“There is an enormous thirst for
communications... we really dedicate almost the entire home page of
the intranet to communications,” Cheryl Travis, intranet manager, Iron
Mountain.
Iron Mountain Incorporated (NYSE:IRM)
helps organizations around the world reduce the costs and risks
associated with information protection and storage. The Company
offers comprehensive records management, data protection, and
information destruction solutions along with the expertise and
experience to address complex information challenges such as rising
storage costs, litigation, regulatory compliance and disaster
recovery. Founded in 1951, Iron Mountain has 20,000+ employees and is
a trusted partner to more than 120,000 corporate clients throughout
North America, Europe, Latin America and the Pacific Rim.
The following is a summary of the
“Delivering a high-performing intranet (Case study with Iron
Mountain)” intranet webinar on May 28, 2009, with Cathy Mcknight
and Cheryl Travis.
6 stages of project management (Cathy
Mcknight, Prescient Digital Media):
1- Enthusiasm
2- Depression
3- Panic
4- Search for the guilty
5- Punishment of the innocent
6- Rewards for the non-participants
Planning:
“Failing to plan is a plan for
failure.”
“A good plan today is better
than a perfect plan tomorrow.”
“Ensuring you have key planning
documents in place (be it the style guide, or content plan)... it's
absolutely critical, and its saved my (intranet) project in many
ways,” Cheryl Travis, Iron Mountain
Planning involves understanding
business needs
functional needs
the right technology needs
resources (internal and external)
budget
Planning is done – now what?
Governance
Governance structure
Roles and responsibilities
Supporting documentation
Communications
Engaging leadership
Engaging content owners &
publishers
Pre-launch employee communications
Launch
Ongoing communications (keeping
momentum)
“We certainly need to engage
leadership because frankly these are the people that fund the
intranet,” Cheryl Travis, Iron Mountain
Content
Content audit
Content ownership
Approvals and publishing
Creating and repurposing
Translation
Archiving
Reviewing and updating
Technology
System requirements
Resource requirements
Ongoing support
(Note: Iron Mountain uses SharePoint
for their intranet, Scout)
Site Build
IA
Wireframes
Design
“For information architecture (IA)
and wireframes you can't rely on your own internal team because they
live the company everyday,” says Cheryl. “You want the IA to live
no matter how your organizations changes. To have a 3rd
party to structure your IA is critical.”
Lessons learned at Iron Mountain
Engage content owners at the start
Rely on your independent resources
Trust your sixth sense
Keep communications lines open
“The sooner you communicate with them
(content owners), the better,” Cheryl Travis, Iron Mountain.
The intranet gap
“What the business wants and what IT
delivers can be two different things,” Cathy Mcknight, Prescient
Digital Media. “An intranet is a process, not an event.”
“Its really good to have an outside
expert to apply best practices,” says Cheryl “They have the clout
and experience to do this (Prescient Digital Media).”
(NEW YORK) Intranets
help empower employees and sales teams to increase sales; a revenue
enhancing benefit that is far too often overlooked by too many
organizations.
IKEA
U.S. has 37 stores, with over 12,000 co-workers; an employee audience
that is both geographically dispersed, and has limited capacity to
connect to the intranet. However, a challenging retail environment
with a dispersed target audience and a limited attention span has not
daunted the IKEA intranet team from focusing on the bottom line:
decreasing costs, and increasing sales.
IKEA's
intranet team began with a series of philosophies that guide their
work and execution:
An
emphasis on the power of people.
Decentralization
works!
The
Intranet is part of a total information landscape.
It’s
good to be a passionate fanatic!
We
are obsessed with impacting the bottom line!
The
last philosophy 'obsession' with the bottom line has also served them
well – leading to increased sales, and cost savings of more than
$500,000 per year:
PAPER
COSTS = $192,000
STREAMLINING
PROCESSES / SELF-SERVE TRAVEL PROCESS SAVES $4,590
MODERNIZING
COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGIES VIDEO CONF to WEBEX = $90,000
SELF-SERVICE
HR = $219,000
The
intranet is particularly focused on supporting the sales
organization; especially sales events and the monthly “seize the
day” sales. In particular, the intranet team delivers content that
is highly focused on sales events with:
Photos
Stores
“reporting in” with lots of co-worker quotes
The
good and the bad
Employee
discussion boards
Sales
number & metrics
Demonstrating
their success in covering their big sales events, IKEA has
consistently exceeded its sales goals since the third sales event
proactively targeted by the intranet team.
