Often it’s a slow death, but making a killer intranet mistake means the end of the intranet as you know it. Of course, a quick death is sometimes a good thing... but a slow death is far too painful not to avoid.

To continue The top 5 killer intranet mistakes...

#4 Killer – Forgetting the employee

One of the top three complaints I hear from intranet managers is that “employees just aren’t using the intranet!” If they’re not coming to the intranet en masse then you’re not doing your job.

More often than used to be the case managers are finally asking employees about the intranet. Unfortunately, their techniques and approaches leave little to be desired in most cases. Often its one or two questions about usage in the annual employee survey or a handful of usability testing that focuses more site navigation (usability testing has nothing to do with understanding user and content requirements!). More and more companies are using WebTrends or Urchin as a metrics analysis software, but the results are rarely examine to the extent required. None of this however will tell you what users want and expect.

Employees are your target audience; you need to know your audience intimately. In addition to talking to employees face-to-face, there are a number of tools that can be used to better understand your employee needs and expectations including:

• user surveys
• focus groups
• advisory panels
• help desk e-mail tracking
• usability testing
• metrics analysis
• return on investment (ROI)

At minimum, you should be using three or four of these tools every year. Using all seven is strongly recommended. If you don’t know how to effectively use these tools, please don’t guess how to do it or ‘wing it’; any research that isn’t sound will only undermine your credibility. Hire an expert.

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#5 – No executive support

Go ahead – just try and build a successful intranet without executive support! It’s damn near impossible!

At the heart of a site’s potential for success, is the backing of senior management – both moral and financial support. Many organizations have intranets that are mid-management or grass-root initiatives, and some enjoy a certain level of success. However, the potential of your portal or intranet will never be fully realized without proper executive support and a senior management champion (ideally either the CEO or CIO).

The number one challenge facing corporate intranets today is not technology, nor tight budgets, but rather internal politics, specifically, the politics of competing priorities and management agendas. The second biggest hurdle is a financial one. To win financial challenge (as well as the politics) you need senior management in your corner.

“Without the support, the site is more of an organizational afterthought and your work is almost an underground effort.” says Shel Holtz, ABC and IABC 20-year veteran of organizational communication (see Nexus of Intranet Success). “So if you want your site to be taken seriously, you need executive support.”

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There are mistakes, and there are killer mistakes. A successful intranet needs a lot of work and careful thought; some mistakes will limit success, others will kill the intranet.

In his recent column Lessons Learned: How to Avoid the Top 10 Intranet Mistakes my colleague Carm Porco, VP, Prescient Digital Media, provides some advice to avoid 10 of the most common intranet mistakes. To build on his list of favorites I thought I’d publish a slightly different list, one that concentrates on the ‘killer’ mistakes.

Note: a killer mistake doesn’t mean that the intranet dies, and shuts down – that simply doesn’t (commonly) happen. A killer mistake is strategic in nature; a strategic error that prevents the intranet from moving forward, halted by inertia or a state of purgatory. This purgatorical state is a broken state where the intranet can no longer progress in its current form without a complete restructuring – which often includes a new governance, technology, information architecture and design.

#1 Killer – No plan

An intranet manager at a major communications company lamented about the phenomenal amount of wasted time, money and effort exhausted in evolving their enterprise intranet portal that serves tens of thousands of employees. In one year, the intranet was redesigned three times – sucking significant funds and patience from an organization that should be using the intranet to support rather than drain the bottom-line. Of an extended team of more than a dozen people working on the intranet, only one person remains.

If your intranet or portal has no plan, then it is wandering aimlessly; achieving no goals and serving no prescribed good. While an intranet or portal without a plan can still be of some good to the organization, its value is severely limited and understated – and its going nowhere without a complete overhaul. The intranet without a plan is designed and grown by the whim of one or a few individuals working in isolation of others.

These intranets are often protected by the sole owner(s) and are treated as a fiefdom within the organization. Disruptive politics between the owner(s) and other parties seeking to play a role often handicap the intranet beyond simple repair. The only solution is to reinvent the intranet with a broader ownership and governance model followed by a well defined plan.

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Nexus of Intranet Success

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#2 Killer – Politics

Inexorably linked to the above, politics begets a slow death. What intranet manager or stakeholder has not been privy to intranet politics? It’s ubiquitous and goes hand-in-hand with any intranet’s evolution. However, while politics are naturally occurring with any intranet and can be expected, debilitating politics will kill your intranet.

Debilitating politics, where the evolution of the intranet is completely halted or hampered by a lack of consensus and the absence of any `decision-making’ that carries clout and ensures progress is made. The politics of course is the competing politics of different groups with differing visions and priorities – namely communications, IT, human resources, and key business units, etc.

