Redesigning an intranet does not mean you are fixing it; a broken intranet requires a lot of work and design is one of the smallest components.

While important, even technology is not the most important ingredient. Far more important to the success of any intranet is people and process.

There’s a process that should be followed for redesigning any intranet – a process that is focused on people, and grounded in the needs of the business.  The process or methodology applied to a redesign is best summarized in the following flow-chart from Prescient Digital Media:

Intranet Project Methodology - Prescient Digital Media

Forget the look-and-feel. Put it out of your mind. The look-and-feel or design of your intranet or portal is window dressing – a distraction from what employees need.

I mention this as we (Prescient Digital Media) talk with so many clients and prospective clients that want to see ‘screenshots’ as fast as possible. Screenshots are important and serve a purpose, and I completely understand having run an enterprise intranet before; everyone wants to see what others are doing.

Fidelity Investments intranet home page

However, don’t ask me to produce a design concept in response to your RFP when I, and all other vendors, know virtually nothing about your intranet other than the very select information provided in the RFP itself. If I whip up a design concept it will be entirely flawed, pointless, and completely counterproductive because it’s based entirely on guesswork because I don’t know:

• The cultural preferences and needs of employee users to different design treatments
• The mandatory or necessary requirements of business owners and senior managers
• The subtle nuances of a preferred an optimized information architecture
• The optimal page layout (whether 2, 3, 4 or more columns) with the right ration of text to white space (which varies for every organization depending on their culture and level of web savviness of users)
• The necessity nor capacity for individual personalization and customization
• Political consideration for the use of the home page
• Strategic initiatives of the organization that must be hooked into the intranet
• The type, quality and quantity of content on the intranet
• Etc., etc.

If I know little or none of the above, to what end or what purpose is served by developing a design concept based on guess work? To qualify our design capabilities? If you’re choosing an intranet consultant based on their ‘design’ abilities then you have no business running an intranet (see How to hire an intranet consultant).

That’s not to say that design (look-and-feel) doesn’t play a roll and isn’t important to users. Design is important, but it doesn’t crack the top 6 or 7 priorities. On average, based on my experience working with dozens of intranet clients, design is equivalent to between 8 – 12% of the total intranet’s value. What is really important is content (20-30%), search (15-20%), information architecture (20-30%), and governance and planning (20-30%).

Unlike YouTube or an entertainment website, users don’t really care about design nor video, flash, and bells and whistles that distract and entertain. Employee intranet users want one thing: to complete a task or to find the content or tool they need to do their job, and to do it or find it as fast as possible. In short, employees want speed. On our roads, speed kills; on our intranets, speed wins.

The following represents our updated model (based on many years of experience), the Nexus of Intranet Success, which visually depicts the critical components of a successful intranet.

Note the importance of people, particularly executives (executive support) and end users (motivated employees). Design helps facilitate the process, but never should be the focus or centerpiece. Argue with me or debate me if you like, but you will lose (see the original feature, Nexus of Intranet Success).

Just as the intranet is evolving and in need of constant refinement, I’m still refining this model as technology, employee needs, and companies change and evolve. More to come in October...

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It’s a little late for New Year’s resolutions, but we’re still early in the budget year for most (or near the end for others). Nonetheless, the intranet is usually in a state of improvement.

Here are 6 timely resolutions for improving the intranet, regardless of the calendar month, by Prescient’s Cathy McKnight:

Resolution #1 - Taxonomy. Develop and execute a robust intranet taxonomy so the site’s content will not be “invisible" to its users.

Resolution #2 - Metrics. Look at the metrics collected on site usage, and use that information to plan the site’s growth and evolution so that it meets the needs of the employees. 

Resolution #3 – Prioritize. “I cannot be all things to all people.” 

Resolution #4 – Redesign. Speaking of revamping the site’s design, this is the year that we ditch the orange and green banner, and update the President’s page so that it does not include a photo of her with a beehive hairdo.

Resolution #5 – Engagement. Get in touch with stakeholders and target audiences. 

Resolution #6 – Marketing. Let everyone know just how great the intranet site is (especially now that you have successfully kept to all your resolutions). 

The top intranet complaint at any organization is “I can’t find anything.” This is why the taxonomy is so important. Learn more by reading What is the New Year without (intranet) resolutions?

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The world’s biggest intranet, the Navy-Marine Corps Intranet (NMCI, with a total price tag of about $10-billion) serves more than 500,000 users – mostly marines and sailors in the field.

The end users are happy with the intranet – whether its dependability, support, or the ability to find information – user satisfaction is about 70%. Mission accomplished. Or is it…

NMCI is viewed as a failing project. A report by the Government Accountability Office (see GAO-07-51) is critical of NMCI for never implementing a plan developed in 2000 to measure and report project progress. GAO says that NMCI intranet has met a paltry three of 20 performance targets set for the intranet.

