I wrote two different blog articles today, and one seemingly contradicts the other. But only seemingly because the intranet, in many respects, is much like the Internet -- but it is dramatically different.

The content spawned revolution

Web content is revolutionizing business. Web content is revolutionizing life. Web content is revolutionizing the World.

Skeptical? Not sold? Need proof? Here are some numbers…

• People click on web links 100-billion times per day
• Five of the top 10 most visited websites are user-generated content sites that did not exist a couple of years ago
• There are well in excess of 100-million accounts on MySpace – and growing at a rate of nearly 250,000 per day
• 1 out of 8 couples married last year in the U.S. met online

     Read The content spawned revolution (Content Matters)

If you build it, they will not come...

A reprise my two most recent posts on intranet usage and increasing intranet traffic. In short, Great intranets inspire use, but also are supported by marketing. To build an intranet is not enough to inspire employee use. Like most things in business, the intranet has to be marketed so those employees that are not keeners and propeller-heads will come and visit.

     Read If you build it, they will not come... (Intranet Insider)

Employees aren’t dumb; they’re not going to use the intranet if it offers little value. However, many, many intranets deliver value, but don't get the employee traffic expected. In fact, quite often, if you build it, they will not come.

One of the reasons why even the best intranets need to be marketed to employees is that computer-based workers are often exceptionally busy and do not have time to explore and surf the intranet. Field workers, sales staff and manufacturing employees have even less time. They need to be educated as to what the intranet offers and why it is of value to both them as individual workers and also to the organization as a whole. Employees need to be ‘sold’.

Here are 5 tips for driving traffic and marketing the intranet:

1-     Default home page – make the intranet home page the unalterable default home page for every employee browser. A very small minority of employees will complain during the first week after the change, but those complaints will disappear quickly if the home page is updated frequently.

2-     E-newsletter – send out a weekly or twice weekly e-newsletter to employee mailboxes with news highlights and links to the full content on the intranet.

3-     CEO involvement – publish reqular Q&A stories with the CEO, and/or webcasts, and/or a hosted online chat.

4-     Contests – nothing sells like a prize. Reward usage and readers with prizes by hosting online contests or quizzes (polls).

5-     Sticky tools – think beyond news, forms and policies to ‘sticky’ tools that aren’t critical to the business, but will be popular with employees including cafeteria menus, online classifieds, weather forecasts, employee discounts, etc.

It goes without saying that if the intranet does not provide valuable content and tools in a user-friendly context that employees won’t use the intranet regardless of your marketing and promotion. However, even great intranets need to be marketed so that when you build it, they will come.

Ericsson Group Function is the colossal infrastructure unit of the cellular telecommunications giant Ericsson with 100 million subscribers on 100 networks. With some 25,000 employees, mostly engineers, Ericsson Group is a large, challenging environment of passionate and intellectually driven knowledge workers.

Like most large companies, Ericsson Group’s intranet evolved in a scattered, free-for-all approach with many groups developing their own intranet site their own way, with their own technology, and without any enterprise standards or collaboration with other groups and entities. Ericsson’s biggest intranet challenge was rationalizing a fragmented content, style and platforms set-up across the organization.

In fact, the free-for-all intranet created a grossly bloated network of 4,000 intranet sites representing more than 4-million pages.

Ericsson Group intranet portal

Ericsson’s intranet goals focused on developing a centralized platform and standards, and finding scales of economy and cohesion across the enterprise. In 2003, Ericsson Group took the first steps towards a single intranet and platform by rationalizing (shutting-down) many intranet sites and standardizing content development, design and navigation. Instead of 4,000 sites and 4+ million pages, the new intranet is limited now to just 80-thousand pages.The rationalization and standardization program led to triple-digit ROI and savings in the millions of dollars.

Despite a successful rationalizing, like many other successful companies that have blazed such a trail with their intranet, additional problems persisted on the Ericsson intranet:

• End users continued to complain about the difficulty finding information
• IT complained that the infrastructure was too complex, expensive and difficult to maintain
• The business maintained that more processes needed to be ‘webified’ with more support for sales, and greater cost savings
• Publishers complained that publishing through the CMS (Interwoven) was too complex and time-consuming

In order to address these challenges Ericsson moved to an integrated web philosophy and a centralized portal platform. “Through this integrated, single portal platform, web customers, partners and employees get access to specific content and functionality based on their profile,” says Mats Renee, Director of Marketing Communications and head of the intranet for Ericsson Group Function.

