"The Long Neck is where the business case of your websites lies. It is the small, crucial set of tasks and content that your customers really come to your website for," writes Gerry McGovern in Do you know your long neck?

"Intranet or public website, government or commercial-every website has a Long Neck. It is crucial that you know what your Long Neck is so that you can deliver maximum value with scarce resources."

Gerry’s bang on. Although, on an intranet, the long neck representing the most commonly accessed content or tools, is probably stretched longer.

The following seven areas likely represent between 60-80% of all requests on the vast majority of intranets I’ve worked with:

• Search
• Employee directory
• Job postings
• News
• Forms
• Policies

If an organization can master these seven areas, with the proper planning and governance as a supporting foundation, then the resulting intranet will be dam good. Easier said than done of course…

Read Gerry’s full article Do you know your long neck?

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ON A PERSONAL NOTE: I’ve been remiss in welcoming new clients as of late… but I’ve been too busy looking after many of them and others! A big welcome (would a hug be inappropriate?) to Thomson Financial, GMAC, Intrawest (Playground), the Municipality of Halton, Degussa, and I know I’m missing someone… I’m sorry I’ll make it up when my memory returns.

In addition to running the business and trips back in forth between Vancouver, Detroit, Toronto and Calgary, with multiple speaking engagements in the past couple of weeks, my wife is away for a few days so I’m running the house and assumed the role of interim COO of the girls… must sleep soon…

But first I have to get something off my chest: Gary Bettman almost ruined the league with over-expansion and soaring salaries and then had to force an acrimonious year-long lockout of players (the longest of any professional sport) to fix the dam mess he made. Now the owners have rewarded him with a 5-year extension. Not to mention his amazing ability to always sound like an ass while belittling almost every reporter that interviews him. (Someone on a local talk show today called-up to say, "I finally figured out who he sounds like! That rabbi from Seinfeld!")  For more check out: Gary Bettman Sucks

Finally, I send my sympathies to Rex Grossman for quarterbacking the Bears to their first Super Bowl appearance in 21 years in his first full season as a player. Yes, he made a couple of mistakes, but the Bears losing had little to do with his play, and a lot to do with the Bear’s brutal defense and a stellar Colts offense.

(TORONTO, ON) It seems that nearly every company I talk to is in some form of “intranet redesign” -which could be a complete overhaul, a design tweak or something in the middle that might include a new technology platform such as a portal or content management system.

One facet of the redesign (by the way I hate that term “redesign” because of course it emphasizes look-and-feel which completely understates the main value and intent of a complex business system – but since its part of our modern vernacular…) that is often overlooked until a problem occurs, is the migration process from old to new. Migration involves a lot… from content to applications to platform. A lot can go wrong with migration.

Paul Chin offers some sage advice in Move It on Over: Intranet Migration Basics on Intranet Journal (no, this is not one of their now all-too-common product announcement or advertorial articles).

Paul’s article summarizes some of the key technical considerations of migration including:

• Component migration
• Multiple environments
• Working with users
• Post-production safety measures
• Rollback measures
• Post-production support

One key thing that is rarely or thoroughly accounted for in the initial plan is the time required for migrating content. If your intranet has thousands or tens-of-thousands of pages or more then full content migration likely will take weeks if not months. It’s not uncommon for some content migration to be phased over a couple of years. Deploying a platform such as a CMS that has ‘batch’ importing capabilities will certainly help, but all content should be reviewed, updated, edited or deleted prior to a migration – and this requires a lot of human effort.

The process of updating or deleting content begins with a content audit – which should be done long before the implementation of a new technology platform. One client at a 750 person company used two summer students armed with a browser and an MS-Excel spreadsheet to track and document all 10,000 pages on their intranet. It took them one month and a half to review and document all 10,000 pages (about 3,000 pages per auditor per month). The good news was they identified all the content and found that only 4,000 of the 10,000 pages were of any value. In one full swoop they wiped out 6,000 pages which saved them a lot of server space and maintenance costs not to mention helped preserve business continuity and accuracy of information.

For more information on content audits, read Auditing your 'king'.

Here’s the key point: a redesign is a face-lift of the look-and-feel, a perfect project for a design agency or PR firm. What most of those design agencies or PR firms have little experience or knowledge of is measures like rollback plans and content audits. Intranet migration to a new site and/or platform (usually one in the same) requires a lot of thought and planning, and an intense commitment to detail and process.