IKEA's
intranet team also delivers key content and tools based on personas
or “key roles” in the stores. The team built manual pages called
“dashboards' for role specific functions. In doing so, the intranet
team hit the road and visited employees on the store floors to
determine the scope and focus of these dashboards, working
side-by-side with employees to understand what content and online
they need.
“Sprint
Nextel offers a comprehensive range of wireless and wireline
communications services bringing the freedom of mobility to
consumers, businesses and government users. Sprint Nextel is widely
recognized for developing, engineering and deploying innovative
technologies, including two wireless networks serving nearly 51
million customers.”
Intranet:
i-Connect
HQ:
Kansas City
Owner: Communications
Vision
“Always
on, always accurate, always easy…wherever you need it.”
Purpose
The
online home for fast, easy access to the essential Sprint tools,
information and personal
connections you need.
Sprint
intranet home page, i-Connect
Intranet
Success Standards
Usage:
The primary resource for internal Sprint information
Content:
Content is relevant, accurate and updated
Navigation:
Navigation is simple and associates quickly find what they are looking
for
End
User Engagement: End users participate in the process of updating
content and
recommending changes
Client/Business
Partner Relations: Clients and business partners entrust us as the
stewards of i-Connect and its users
Overall
Satisfaction: End users are satisfied
Survey
Results Key Findings: Satisfaction
“In
the last six months, how satisfied have you been with i-Connect as
your online
home
for fast, easy access to the essential Sprint tools, information and
personal
connections
you need?”
Search
Navigation
(Department Pages, My Work & Our Company)
BT,
once known as British Telecom, has 160,000 intranet users in 170
countries. A key driver in its technology strategy is an overarching
corporate goal to be “recognized for innovation and great
service...” This innovation has many forms including a combination of
technologies that help "pull together" a wide-ranging and disparately
located population (at any one time, up to 25% of the population is "in the air."). A cornerstone of these technologies is the BT intranet, a mission critical business and communications system.
The
BT intranet has been in operation since the 1990s and has enjoyed a
modicum of success. However, the rise of social media at a time it
strives for innovation in a sluggish, if not desperate economic
climate has forced the English-stalwart to embrace intranet 2.0.
However, the innovative embrace wasn't delivered without executive
resistance.
BT's employee podcast center on the intranet, Podcast Central
Rewind
the fibre optic 2-plus years ago and all but a handful at BT had any
understanding, let alone acceptance, of social media. More than a few
eyebrows were raised when it came to management's attention that
12,000 employees had joined a dedicated Facebook community for BT
employees. While unaware here-to-date of the back-current of
conversation flowing through the popular social media site,
executives were forced to take heed: BT employees were using publicly
available social media to discuss business related issues without the
company's full knowledge or participation.
Now
the Senior manager of Social Media at BT, Richard
Dennison was quick to realize the adoption of social media by
employees and the potential impact on the company. While the first
Intranet 2.0 tool introduced to BT was a wiki on server under
someone's desk (as was the case at Cisco and many others), Richard
was an early champion that helped 'sell' the social media cause
despite an over-abundance of caution and skepticism from management.
"Many
believe that trying to stop social media tools seeping onto intranets
is a futile activity anyway, so it is better to introduce them on
your terms in a managed way,” says Richard1.
“If you don’t think about what value you can deliver in an
enterprise 2.0 environment, you are going to become irrelevant!!!”
What
followed management's acceptance and adoption of social media can
safely be called 'stunning' with little risk of exaggeration:
Wikis
have grown at exponential rates to more than 750,000 wiki pages (the
vast majority of which are dedicated to business issues, adds
Richard)
Thousands
of employees are blogging
Countless
executives and managers are podcasting & webcasting (even
vlogging)
Thousands
are connecting on the intranet social networking site, MyBT
500,000
Team Sites have sprung-up using Microsoft SharePoint and Confluence
(a service dubbed BT Collaborate)
BT
is quiet about the expense of these tools but Dennison says that most
of the social media tools were built on the cheap internally using
open-source or existing software (SharePoint and Confluence are
exceptions). Of course the business case to move to social media was
built on one of need, rather than ROI, and the value is self-evident.