The new Ericsson portal (powered by IBM’s Websphere) is a personalized intranet based on employee profile, role, business unit and location. Other benefits include:

• The portal encourages re-use of content where input fields (tags) are based on the editor’s profile
• Content can be published once and re-used in multiple areas (powered by Interwoven Teamsite)
• The organizational structure is no longer ‘hard-coded’ in the portal, which eliminates the need for painful content migration efforts
• Users can find needed content more quickly with access to selected content and tools based on the user’s profile
• Role-based content access also increases security

Instead of organizing the intranet by the company structure the intranet is now grouped intuitively for employees by eight major categories:

• Workplace
• Products & Services
• Sales & Marketing
• News & Events
• Projects
• Support
• Unit Info
• Employee Info

The portal is owned by Ericsson Group Communications, but the governance is decentralized and split according to area:

• Channel strategy and design
• Web platform and technology
• Category management

Marketing communications owns the design and strategy, and IT owns the technology. The content however is decentralized so that while Marketing Communications owns the content strategy and standards, each group and content author owns their own content while using the centralized platform to manage the content.

To launch pages on the intranet, all content owners and authors have to adhere to strict standards that are outlined in some detail on a governance site called WebCOM. WebCOM details all the necessary information for creating and managing pages including technical, security, editorial and design standards for Ericsson. Everything a content owner/publisher needs to know about the web is detailed on WebCOM including:

• Launching a website
• Maintaining a website
• Shutting down a website
• Rules and directives
• Guidelines
• A-Z Glossary
• FAQ
• Training
• News
• Help (Support)

The intranet has a balanced scorecard that tracks its performance on several levels including ROI, brand and user satisfaction. User satisfaction is measured at least once per year and averages a 3.5 out of 5 (70%).

While developing a successful intranet has taken years and mountains of effort, Mats share some of the key lessons from the evolving experience of:

• Focus on the low hanging fruit
• Rationalize and consolidate where possible to streamline the platform and organization
• Take an incremental, pilot implementation approach rather than big bang implementations
• A significant amount of money can often be saved by stopping all initiatives that are not in line with strategy and roadmap (e.g. through Governance support process)
• Align budgets/projects with all stakeholders involved in executing the roadmap(s)
• Balance revenue generating and cost saving initiatives based on ROI analysis

A key to Ericsson’s intranet success is the support and involvement of senior management. “As in any change management program you need senior management support,” adds Mats. “And from the migration point of view, we did not get up to speed until we have a commitment from them.”

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ON A PERSONAL NOTE: Congratulations to the Vancouver Canucks and their fans on a an extraordinary tough first series victory (I've had to show remarkable restraint for a 30+ year fan and take all my Canuck thoughts, fanaticism and angst to a seperate blog, Canucks blog).

I haven't had the time to wipe this horrific Windows Vista from my computer. I tried to uninstall a program and after taking 5 minutes to figure out where Windows now hides that option, Windows wouldn't let me uninstall a simple program. After trying a second time it froze my computer and I had to re-boot. 20 minutes wasted and I still can't uninstall a program. This has to be one of the worst pieces of software I've ever owned. I am going to make time next week to uninstall this crap. Eventually I will switch to Apple. I'm tired of being manipulated by MS.

Also I cannot stand IE 7.0. Why is it that you can't right click and copy text anymore? Brutal.

“How many visits a day/month should we get to our intranet?” It’s a common question I hear often (but for some reason I haven’t explicitly written about until now).

There is no rule of thumb because every organization is different and usage depends on a number of things including:

• Corporate culture (value of communications)
• Employee access (% with direct access to intranet)
• Web competency (ability and comfort level using the intranet by employees)
• Intranet value (is the intranet any good? Does it inspire use?)

If however the organization has a healthy culture and places a high value on communications where employees want to the use the intranet (and have access) because the intranet is of value then a large majority of your employees should be accessing it every week.

