In many ways, websites and intranets are like telephone systems – they assist us in accomplishing mission-critical work all the time but their true value is rarely measured.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Register for the free webinar: Intranet Governance (Wed, 12pm EDT)

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Most people and organizations inherently know and understand the value of the telephone and don’t require a detailed ROI balance sheet before buying a phone. Like the telephone, most organizations inherently understand the value of an intranet, but don’t truly measure its value beyond HITS.

Failure to measure your intranet’s performance above and beyond simple analytics (e.g. HITS and page views) is a failure of responsibility (particularly in this economy where most organizations are looking cut costs wherever they find them).

Here are five noteworthy key performance indicators (KPIs) that you need to adopt:

1. Sales – if you’re intranet is not helping your organization increase sales, then you’re missing out. It’s far too easy to accomplish with a little planning and execution. Among the benefits:

• Provide the sales team with better information, more efficiently

• Solicit and reward employee leads & referrals

Additional reading:

Intranet Insider World Tour: Sodexho USA

2. User satisfaction – more important than what employees are reading, and how often / much, is their satisfaction with the intranet. How happy are they? In particular, user satisfaction with:

• Design

• Content

• Navigation

• Tools

• Search

Among the satisfaction metrics BT tracks on their intranet (see Satisfied BT Intranet users « Mark Morrell):

 

• 83% satisfied with the intranet (down 3%)

• 42% extremely/very satisfied with the intranet (down 3%)

• 6% are dissatisfied with the intranet (up 2%)

• 79% satisfied with BT Homepage (new design) the corporate intranet portal (down 3%)

• 43% extremely/very satisfied the BT Homepage (down 5%)

• 3% dissatisfied with BT Homepage (no change)

   

3. Productivity – the intranet can significantly boost employee productivity and their ability to find information and tools to complete their work. Among the productivity metrics that Microsoft, IBM and BT track:

• 33% of Microsoft employee survey participants (33%) agree completely that the Microsoft intranet (MSWeb) saves them time

• 27% agree completely that MSWeb has helped to improve their productivity (8 or 9 on a nine-point scale)

• 80% IBM employees visit w3 (the intranet) at least once per day

• 68% view the intranet as crucial to their jobs

• 52% are more satisfied to be an IBM employee because of information obtained on w3

• 48% agree the BT Intranet improves everyday working life

• 57% agree the BT Intranet saves me time in my working day

• 59% agree the BT Intranet helps me to be more efficient in my job

Additional reading:

Intranet 2.0 case study: BT

Leading intranet case study: IBM’s W3

 

4. Stakeholder satisfaction – a far more critical and discerning audience are those managers and executives (stakeholders) that have a hand in or ownership of the intranet. Our intranet consultants (Prescient Digital Media) have solicited and surveyed stakeholders for their opinions and ratings of the for more than 100 intranet clients. Why? It’s not just about making users happy, but also making management happy.

    

Additional reading:

Creating A Measurable Intranet Strategy Prescient Digital Media (PPT with case study from PNC Bank)

 

5. Cost savings – why have an intranet if it’s not saving your organization money? Improved communications and HR are nice, soft benefits, but if the intranet is delivering those benefits, then it’s probably delivering cost savings that you just haven’t measured. Everything from paper, software, technology, administration, distribution / delivery, and travel costs to just about anything under the sun. There are hundreds of areas to save money with your intranet.

    

Additional reading:

Finding ROI: Measuring Intranet Investments (free white paper)

Technorati Profile

An intranet or website is more than a project or a piece of technology; it’s a mission-critical business system and a significant investment that requires proper planning.

 

Many intranets begin without a plan; many are redesigned without a plan. An intranet is far too expensive to leave to guess work, intuition, or a single-minded purpose such as communications or HR. In order to truly realize the full value of the investment the intranet must have a proper plan that accounts for all aspects of the business – including HR, IT, communications, operations, finance, etc. A proper plan begins with a thorough assessment.