“Using technology to break down traditional boundaries encourages a
culture that reaches out rather than locks out, and that is something
that the Digital Generation is ideally equipped to do,” adds
Richard2,
who told me himself on a recent trip to jboye08 in Denmark that ROI
is “overrated."Despite
the success, many naysayers openly muse about the deleterious affects
of social media on employee productivity. What if, for example, an
employee spends hours on Facebook? My response to this valid concern
is my typical response: “What if they spend hours chatting on the
phone? Or spend their break time snorting elicit drugs in the
bathroom?”
While
care and planning should not be thrown to the wind, employees should
be judged on results and not the clock. Results aside, Dennison is
quick to quip, “If we can't trust them then we have to ask
ourselves why we are employing them.2” Touché!
For
those with the temerity to pick-up the intranet 2.0 torch and to run
the extra mile required to adopt social media, Richard offers a
number of lessons that should be ignored at your peril1:
Focus
on value not risk!
Start
anywhere … start immediately
Start
small and build slowly – follow the energy of yes through the
network
We
learn what works by doing the work … so …
…let
users try as early as possible – ‘warts and all’ – succeed
or fail quickly … and cheaply!
Engage
legal/HR/security early… and emphasise evolution not revolution
Have
realistic expectations … the intranet is not the internet!
Harness
the enthusiasm of the enthusiastic … especially if senior
Sometimes
… ‘the only form of transportation is a leap of faith’!
At
the risk of imitating a broken record... there are many thousands of
you who still haven't taken the Intranet
2.0 Global Survey.
Come on now–it only takes 10 minutes! This is the way it works: I
give you free advice and case studies, you take the survey... !! PLUS
– YOU WILL NOT GET THE FULL RESULTS IF YOU DON'T TAKE THE SURVEY.
The study closes during the holiday, so hop to it!
The Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) is know for helping safeguard the health of U.S. citizens, but its also home to 14,000 staff (9,000 are federal employee + contractors).
In 1993, CDC launched their first intranet, CDC Connects.
Traffic: Monthly page views: over 1 million per day (up from 176k in 2003)
Technology: standard HTML (news published via brand name CMS)
Home page features:
Director’s corner
In a Snapshot (featured photo)
Inside Story features (3 home page features)
Calendar of Events (enterprise wide – any staff can add to)
Employee Tools links
My Links (customizable by the user)
This Week in CDC History
Connection Conversations blog
CDC in the News (including TV clips)
Story ideas (Submit news)
Key to the intranet's success are the plans that incorporate employee needs and represent a intimate understanding of employee requirements. “It’s about building a trusting relationship,” says Kay Sessions Golan, CDC’s Director, Employee Communications, who presented her intranet's case study to the Ragan Web 2.0 conference in North Carolina.
CDC employed a number of research initiatives (done in-house) to determine the nature and scope of the intranet). Among the learnings[1]:
Employees want more information:
Email announcements provided some information
Many didn’t know “what’s going on"
Wanted a formal channel for CDC communications
Comments:
"I want to know more about people here and what others are doing."
"Many times I find out things first in the newspaper."
"I would like to see the news stories about CDC."
Employees felt disconnected:
They’re connected to their group/area/program
But disconnected from the agency (enterprise)
Employee Comment:
"The fact that CDC is geographically much decentralized… speaks to the importance of having one place employees can go to get regular, detailed, up-to-date information…”
Driving the intranet are CDC's employee communication goals:
- Create a recognized and valued system of employee communication that helps improve communication… across employee groups
- Create a well informed employee public that understands CDC’s health protection goals, other public health initiatives, and business and employee services.
- Enhance trust and community between and among CDC leadership and employees.
- Prepare and encourage employees to serve as ambassadors for CDC among external audiences.
CDC’s macro approach was to combine the models of the online newspaper with intranet home page (traditional):
Intranet best practices:
Alerts & notifications
Most useful links
Employee connections
Newspapers
Fresh content (2 feature articles per day (4x per week)
Interesting photos
Feature stories
Despite the fact that their business is health, wellness and public safety – and they’re a federal government agency – CDC encourages employee blogging. In fact, the employee blog has been live for two years:
Launched October 2006
Evolved from infancy to a 14 or 15-year-old… and growing
Conversations are happening anyway
Blog allows respectful, open conversations
Safe forum for tackling controversial issues or bad news quickly and openly
Blog can lead to problem-solving across the agency
Great employers demonstrate trust in employees (Fortune magazine’s 2006 100 best companies)
Blogs self-policing (the occasional post has to be cleaned)
Governed by “rules” that allows for instantaneous posting if its attributed by person’s name (anonymous postings are allowed but moderated and reviewed)
Powered by WordPress
“People were blogging anyways on the Internet… people were airing dirty laundry anyways so lets give them a channel to do so internally,” says Golan. “It’s not a CEO blog, its for employees (occasionally its contributed by executives and guests).