Read the full article, Move It on Over: Intranet Migration Basics.

I’ve spent much of the week highlighting what I refer to the immaturity and ‘smoke and mirrors’ of the CMS market (see Ziff Davis event shows immaturity of CMS market). Of course, don’t take my word for it. Ask Tony Byrne, the founder and editor of CMSWatch.com, who wrote a very timely and bang-on piece on the industry, Sex, Lies, and CMS Vendors

“Most CMS salespeople I know are good educators, but they also have quotas to meet,” writes Byrne. “Under these circumstances, vendors will sometimes short-cut important discussions about functionality and pricing with simple -- but not always completely truthful -- answers.”

Byrne lists his top 10 most common myths you might hear from a CMS salesperson (and they are all too accurate - in green below):

MYTH: "Our interface will sell itself" (This is the sex part)

As I have noted in the past, everyone says they have a WSIWYG editor. Few actually have one.

MYTH: "You only need XY thousand to get started"

It always costs more than they say. Licensing is often a fraction of the cost – implementation is where it adds up.

MYTH: "You can recoup your software expenses by re-assigning the web team"

Only in some rare organizations does a CMS mean saving headcount.

MYTH: "Our open-source solution means you'll get off cheap" & "Our commercial solution is better supported than open-source alternatives"

Open-source has the same implementation story – and it needs support too. Commercial solutions require paid support and they rarely have open communities of support (discussion boards, shared code, etc.).

MYTH: "Access to the source code protects you in an uncertain marketplace"

“Source-code escrow or open-source licensing is nice, but having to muck with source code is faint solace if your vendor expires,” writes Byrne.

MYTH: "No requirements? No problem! Our business analysts can get you started"

Content management requires three major components: technology, people and process. Technology is the often the least problematic. Defining a plan and all requirements requires experience and skill – and time. CMS vendors rarely focus much beyond the technology.

MYTH: "Most enterprises deploy our solution within 4-6 weeks" 

Ha, ha, ha! Sure it is possible… in smaller, extremely well organized companies.

MYTH: "Our migration scripts will take care of your existing content"

Bad content is still bad content on a content management system – regardless of the migration system.

MYTH: "Our product is better than Vignette, for a fraction of the cost"

Yes, Vignette is expensive, but there’s a reason why Vignette is the market leader for enterprise content management. There’s a reason why there are thousands of CMS vendors with very few name client implementations. I’d recommend Vignette for very few organizations, but there are a lot of CMS vendors I’d never recommend to any.

MYTH: "We're the only product with..."

Sure. There are thousands of vendors… what are the chances that someone else has a polling feature too?

--

Oh speaking of sex, lies and CMS vendors… since uninviting me to their wine tasting and CMS event (sex), Ziff Davis has sent me the same spam invite four additional times (lies)!!! Since the event organizers never responded to my email or my article (see Ziff Davis event shows immaturity of CMS market), I wrote Ziff Davis’s PR director about their PR mess…. surprise, surprise – no response!!! Outstanding PR (can you hear the tongue boring a hole in my cheek?)

© 2006 Toby Ward - Prescient Digital Media

Managing content online content continues to be one of the top issues dogging intranet managers. Employee complaints about not being able to find certain information continues to be a top complaint followed closely by those about content quality.

Quality comes from good writing and management (i.e. cataloging, storing, tagging, etc.). Even the best communicators require refresher courses. For non-communicator employees who are managing content, training is a must – regardless of the content management system, publishing tool or established policies.

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TODAY'S GET STRATEGIC:  E-commerce sales now 7.7% of offline sales

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“With the increasing implementation of distributed publishing throughout organisations there is an increasing need to train content providers to help develop a more consistent approach and style for their online content, not just train people on how to use the software,” writes Nick Besseling, a New Zealand-based intranet consultant in Training intranet content providers (thanks for the pointer from James Robertson @ Column Two).