"By not implementing its performance plan, the Navy has invested, and risks continuing to invest heavily, in a program that is not subject to effective performance management and has yet to produce expected results," auditors said.

But the real damning evidence is from management. In two different satisfaction surveys with naval and marine commanders, the intranet was shot to pieces.

“Specifically, on a scale of 0-3 with 0 being not satisfied, and 1 being slightly satisfied with the contractor’s support in meeting the mission needs and strategic goals of these organizations, the average response from all organizations was 0.65 and 0.76 in September 2005 and March 2006, respectively. The latest survey results show minor differences in the degree of dissatisfaction with the four types of contractor services addressed (cutover services, technical solutions, service delivery, and warfighter support),” says the GAO report.

Users can find information and do most of the things that they want, but the intranet is failing to live up to its purpose. If an intranet fails to achieve business objectives and deliver on the priorities of management, then the intranet fails. It’s money wasted, and opportunity squandered.

Design and usability are important, but both are tertiary values compared to planning, performance and content (including governance, process and resources). Despite the incredible hype and emphasis on look-and-feel and usability testing (specifically these ridiculous awards reports and ceremonies), colors, pictures, blogs, and podcasts are all for nothing if the intranet does not have well executed plan that supports management objectives.

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For more intranet news visit www.IntranetReport.com

© 2006 Toby Ward - Prescient Digital Media

The start of a new year brings a lot of hype – the promise of bigger, better, faster; predictions and prognostications for the future; and the annual Intranet Design Annual by Jakob Nielsen et al.

While we’re only 15 days into 2007, the report is hyped as “the 10 Best Intranets of 2007.” I’m not sure how that’s possible, but Nielsen is a master at hyping his own work – which is very, very good. Nielsen is a true thought leader and, by all accounts, a genius. Usability and design is his tapestry and laboratory. And marketing is one of his gifts.

But beware the hype. Only a small fraction of an intranet’s value is design and usability – tertiary aspects to the larger value delivered by content, planning and resources. This value appears to be an afterthought to the authors of the report in years past, but at least they are forthright in promoting the report for what it is: a ‘design’ annual.

The report though is very well written and there are some great case studies and screenshots. At US$179, the report is great value. (Funny, I promote this report every year and despite all my readers I’ve never  gotten a note for them… no response ever. Perhaps I’m too frank and not selling it hard enough… though I’d be surprised if this column delivers no less then a few dozens sales for them. Am I becoming an intranet snob?!? J).

This year’s winners (keep in mind that these aren’t really the best of the year, just the best of the submissions and screenshots that Nielsen Norman received) include:

• American Electric Power (AEP), United States
• Comcast, United States
• DaimlerChrysler AG, Germany
• The Dow Chemical Company, United States
• Infosys Technologies Limited, India
• JPMorgan Chase & Co., United States
• Microsoft Corporation, United States
• National Geographic Society, United States
• The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), United Kingdom
• Volvo Group, Sweden

Here are some interesting tidbits from the report offered up in Nielsen’s latest column 10 Best Intranets of 2007:

• Dow uses English for most global content, but translates the most important content into six other languages (Dutch, German, French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish). It also translates selected content into Chinese, Greek, Japanese, and Thai.
• The most-used products were: Windows Server, Google Search Appliance or Google Mini, SharePoint, SQL Server, Google Maps, Omniture, and Vignette
• Across the first three Intranet Design Annuals (2001-2003), the winning intranets were 4.3 years old on average. Across the three most recent Annuals (2005-2007), intranets were 7.5 years old on average
• Across the first three Design Annuals (2001-2003), the average intranet contained 200,000 pages; across the three most recent Annuals (2005-2007), the average intranet contained 6 million pages
• This year’s intranet winners have the following owners: 35% were in Corporate Communications, 27% were in Information Technology or Information Systems (IT/IS), and 19% were in Human Resources (HR)
• Comcast's marketing extranet has reduced versioning and distribution costs by 50-60% and reduced delivery time even more
• Infosys has experienced a 65% drop in help desk calls since launching its redesign

OK here’s the big free plug you can bank on Jakob: you can buy directly online the 360-page Intranet Design Annual with 199 screenshots.

Often overlooked, as I stated today in my speech at the 2006 Corporate Reputation and Communication Conference (Conference Board), is the power of the employee in representing the corporate brand and the necessity of employee communications and the intranet in maximizing the value of your brand.