Blog learnings (51 posts, 2400 comments later):
Most active discussions: on topics that affect daily work life
Least active discussions: on scientific or programmatic topics
Many managers are reluctant participants
Discussions easily wander off topic
Appreciated by bloggers
Let it evolve and mature
Challenges:
Governance
Content Mgt.
Further Branding
Templates and standards
Budget……ROI
Parting thoughts from Golan:
A key challenge continues to be security: “The more we open with communications… the more security wants to close down. (e.g. There’s not enough bandwidth to open YouTube to all employees).”
[1]Adapted from the presentation “CDC Connects: CDC’s On-Line Newspaper and Intranet Portal” by Kay Sessions Golan, CDC’s Director, Employee Communications, at Ragan’s “Corporate Communications in a Web 2.0 World” conference)
Universal McCann (UM) is a global media communications agency with 2800 employees in 66 countries. UM undertakes massive marketing campaigns and media buys for large Fortune 500s such as Coke, Mastercard, Microsoft, and others. With a highly distributed workforce, UM found that knowledge and expertise was often trapped in geographic silos that could not be shared easily with other offices.
UM considered a variety of different intranet and social computing solutions and ultimately selected Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS) with an integrated NewsGator Social Sites solution.
“The fast-changing media environment in which Universal McCann works demands that our employees have a finger on the pulse of what’s going on, not just in their respective markets and account groups, but globally across the industry,” said Quentin George, worldwide officer for digital strategy & market innovation for Universal McCann. “In order to deliver our clients the ‘Next Thing Now’ we must share and learn from our collective knowledge and experience. We found NewsGator and Microsoft’s social networking tools to be the ideal way to facilitate communication and knowledge sharing across geographic and division boundaries – leading to improved productivity and increased innovation.”
The UM intranet, called LIMO, features:
• enhanced personal profiles
• social networking
• subject matter interest communities
• search for the most relevant or popular content
• blogs
• wikis
• RSS
“Teams can actually interact with, in safe secure areas, with the client – post documents, post status reports, post media plans – where they can work together in a secure environment online,” says Paul Roer, VP Content and Creative Director with Universal McCann. “People can get to know other planners on an account; get to know research people; and they can meet each other in this virtual environment and share best practices.”
Once on the LIMO intranet, UM employees can also form social networks, and build communities based on areas of interest, rather than geography or project teams. The integrated Newsgator Social Sites solution automatically builds profiles of users based on the user’s actions on the intranet. Users are able to find the most relevant colleagues and subject matter experts based on the user’s activity. This activity “surfaces” recommended connections based on common RSS reading, community memberships, tagging, etc.
“Communities support ad hoc formation of groups to facilitate cross-geography & cross-team collaboration, information sharing, & communication around client projects, interests, or activities,” according to Laura Farrelly, Director of Marketing for Newsgator. “Communities enable members to engage in rich discussions, share documents, track activity, & surface relevant, dynamic content.”
According to UM, NewsGator and Microsoft have delivered “immediate business benefits while providing a technology that can easily expand & evolve as the organization’s needs change” including:
• Improved productivity & streamlined workflows
• Better collaboration & communication across the global UM network
• Increased innovation
• Lower technology complexity & support costs
• Improved compliance with corporate security & privacy policies
• Enhanced client service
• Ability to become a “smarter collective organization, faster”
• Increased adoption & usage of the intranet
“Microsoft & NewsGator offered us an enterprise-class social computing solution that delivers the social networking features we need today while providing us with a platform that can easily evolve as our needs grow & change,” says Jason Harrison, Worldwide Chief Information Officer, Universal McCann. “In addition, their solution integrates seamlessly with our technology infrastructure & security protocols, helping to lower our support costs.”