I’ve been talking to one energy utility for four years. The utility approached me about helping them evolve their intranet into a high-value business system from the unproductive sloth it currently represents. Sadly, four years of bickering between various groups and business units has produced nothing. A terrible intranet four years ago is little better today and a massive leap from achieving its potential. This intranet is dying a slow death that will come one day when there is the clout to undertake a proper plan and restructuring; until then the utility’s intranet will flounder in intranet purgatory.

The best way to combat debilitating politics is by achieving consensus and cooperation through a well defined governance model. Should your intranet survive the politics of competing stakeholder priorities then the value the intranet or portal delivers will be severely limited unless a proper governance model is developed.

Recommendations:

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The Politics of Intranet Ownership

Collaborative Governance (Intranet Politics Part II)

#3 – Technology driven business

One prominent financial services firm purchased a CMS for $1.5 million. The CMS limited the number of publishers, it limited the number of pages that could be stored and published, and it proved unstable. Worst of all, the company that supported the product went bankrupt, leaving the client with no support. A little more than one year after they implemented the CMS, they had to scrap it. One wonders if the outcome would be different had they properly addressed their business requirements and constructed a thorough plan.

Sadly, IT’s credibility, skill and intelligence is being undermined by being left to make business decisions in the absence of necessary intelligence and planning. More often than not – and likely the case in about 95% of organizations – the cart is being put before horse: the intranet or portal technology is chosen before any plan or business requirements analysis.

The worst proponents of technology driven intranets are the respective sales forces of Microsoft (SharePoint), IBM (Louts Notes, Domino and Websphere) and portal and content management vendors (the lines between the two are blurring) such as Plumtree and Vignette. It’s not really their fault per se though – they’re just doing their job. Most organizations that are buying, however, are not doing their job. I don’t know how many times I ‘ve talked to a company that tells me, “We’ve just installed a CMS and now we need a plan...” or, “we’re about to buy SharePoint and need some help.” You get what you deserve...

How do you know what technology you need if you don’t know what the business needs? Simple: you cannot know. Do your homework: build a plan and then choose the technology.

Continued with... Killer intranet mistakes #4 and #5

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AUCKLAND, NZ – While at a reception here in Auckland I had the privilege to meet New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark. An impressive and widely respected woman (even rival aussies that I talked to had nothing but good things to say) Clark has been New Zealand’s leader for six years.

Progressive to say the least the Right Honourable Clark (Labour Party) has formed the past three governments forming coalition (minority) governments – the current and the past governments being coalitions with the Progressive Party.

While here I wanted to see just how progressive these kiwi politicians are and so I decided to do a little research. I found an impressive and highly progressive intranet case study: the New Zealand Ministry of Health intranet (the first one I found). As far as intranets go, it certainly is progressive (it is NZ Health’s own case study that is open to anyone to read).

What is particularly impressive about NZ Health’s intranet is their dedication to people and process. Before NZ Health did anything, they undertook a consultation process to find out what the target audience wanted. The consultation involved stakeholders in five cities and not only included Ministry employees but also “Crown health enterprises and independent practitioner associations.”

The NZ Health Intranet is ultimately governed by a very effective vision statement:

"Timely, accurate and robust information appropriate to their roles and needs will be available to all individuals and agencies involved in the provision of health and disability support services, and to consumers, with the knowledge, agreement and confidence of everyone, which will facilitate the ongoing, continuous improvement in the health and disability status of all New Zealand people."

Perhaps the single best intranet vision statement I’ve seen. Most organizations don’t bother with a mission or vision statement and that’s an unfortunate mistake. If you have an intranet or portal, you need a mission or vision statement.

The process also included a privacy impact assessment, pilot phase, and a technical review prior to fully building and rolling-out the intranet in 1999, 18 months after the initial consultation process.

So there is no confusion, the purpose of the governing body must be well defined to focus priorities and to minimize politics. NZ Health Intranet has a well-defined Governance Body with a governing committee of 10 individuals represented by individuals from the Ministry, Crown enterprises and related associations. The NZ Health’s Governance Body has a focus “to ensure that the Health Intranet benefits health services delivery through improved and cost-effective communication in the health sector” and has five priorities:

• Promoting the Health Intranet to individuals and organisations in the health sector
• Determining security standards for the transfer and sharing of health information
• Accreding and managing network and certification vendors required for Health Intranet operation
• Accrediting types of applications for the Health Intranet
• Approving new members to join the Health Intranet

I’ve talked many times about the need for intranet standards which NZ Health is explicit in documenting. Intranet standards include:

• Security standards (defines six principles for ensuring security)
• Code of Practice (“An agreed set of rules that determines how information can be exchanged in the health sector. Among other things the Code defines user and supplier criteria.”)
• Technical standards (use of digital certificates, secure e-mail, etc.)

Not so much progressive as it is smart and necessary – something absent in most intranets.