 

Prescient has a five-phased approach or methodology that our Intranet consultants use to creating highly effective intranets and portals. The first phase of this methodology is the Assessment phase, where the business and functional requirements of the intranet or website are determined and documented.

 

Prescient's unique intranet project methodology

 

Despite the traditional focus on technology and integration, the most critical phases are the initial ones: Assessment and Planning. At the heart of an intranet's success is the strength of the plan that governs it, and a successful plan begins with a website or intranet assessment.

 

ASSESSMENT

 

Before undertaking any website plan or build, an extensive needs or business requirements assessment is necessary to identify, develop, prioritize, and document goals and current practices.

 

The assessment should include stakeholder interviews and input, as well as user research, and possibly stakeholder workshops. When building a leading-edge website, a detailed strategic blueprint can be crafted with the acquired data and knowledge including:

• Creative

• Information architecture

• Technology

• ROI plans

 

It is recommended that any organization consider engaging a third-party or consultant to conduct the assessment. While the cost may be prohibitive for organizations with tight budgets, a third-party may be more successful in gathering sensitive opinions and feedback as a third-party, unlike stakeholders, have no personal attachment or stake in the intranet and do not have any political agendas.

 

It is important to gather the needs and requirements of stakeholder and users, at the risk of failure; a representative sampling of user opinions is crucial to gathering an accurate reading on user needs and requirements.

 

Engaging Users, Identifying Needs

 

The first two phases, assessment followed by planning, are perhaps the two most important phases: without undertaking rigorous and thorough assessment and planning stages, the subsequent three phases will not realize their potential. The purpose of the assessment is to identify the organization’s needs and requirements. Steps in the assessment phase should include:

• Current state site evaluation

• Business requirements interviews

• User surveys

• User focus groups

• Review of existing research (surveys, etc.)

• Benchmarking (best practices)

• Usability testing

 

Business and needs assessment

 

The assessment serves two important needs: it documents the needs and requirements of the user population, for the purpose of answering those needs.Before undertaking any site or portal design or redesign, regardless of the size of the project, a requirements assessment is necessary to identify, develop, prioritize, and document goals and current practices. As mentioned above, each engagement begins with an assessment that concretely identifies and documents the project’s goals and objectives, aligns those objectives with those of the sponsoring department and the enterprise as a whole, as well as documents the needs and requirements of the user audience and stakeholders.

 

Armed with the acquired data and knowledge, a detailed strategic blueprint – including creative, information architecture, and ROI plans – can be crafted to build a leading edge site. Individual modules in the Assessment Phase may include Stakeholder Engagement, User Research Review, User Survey, User Focus Groups, Benchmarking (sometimes conducted in the Planning Phase) and the delivery of the Key Findings Report.

 

FREE WEBINAR:

Online registration is now open for Intranet Governance: How to Run An Intranet

(Sept 23, 12pm EDT)

 

ADDITIONAL READING:

Intranet Evaluation

The Intranet Plan

Technorati Profile

Who should own the intranet? Communications? IT? HR? All of them? You may be shocked to learn that many companies don’t know the answer; in fact, many organizations can’t clearly answer with any confidence whom is the present intranet owner.

 

As is the case with most intranets it is simply impossible to achieve any long-lasting success without a clearly defined ownership and management structure. Far from being a buzz word or jargon, intranet governance provides clarity and rules: namely the titles, roles and responsibilities of its owners, managers, stakeholders and contributors.

Sample governance model – large-sized financial services firm

(Source: Prescient Digital Media)

 

Simply put, governance defines an intranet’s ownership and management model and structure including the:

 

• Management team
• Roles & responsibilities of contributors
• Decision making process
• Policies & standards

 

Like the content of your website or intranet, planning and governance is technology agnostic; whether it’s SharePoint, IBM or another portal or content management system, the necessity for and the approach to governance is the same. Given its technology neutral status in governance is largely applicable to any technology platform.