Training workshops are a good forum for educating managers about the dos and don’ts of online content management. Nick provides a 7-point framework for conducting content training workshops:

1. Before the workshop
   Send out pre-workshop questions and an online content article to help get participants into the online content ‘head space’ and start them thinking about issues/problems.
2. Audience and purpose
   Emphasise that the user of the information is the focus of content not the provider or the provider’s manager. This can be a major sticking point to get effective and useful content.
3. Intranet and online content conceptsCover concepts such as the idea that online readers skim/scan, the content triangle/inverse pyramid concept etc. Keep in mind that some of your content providers may have very limited knowledge of what makes online content successful.
4. Writing/online style guidelines
   Cover specific guidelines such as writing short sentences, ‘one idea’ paragraphs, use of tables, images, file types etc. Also cover the fundamentals in your organisation’s writing/communication style guide (get one developed if you don’t have one!). Be sure to highlight anything in the style guide that may clash with effective online content.
5. Discussion and exercises
   Emphasise discussion and hands-on exercises. Get people talking about online content and working together to share ideas and approaches and use these discussions to help understand where your content providers are currently at. Exercises should be based on current intranet content and cover both concepts and specifics as discussed above.
6. Managing participants
   Mix participants up across different business groups and keep numbers limited to a manageable numbers (10 or less), Get people working in pairs during the exercises and avoid domination of the workshop by more experienced participants (but be sure to use them when needed to elicit responses).
7. Cover editing/collating as well as writing
   If (as in many organisations) a lot content comes from existing sources rather than being produced initially for an online environment, put more focus on ‘editing for online’ rather than just writing.

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At one time, in the late 90s, IBM had 10,000+ intranet sites. No, not pages, 10-THOUSAND intranet sites (representing millions of pages). I call that gross intranet sprawl.

What’s a megalithic corporation to do with 10 grand rebel sites? Shut ‘em down.

Of course, they weren’t so crass to start hacking and slashing every site. Though by establishing a centralized platform, a set of enforceable policies, and a measure of political campaigning and time, IBM eventually rationalized more than 6,000 intranet sites. The campaign saved IBM $9-billion (BILLION!).

Most intranet owners cooperated willingly. And why wouldn’t they? If the corporation provides a central platform, an easy-to-use publishing tool, indexing from the central search engine and technical hosting, why wouldn’t renegade site owners jump at the opportunity to close their intranet site? They would; they did. Some of course were reluctant and a less subtle form of persuasion was needed in the end.

“Driving the consolidation of sites was difficult,” said IBM’s Liam Cleaver, a key manager of IBM’s intranet portal W3, in our recent webminar, Intranet World Tour with IBM. “We owned little and controlled less. “But we (the portal team) do own the URL w3.ibm.com and groups want to have that root in their URL. To be part of that they have to adhere to standards and we have the authority to shoot down sites. We don’t like to play cop but prefer carrot and stick approach that sells the value.”

Close the rebel site, migrate the content, relinquish the hassle, pocket the money.

Well, easier said then done. Believe me, by jove, it isn’t easy. It takes an open pit mine full of gumption, political fortitude and a double reinforced iron gut. If you’ve got brass kahunas to try it, the rewards can be high.

Here are the ingredients needed to attempt a site rationalization program:

• A forceful and tactful executive champion that is, with few exceptions, a C-level chief.

• A united and strong central steering committee or council that widely represents core business services and business units.

• A strong business case with anticipated and measured return on investment (dollars and cents sell business cases).

• A robust central intranet portal and supporting technology.

• An engaged and participatory IT department (no more excuses about understaffing and bigger priorities).

• A set of enforceable intranet standards and polices (development policy, editorial policy, etc.) that spell out the rules, roles and responsibilities of all.

• A central content management system and publishing tool that stores and indexes all content with standardized page and document templates.
• A decentralized content publishing model where content authors and owners write, publish and manage their own content via the central CMS while adhering to the aforementioned polices and standardized templates.

Start small and seek out friends for some easy wins. Rationalize a few sites. Talk about the program benefits and success for the content owners and the publishers. Sell, sell, sell. Once the carrot looses its shine and ceases being effective, then pull out the big stick.

Whatever you call it, rationalization, cooperation or adoption, the path to success will be fraught with politics. Intranets are political footballs and politics will almost always be an intranet manager’s top challenge, in most organizations. This is a natural outcome of the many divergent groups with different minds and ways of looking at the world forced to work together in a cooperative environment and a common platform. Communications sees the world far differently than IT. Marketing approaches business far differently than HR. So friction is natural. Hence the need for a strong champion, a cohesive steering committee, and an armful of polices (legislation) to support the process.

“I've had the opportunity to work closely with both developers and end-users during these system adoptions and have always noticed a subtle but very real threat to the outcome,” writes intranet journalist Paul Chin in his latest column, Lil' Orphan Intranet: Adopting an Ownerless System. “It isn't a technical threat, it's a social threat. IT may feel some animosity, justified or not, toward renegade developers...  Users, however, should never have to bear the brunt of this frustration.”

