Intranet Blog

Intranet in the mind’s eye

Toby Ward — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 14:41:31 -0700

“Man looks in the abyss, there’s nothing staring back at him. At that moment, man finds his character. And that is what keeps him out of the abyss,” Lou Manheim (Hal Holbrook), Wall Street.

It’s a telling and provoking quote that is an expansion on the famous quote from Friedrich Nietzche: “When you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.”

While I’m tempted to debate the various interpretations, positions and philosophical arguments and positions for both, you’re likely reading this not to read Toby Ward the philosopher, but to understand the connection to the intranet. And where the hell is the woman while man is lazing about at the abyss?!? No doubt, she’s too busy running the world.

The essence of the philosophy is the nature of the mind’s eye, and our subjective interpretation of one’s self, and the world in which we operate (and shape, in part).

I’ll cut to the chase on the relation to the intranet: the intranet is a reflection of the organization, and the direct and in-direct team, including the man and/or woman who runs it. More importantly, the success in its current and future form is subject to the person looking at it (or into the abyss).

Another way to frame this picture or paradigm is to say that as great as IBM or Cisco’s intranet (or any other impressive intranet), they are not great in the eyes and minds of other organizations, and other employees. In fact, I test intranet designs, layouts and information architectures all the time, and frequently I’ll test the IBM design or Cisco design versus smaller, less complex intranet designs and the results are nearly unanimous every time: IBM sucks (it’s far too busy, with far too many links, and its far too complex). And yet, the IBM intranet is arguably the best intranet on the planet.

This is to say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder – or the mind’s eye. The IBM design is fantastic for IBM, but it doesn’t work for too many other organizations. But it doesn’t have to; the IBM intranet design needs to work for only IBM’s structure, culture and employees only. Every organization is different, has different needs, different structures, different cultures and different employees with different backgrounds, needs, expectations and tolerances. Therefore, while it is valuable to know what other intranets are doing, to adhere to best practices and to cherry pick winning ideas from those trailblazers that have preceded you, you cannot do so in the absence of input from both management and employees.

More to the point, here’s the crux of the mind’s eye: every organization is an ensemble of different cultures, structures, values and motivations, with different subjective interpretations of the world, the organization, and the intranet. Of course, even more granularly, every single person has their own culture, values and motivations. So it’s important to understand their mind’s eye and their subjective needs for design, navigation, content quality, etc.

Understand the benefits and best practices of IBM and others, while taking the time to understand the needs and motivations of both management and employees, and you can’t help but be successful with your intranet (taking into account all of the above, not the least of which is governance).

Woman looks into the abyss and sees nothing staring back at her. At that moment she knows man is completely over-rated and that she should be the rightful owner of the world (and the intranet). What’s in your abyss?

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Fixing a broken intranet

Toby Ward — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 01:00:00 -0800

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

I’m not going to drone on about this process and the importance of people and business requirements in a blog article. Sufficed to say however I’ve built a business around this methodology and worked with many dozens of companies that understand the need to align the business with the intranet and to demonstrate measured value. Initiating an intranet redesign begins with the people and documenting their requirements and that of the entire business.

Speaking on a similar topic at KM World & Intranets 2006 this past week in San Jose, my colleague Carm Porco met Nicole Engard, Web Manager for the Jenkins Law Library in Philadelphia. Nicole actually has a pretty good little blog (What I Learned Today) where she’s published a very detailed, lengthy and worthwhile case study documenting the complete redesign of their intranet.

“While the design was important, we saw an opportunity for a complete redevelopment. After researching what other libraries were doing with their intranets, we decided to use read/write Web or Web 2.0 technology,” writes Nicole in her posting Intranet 2.0: Fostering Collaboration with a Homegrown Intranet. “In May 2005 we offered an introduction to the read/write Web for our staff. We defined terms like blog, wiki, and portal, then pointed them to Wikipedia [www.wikipedia.org], encouraging them to edit articles that interested them so that they could get used to wiki technology and syntax.

Once we had a direction, we needed to decide whether to use a prepackaged site or develop something in-house. We wanted more than just a wiki; we wanted blogs (one for news and inter-department communication, and several for ongoing projects), a Web-based helpdesk, and a shared calendar. Most importantly, we wanted to be able to easily link to our homegrown modules. At first we looked at free and low cost portal/content management packages, but nothing lived up to our expectations. In the end we decided to build our own site using PHP and MySQL.”

Jenkins intranet home

The case study focuses a little too much on tools and design and barely touches on the needs of the organization and how performance will be gauged and measured, but it is a pretty good illustration that the efforts involved in a redesign are very significant.

Read more on the process and requisites for building a successful intranet: Intranet Planning: An Intranet Model for Success.

To learn about Prescient's intranet planning services, please see our Intranet Blueprint service.

Toby Ward, a former journalist and prominent writer and speaker on intranets and intranet planning, is the President of Prescient Digital Media. To learn how to undertake effective intranet planning, or to get our free intranet white paper, Finding ROI, please contact us directly.

Intranet design is not about design

Toby Ward — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 17:13:34 -0700

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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6 timely intranet resolutions

Toby Ward — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 11:00:29 -0800

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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Intranet design is important, but not that important

Toby Ward — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 15:00:47 -0800

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

10 Best Intranets of 2007

Toby Ward — Mon, 15 Jan 2007 21:43:39 -0800

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.

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For more intranet news visit www.IntranetReport.com

Branding the intranet

Toby Ward — Wed, 27 Sep 2006 11:34:59 -0700

(New York, NY) Branding is a funny game – it’s more art than science and involves too many intangibles that cannot always be controlled. Brand is more than an image or design – your corporate brand represents the sum perception of consumer’s total interactions with the company – the intangibles that bridge a product or service promise and the customer’s demand and opinion of that promise. The Internet is one of the most important touch points. The intranet an increasingly important vehicle.

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)

Intranet Design Melds To One

Toby Ward — Mon, 14 Aug 2006 20:00:00 -0700

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.

Intranet redesign: rolling content inventory

Toby Ward — Tue, 20 Jun 2006 01:05:47 -0700

Most of you have either recently undertaken or plan to undertake in the near future an intranet home page redesign. Hence, the focus of redesign over the past week.

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.

Read Intranet redesign: building a business case and Leading an intranet redesign.

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 how intranet experts Prescient Digital Media approach intranet redesigns: The Intranet Plan Intranet Blueprint © 2008 The Intranet Portal Blueprint © 2008 Intranet Evaluation Value and Return on Investment CMS Blueprint © 2008