Here are some examples by some leading companies with great intranets:

• Nordea: 70-80% of the employees visit the portal every day
• HP:  95% of employees use the intranet on a monthly basis
• British Airways: 94% of all employees access the intranet every month
• IBM: 80% of all employees access the intranet daily
• DaimlerChrysler: 70% of all users in Germany — including 120,000 blue-collar workers — log in at least once per month
• Microsoft: 60% employees visit MSW once a day or more, and an additional 25% use MSW at least a few times per week 

If traffic or usage of your corporate intranet or portal is less than the examples above (factoring in access and competency) then your intranet is likely underperforming. In other words, the intranet isn’t very good and is not living up to the potential.

Usage and employee traffic will only be as good as the intranet and (the access to it) with mitigating factors for culture and competency.

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The cart isn’t just put before the horse in most organizations, the cart is thrown ahead and the horse is thrown to the fire.

Far too many people ask me to recommend a good content management system or portal or search engine. These same people are way over their heads. It’s the equivalent of me asking you, “what’s a good medicine to take?”

“I don’t know,” you might ask. “What ails you? Do you have any allergies? Are you taking any other medications? Any complications I should know about?”

And that’s the problem with most of your crappy intranets – you refuse to ask the right questions to find out specifically what is wrong, and what needs to be solved. Instead you jump right to the medication. Of course, this doesn’t apply to all of you, but it does apply to most.

At the risk of oversimplifying a complex system, a successful intranet has 3 big ingredients:

1. People - The right people
2. Process - Well defined processes
3. Technology - The most appropriate technology

If you have not defined the people (roles and responsibilities, ownership and requirements) and process (governance and publishing, standards and policies) then forget about the technology. The technology will only confuse, distract and undermine your efforts – because you probably picked the wrong solution (more likely, you were SOLD the wrong solution).

Moving beyond the 'big 3', here’s the more detailed model of success that we use at Prescient, the Nexus of Intranet Success (recently refined):

PEOPLE

The single greatest and most important thing that you can do as an intranet manager is to secure the active support of an executive champion. Not just any old VP, but someone on the executive management team – the President or someone who reports directly to the President and has political clout and financial influence.

Many organizations have intranets that are mid-management or grass-root initiatives, and some enjoy a certain level of success. However, the potential of your intranet will never be fully realized without an executive champion.

The number one challenge facing corporate intranets today is not technology, nor tight budgets, but rather internal politics, specifically, the politics of competing priorities and management agendas. The second biggest hurdle is a financial one. To win these challenges you need senior management in your corner.

Before the project (build or re-design) can gain executive support, it must be presented and marketed to demonstrate how   it can help the organization achieve its goals and objectives. The intranet must demonstrate measurable value insofar as it relates to company profits, earnings and revenue.

Outside of an executive champion, you still need to identify the roles and responsibilities of other key managers and stakeholders involved with the intranet

An intranet manager also needs to engage employees to involve them in the site design and structure and to promote an ongoing two-way (symmetrical) dialogue. The intranet cannot be solely a push communications vehicle.

If this seems complex or daunting then by all means hire a consultant to help you. It doesn’t have to be me or Prescient Digital Media, there are others that know what they’re doing (see How to hire an intranet consultant).

People are not only at the heart of a successful intranet, they’re the most integral part of every layer, process and tool – including the supporting technology. A successful intranet begins with the right people with well defined roles and responsibilities, and guided and supported by well defined processes and the most appropriate technology.

Here’s some additional & related reading:

Infant intranets need executive loving

Leading an intranet redesign

Top 5 killer intranet mistakes

“If you prick us do we not bleed?” lamented Shylock (most recently portrayed, and brilliantly played by the great Al Pacino) in The Merchant of Venice. The answer is as certain as George W. mangling his syntax in a press conference on foreign affairs. But the answer confounds many communications managers who still wrestle with the question of whether to blog (or not).

A recent study by Bain & Company involving 1200 executives throughout the world (see Management Tools & Trends 2007 study) reveals that 30% of those companies (a cross-section of small, medium and large companies) use blogs. Those same executives report an underwhelming rate of satisfaction with their blogs of only 3.39 out of 5.

Clearly, more companies are blogging, but with mixed results, and causing many more to think about it, but wonder if they should or not. Huh?! Yes, some are as confused as Dick Cheney on a hunting trip.

Read my full article If we write do we not blog? (Content Matters).

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