There’s the rub. The intranet must serve the audience: the users, your employees. Measured ROI and cash saved is important. Without the support and use by employees, however, that ROI will never be realized. The buck stops with the users who are tired of the frustrating experience that the intranet has become. A rationalization program will save money, but it will also save the sanity of frustrated users who are tired of complaining, “I can never find anything!”

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Despite the fractured and disparate marketplace for content management systems (CMSs), my colleague James Robertson in Australia does not necessarily believe a market consolidation is coming (despite the thousands of vendors).

In his most recent column, Will the CMS market crystalise rather than consolidate?, James surmises that crystallization will happen rather than consolidation.

“Ipotentially see the market crystalising around specific problem areas or vertical markets. For example, some vendors may cluster around delivering solutions to health care organisations, or universities. Others may primarily target ecommerce websites, or large intranets.

Over time, this would allow customers to more easily identify potential solutions, even as the overall size of the market continues to grow. Vendors would also be able to better target their marketing efforts.”

One of the keys to success for retailers such as Dell and Wal-Mart is inventory control. Knowing what inventory or products they have, how much of it, and how it relates to customer demand (e.g. what are they buys, when will it run out, how much do we need to order).

Your intranet or website offers a product: content (either static, dynamic or in the form of a tool or application). And content remains king. It is the most valuable thing you offer your employees or readers. But do you know the state of your content? Is it up to date? Who owns it? How much do you have?

Dell and Wal-Mart offer a practical lesson for the world of intranet: success is partly predicated on knowing what you have.

The challenge is volume. If your intranet is like most, then your intranet portal and/or sites have a lot of content. It’s rare that I work with a client intranet that has less than 100 – 500 pages of intranet content per employee. IBM has more than 10 million known pages (more than 300 pages per employee).

While knowing what you have is important it can be time consuming but highly worthwhile for a number of reasons:

• business continuity – ensuring employees have the right information to do their job
• cost efficiency – stale or wrong information or data can be eliminated
• employee productivity – maintaining and prioritizing information so that the most valued and used information is easily retrieved
• business priorities – determine what content and information is needed to drive an effective business

“Intranets grow and become more content heavy, ownership moves from one department to another, and business processes as well as their user base will change throughout content's lifecycle,” writes Paul Chin, an intranet consultant and writer, in Taking Stock: Intranet Content Audits. “Over time, content that goes unchecked can be lost, forgotten, or even become a burden on the system. It can be relegated to the darkest recesses of the system never to be seen again.”

Undertaking the audit is the most time-consuming task. We often recommend that a client use a web analytics tool such as WebTrends to identify all the pages and content on the various intranet servers and then visit each one-by-one to identify:

• content type
• content relevancy
• date of publish
• owner/author
• status: save it, update it, or delete it 

One client of ours at a 750 person company used two summer students armed with a browser and an MS-Excel spreadsheet to track and document all 10,000 pages on their intranet. It took them one month and a half to document all 10,000 pages (about 3,000 pages per auditer per month). The good news was they identified all the content and found that only 4,000 of the 10,000 pages were of any value. In one full swoop they wiped out 6,000 pages which saved them a lot of server space and maintenance costs not to mention helped preserve business continuity and accuracy of information.

Content is king therefore it needs care and pampering.

Mike Pastore, editor of the Intranet Journal, has written an interesting analysis on the evolution of paid content and syndication in For Paid Content, the Times They Are a Changin'

“For decades, the way to keep the knowledge workers in your organization on top of industry news was to subscribe to the services of a content aggregator like Factiva, Dialog, or LexisNexis. The evolution of intranets and electronic delivery fit well with this approach, but now the amount of free content available to people with an Internet connection is changing the rules of the game.

The "deep Web" — online content that sits behind subscriptions and members-only barriers — and the not-so-deep Web (free Web content) collided with the launch of the Yahoo Subscriptions beta last month. The Yahoo service, which added LexisNexis and Factiva to its list of content aggregators and publishers this week, lets users search both the open Web and the deep Web in one search. And if you already have a subscription to Yahoo Subscription's publishing partners, you get to use the Yahoo search technology to search multiple publishers and aggregators as well as the open Web.”

For Paid Content, the Times They Are a Changin'