Did you know that in the ‘guess the jellybeans’ game the average guess of all the guesses is almost always closer than the closest individual guess? It’s a wonderful example illustrating the power and wisdom of the ‘crowd’ – and why Web 2.0 and Intranet 2.0 are proving to be so powerful.
Like Web 2.0, Intranet 2.0 represents the evolving collection of social media tools that are revolutionizing the intranet, and the way organizations and employees connect and collaborate. Specifically, Intranet 2.0 tools like blogs, wikis and social networking sites promote collaboration, people connection, and ongoing dialogues that augment, but not replace the traditional top-down communications model.
Whether you’re ready or not, your organization can no longer ignore Intranet 2.0. Employees are reading blogs on the web, contributing to wikis, listening to podcasts, and networking via Facebook, MySpace, Orkut, or others. Moreover, they’re probably talking about your organization, and you’re not part of the conversation.
Before they implemented their own employee social networking site, MyBT, BT (British Telecom) discovered that 4,000 employees had voluntarily joined a BT Facebook community in their own time. Employees were connecting online, in their own time, talking about BT, and BT wasn’t part of the conversation.
“Many believe that trying to stop social media tools seeping onto intranets is a futile activity anyway, so it is better to introduce them on your terms in a managed way,” says BT’s social media chief Richard Dennison, who’s quite candidly shares this though and BT’s work on his blog Inside out.
Intranet 2.0 has indeed exploded at BT. In addition to social networking, BT employees blog, podcast, collaborate in discussion forums, and they wiki too. In fact, the wikis are so popular and successful that there are more than 500,000 employee wikis – and the vast, vast majority of them are dedicated to business topics that help BT compete in the global workplace (I will share a more comprehensive case study on BT’s Intranet 2.0 tools and successes next week).
A study of Prescient Digital Media’s clients who participated in yesterday’s Intranet 2.0 webinar found:
25% have implemented a blog (in some form, somewhere in the organization)
17% have implemented wikis (again, in some form)
0% have implemented employee social networking
These numbers are very average indeed (though much, much lower in medium size, and small organizations) and echoed by many recent studies: most organizations have not introduced Intranet 2.0 tools, but want to. An additional 50% of the webinar participants (representing a couple dozen organizations) are testing, trialing, evaluating or planning to introduce such social media tools on their intranet in the next year or so.
Many, many others of course have blazed that trail and so while some organizations struggle with the ‘how’, IT and communications managers need only look to the trailblazers like BT, IBM, and many others that have shared their successes (I will link many of these case studies below).
Sabre, the company that runs most of the world’s airline flight reservation systems among many other systems, is an impressive example of the power of Intranet 2.0. With about 9,000 employees, they are a medium-sized company that have embraced Intranet 2.0 with spectacular results. Building from scratch, Sabre launched their own intranet social networking site for employees (built on Ruby on Rails) called SabreTown.
SabreTown has all the features of most social networking sites:
Employee profiles with lots of details
Shared photos
Blogs
User commenting
Network connections & feeds
Enterprise question & answer functionality
On Sabre Town, users can post a question to the entire organization, and the site’s inference or relevance engine will automatically send the question to the 15 most relevant employees (based on what they’ve entered in their profile, blog postings and other Q&As that have been previously posted). The results have been spectacular: 60% of questions are answered within one hour (one hour!); each question receives an average of 9 responses (9 responses!). The system has already led to more than $150,000 in immediate, direct savings for the company, with much greater benefits not yet measured.
SabreTown’s success is summarized in one spectacular metric: 65% of all Sabre employees became active SabreTown members in the first 3 months! More than 90% of employees are active today.
(I’ll provide a more in-depth case study on SabreTown next week. Watch for it as it is worth the wait, and the read).
Intranet 2.0 is no longer the future, it’s now. Many organizations have embraced the new social media technologies for the benefit of both the organization and its employees. If you ignore the potential that Intranet 2.0 offers, you’re doing so at your own risk, and the perhaps to the benefit of your competitors that may have already embraced these tools, or soon will.
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If you have additional questions about today’s Intranet 2.0, or a comment feel free to post them below. You can see a summarized version of the presentation on Slideshare: Intranet 2.0 webinar.
You can also join the discussion on the Intranet Global Forum (Facebook community requiring free, 30-second registration).
If you’re looking to move to Intranet 2.0, but don’t exactly know how, then have a look at our Intranet 2.0 Blueprint service, or call me at 416.986.2226.
