PLEASE NOTE THE CORRECTED DATE. THIS WEBINAR IS THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 2, 2006.

A successful intranet requires a lot of smart work, hard work, planning and technology. Verizon is a company with an intranet that embodies this success, but not at the expense of innovation.

The giant U.S. communications company has a cutting-edge “technology digital workplace” that allows its geographically dispersed employee base to access corporate news, information and other important work tools via multiple online channels, including:

·    a voice-recognition portal that allows employees to get news, find out about jobs and send/hear emails over the telephone;

·    collaborative web conferencing;

·    and employee-managed forums, blogs and wikis.

The Verizon intranet

The new intranet or “workplace” has evolved well beyond a traditional intranet where employees click and pull information. Verizon’s Digital Workplace offers multiple access points to make it easier for employees to meet and do business. It's a place where access to information is unprecedented and geographic boundaries are eliminated. Verizon’s Digital Workplace is the total environment where employees create, innovate and communicate on all aspects of the business without the limitations imposed by divergent resources, face-to-face interaction and four walls.

If you’d like to learn more about Verizon’s success and its leading-edge innovation then tune into the next Intranet Insider World Tour: Verizon, Digital Workplace from Communitelligence.com and hosted by Verizon’s intranet guru Donna Itzoe and myself as the facilitator.

Intranet Insider World Tour: Verizon, Digital Workplace

Thursday, November 2

2-3:15 pm Eastern

• Find out about how Verizon provides multiple online gateways to access to applications and systems, news, project information and other tools that employees need to do their jobs.
• Learn how employees use a voice-recognition portal, instant messaging, blogs, wikis, text messaging, email and, of course, authenticated and unauthenticated web sites to collaborate and communicate real-time.
• Discover how Verizon breaks down the internal digital divide using by integrating new technologies integrated with innovative communication techniques

Reserve your spot on this key 75-minute Webinar: Intranet Insider World Tour: Verizon, Digital Workplace

Intranets are still in their infancy, and they require more involvement from senior management. These are two of the major bang-on conclusions of Jane McConnell’s superb study on intranets ("Intranet Strategies Today & Tomorrow").

“Senior management perception of the intranet is out of sync with reality on the ground,” says Jane, a France-based intranet consultant (who works internationally) and author of the NetJMC Blog blog.  “They are largely unaware of the usefulness of the intranet for employees for their work. 55% of the respondents say that if the intranet were unavailable for 1 to 2 hours, employees would be disturbed in their work, yet only 13% of the respondents say that senior management perceives the intranet to be “business critical.”

No surprise there. The weakest intranets have the lowest level of involvement and active support from senior support. The best intranets have incredible senior management support.

Is it any surprise then that decision-making is an issue for most organisations? “Lack of awareness of the potential role of the intranet” is cited as the top obstacle for decision-making. Of course, there would be no problems with decision-making if there was in fact a senior management champion at the same organizations.

Money begets executive support. The study also found that, intranets lack sufficient funding and resources (though that almost half of the respondents expect their budgets to rise in 2007.

Jane’s study found that “almost 40% of the respondents have or plan to have internal blogs, significantly higher than the current or planned external blogs (around 15%).”

I still find it surprising then that given the current state of the intranet – what I referred to as ‘piss poor” and James Robertson referred to as “sh-te” (at this year’s IBF Live 2006) – that so many managers are obsessed about blogs, wikis and podcasting. They should be concerned about planning and governance and the role of executive management as part of that governance. But hey, blogs are certainly more sexy than governance models!!

Study participants represented 101 organisations headquartered in Europe, North America, and Asia Pacific, ranging in size from under 5000 to over 100,000 employees. Nearly 60% of the organisations operate in over 20 countries, and over one third have from 2 to 4 official languages, making the survey population very international.