So what does the brand mean to the intranet? How do you brand the intranet? Firstly, the intranet must reinforce and support the corporate brand. The intranet is one of the most visual representations of the organization to employees on a day-to-day basis. Therefore, the intranet cannot be designed willy nilly. It must adhere to corporate branding standards and creative including: 

• Use and treatment of the corporate logo
• Applications of color from an acceptable and complimentary color palette
• Treatment of images, icons and photos that align with the corporate image

Does this mean though that the intranet home page should look like the Internet home page? No it doesn’t. It should not be a replication of the external site – there should be some distinction. However, there is a fine line between replication and reinvention. If you adhere to corporate branding standards (I’m assuming you, like most organizations, have them) then there will be some consistency with the external website (e.g. colors) but it should be at a glance visually distinctive so employees know that the intranet is just for them.  

"Visual appeal can be assessed within 50 milliseconds, suggesting that Web designers have about 50 milliseconds to make a good impression," according to Dr. Gitte Lindgaard of Carleton University in a recent e-commerce Times article about a report published in the journal Behaviour & Information Technology. 

As I’ve said time and time again, there is far too much emphasis on look-and-feel and design. “We’re doing a redesign” is a common turn of phrase meant to convey a complete restructuring of the intranet or website, but it in fact emphasizes the look-and-feel. In my experience, the user, your target audience, determines what is important.

It goes without saying that building an intranet brand is far more complex than marketing. A number of key contributors must be carefully mixed and executed to create a valued resonation:   

• Site design
• Usability
• Site layout
• Content quality
• Application value
• Collaboration

This does not mean however that the intranet ‘brand’ should be left to chance and that it is not important. The intranet brand is very important given its profile as an ever-present representation of corporate messaging, goals and source of information and collaboration. While the design or look-and-feel of the intranet should never be done on a whim or without a plan that aligns with the corporate brand, it should not be forgotten that employees don’t go to the intranet for brand, they’re after content.

ADDITIONAL READING:

Building a web brand (Get Strategic)

Don't Shout, Listen (Fast Company_

On the Web, Branding Is Back (Business Week)

Web branding is more than skin deep (Gerry McGovern)

 

© 2006 Toby Ward - Prescient Digital Media

In his May 23 Useit.com column Jakob Nielsen talks about intranet design and how more and more intranets are beginning to look alike.

“Homepage layouts are becoming more and more similar over time,” writes Nielsen in the Canonical Intranet Home Page.

With some exceptions of course, he’s right. More and more organizations and consultants are getting smart about universal practices with respect to layout, usability and content. Design is also being driven by off-the-shelf portal and content management solutions that standardize the design and layout.

Ultimately, if the designing organization knows the user audience well, then it probably understands that “speed wins.”

Employees want speed: to get information as fast as possible.

To achieve the speed principle, design takes a backseat to ‘effective information’ retrieval. As such, by default, design begins to become homogenous with other successful intranets that adhere to universal usability and layout practices.

Where I tend to diverge from Nielsen’s thinking is the emphasis he puts on usability and design. If you read his annual Intranet Design reports you might be left with the impression that usability and design were the two most important elements of a successful intranet.

Truth of the matter, based on my years of experience working with several dozen organizations, is that usability and design take a back seat to content and planning. In fact, Prescient Digital Media has a methodology for evaluating and scoring the value of an intranet and usability and design each account for about 13% of an intranet’s value while content and planning & resources (including governance, process, people, and funding) account for 50% of a site’s value.

Nonetheless, an intranet’s design should support and enhance the organization’s brand and culture while ensuring that employees are able to get the information they want, when they want, as quick as possible.

If you want to focus your intranet energies on any one or two areas, focus on content and process.

Why are so many companies in a position to redesign their intranet? Well, it’s time. The corporate intranet, in most organizations, has changed very little in the past five or six years. Meanwhile, the available technology and platforms – such as content management systems and portals and self-service applications – have evolved considerably. In addition, the intranet, like the business it represents, is in constant flux and evolution. A redesign forces the necessary change and process revisions to keep pace with the business and the market.

A redesign should be driven by business needs and a business case that details the needs, requirements and value of a redesign.  

Part of the process, prior to any designing or redesigning the look-and-feel, is addressing the little monster known as content. The monster requires feeding and likely has been well fed. As such, a number of key questions must be answered:

• What content from the old site needs to be migrated as is?
• What content has to be edited and updated?
• What content has to be forgotten and deleted? 

One client undertook an intranet content audit and was able to rid themselves of 70% of their content. Yes, 70%. Run that through the ROI calculator for your redesign business case!

In Rolling content inventory Louis Rosenfeld espouses the need to not look at site content just simply once, as a simple snap shot in time, but to continually examine content as the intranet rapidly expands and evolves. 

“When you've got hundreds or thousands of distributed subsites and other pockets of content, you simply won't not know what's out there. If you send a spider on a content reconnaissance mission, you'll still likely be overwhelmed by the volume of content that turns up. And even if you can send, as one past client put it, an "army of monkeys" to swarm over and survey your content, well, that's not good either. No measure of simians can deal with the jungle truth that your content is a moving target. Any snapshot you take of it will be instantly out of date. And in your efforts to grab a comprehensive view of your content environment, you will surely go insane. 

That's why I'm increasingly recommending pursuing a rolling content inventory. Instead of a snapshot, as all those silly IA books suggest, inventory your content on an ongoing basis. Put another way, a content inventory is an process, not a deliverable. Put yet another way, content inventory shouldn't be something that you allocate the first two weeks of your redesign to; allocate 10% or 15% of your job to it instead.”

Read more about Rolling content inventory.

(Tip of the hat to James Robertson).

An intranet redesign is like a political campaign – you might win, you might lose. And like a political campaign, an intranet redesign requires the support and vote of those that count – particularly senior management.

It is possible to do a redesign without the support of senior management and eek out a minority victory, but your power and potential success will be severely limited without the support of those key taxpayers – the people that pony up the cash.

If your intranet isn’t owned by a senior executive then you need a champion. However, unlike a political campaign working for a democratic purpose, a corporation is not a democracy. Senior executives are all powerful. They have the political clout and they control the purse strings.

Enlisting an executive champion

In organizations with successful intranets, the intranet champion is a c-level executive. In other words, a senior executive that reports directly to the CEO. This could be the CIO, the CFO, the COO or perhaps the SVP for communications or human resources.

Determining which executive makes the best champion in your organization depends on the executive and their power and influence within the ranks. Firstly, your executive champion should understand the value of the intranet and the potential it can deliver. Secondly, your executive champion needs to be involved. Not on a day-to-day basis, but when a decision needs to be made or funding is required. As far as a time commitment, your champion need only attend an occasional meeting (perhaps twice per year).

Usually, in most cases, executives don’t know much about intranets. In fact, most think of the intranet as a cost center. You need to educate them.

Education comes in the form of:

• Best practices and case studies (see Know the leaders and the competition)
• Employee research
• Business case with ROI

Developing a complete business case with all of the above will convince just about any executive of the need for a high value intranet.

Continued with Intranet redesign: rolling content inventory and Intranet redesign: building a business case.

For more intranet news visit www.IntranetReport.com

© 2006 Toby Ward - Prescient Digital Media

Great intranets are rarely done solely in-house. There’s too much at stake and the intranet is far too political to not take advantage of a non-partisan intranet consultant with relevant expertise.

There are advantages to doing it yourself:

• Costs less cash out of pocket
• Internal stakeholders are forced to learn the ropes
• Internal jobs are reinforced

The disadvantages of doing it yourself are obvious:

• Lack of skill and experience
• Lack of people to execute
• Internal politics on what and how to do it
• Time away from day-to-day work

To hire an intranet consultant, visit Prescient Digital Media to see their intranet consulting services.

Politics

The greatest barrier to an intranet’s potential is politics. Technology and budget are secondary barriers. The intranet is a political football.

Why? Most intranets don’t grab the attention of executives. The intranet is left to middle managers in communications and IT with limited budget and power. Conflict ensues and the intranet stalls – often for years.

Resolving conflict and breaking the subsequent limbo requires senior management support and participation. Where politics runs thick, a collaborative governance model is strongly urged.

Tearing down the political barrier often requires a third-party consultant with lots of expertise and no political axe to grind, but an arsenal full of best practices. If communications tries to lead the process, the other stakeholders will be suspicious. Ditto for IT and HR. If budget allows, everyone respects an experienced and capable mediator.

People

Building or redesigning an intranet requires a lot of work. It can take months or years. If you decide to build or rebuild the intranet, who will be minding the store?

An intranet requires:

• Employee input (research)
• Best practices intelligence (benchmarking)
• Business requirements analysis and documentation
• Strategic planning (mission, objective, goals, CSIs)
• Functional planning (structure, content, etc.)
• Governance model
• Policies and guidelines
• Business case and ROI
• Content management & migration
• Information architecture
• Layout
• Design
• Tools
• Staffing
• Technology implementation
• Network and database administration
• Integration
• Writing
• Etc.

Hiring an intranet consultant will free-up the necessary time to stay on top of the day-to-day job you were hired for – the daily news, benefits enrollment, new application rollouts, etc.

Finally, does your team have the skills? Have they ever developed a governance model, an editorial policy. or an LDAP integration plan?

How to hire an intranet consultant

If you have a budget and a work culture that recognizes the value of an outside intranet expert then proceed with caution.

Caution: an Internet consultant is not an intranet consultant. A web design firm has deep creative skills, but rarely has any business acumen and intranet expertise. A big-five consulting firm has very smart people but is very expensive.

Identifying the right intranet consultant