 

POLITICS

 

Politics and the issues of control, ownership and standards go hand-in-hand with intranet management and perhaps these issues, more than any other, have driven the requirement for planning and defined governance models. Sadly, very few organizations actually have a well-defined governance model, and many of those have spent hundreds-of-thousands to millions of dollars on their website or intranet – amounting to extraordinary investments left to chance and execution on a whim.

 

According to the Intranet 2.0 Global Survey:

 

• Only 47% of organizations have a defined governance model (32% have 6,000 employees or more; 11% have 30,000 employees or more);
• Of the tools and platforms being used by survey participants, a whopping 47% are using SharePoint (MOSS 2007) in some shape or form.

 

Politics will kill your intranet. Without a well defined governance model (and should your intranet survive the naturally occurring politics of competing priorities amongst various stakeholders – communications, IT, human resources, various business units, etc.) then the value the intranet or portal delivers will be severely hampered.

 

OWNERSHIP

 

“If you don’t have structure, you’re going to constantly run into politics,” said Terry Lister, Partner and Leader of IBM Canada’s Business Consulting Services. “Without a governance structure with standards, different silos try to do something in parallel (their own thing) and it costs more… and will lessen the user experience.”

 

Much of the problem lies in the immaturity of this nascent intranet technology. With the rational consolidation of intranet sites and services under a central site or portal, disparate departments and stakeholders such as corporate communications, human resources, IT and varying business units now must cooperate under a lone umbrella with a single intranet home page. Along with this ‘forced’ cooperation comes the predictable politics and competition for ownership of the intranet (and competition for valued home page real estate).

 

The problem lies with the traditional growth and evolution of the intranet. Initially, when intranets first came online in the early to mid-1990s, they were nothing more than a web brochure (a.k.a. ‘brochureware’) that sat on a small server under the desk of a Web developer who served as designer, writer and Webmaster.

 

GOVERNANCE MODELS

 

I categorize intranet governance by four broad approaches or models:

 

• Decentralized (no single owner; do-what-you-like)
• Centralized a single owner or department controls it all; highly bureaucratic; common in small organizations)
• Collaborative (shared ownership via committee)
• Hybrid, centralized (single owner, with collaborative accountability, decentralized content ownership)

 

COLLABORATIVE GOVERNANCE

 

The most common governance model in recent years, in medium to large-size organizations, has been the collaborative model. The collaborative model is most often focused on a cross-representative steering committee representing the major functional stakeholders:

 

• Communications
• Human Resources
• Operations
• Information Technology
• Business units / departments

 

This model is most successful when the committee is championed by one or two key executives, often the CIO, the head of Communications, or HR. Instead of no owner, or one single owner, a collaborative team governs the intranet through the application of policies, standards and templates. This committee is typically responsible for the direction, vision, prioritization of projects, and future evolution.

 

About two-thirds of medium to large-size organizations have some form of collaborative governance and some form of intranet ‘steering committee’ or council. They typical committee has 6-10 individuals (mostly from IT, HR & communications) and is focused on:

 

• Mandate and vision
• Business objectives
• Policies and standardization
• Project prioritization
• Trouble-shooting and conflict resolution

 

HYBRID, CENTRALIZED GOVERNANCE

 

The hybrid, centralized governance model is one that combines elements of all three previous models:

 

• Centralized ownership
• Centralized policy making and future development decision-making
• Centralized technology and content management platforms
• Decentralized content publishing and ownership
• Decentralized application ownership / management

 

The hybrid model is very closely aligned to the collaborative model, with two significant exceptions: there is often a supporting steering committee, but it falls under a single intranet owner (or co-owners); and the role of IT is usually reduced from a collaborative owner to a committee member without ownership, but rather a support or enabler role for the business owner (often communications or HR). So while the collaborative model has a committee as the end intranet owner, the hybrid model puts the committee under an owner (though sometimes this business owner is in fact IT).

 

FREE WEBINAR

 

Learn more about intranet governance during the free, one-hour webinar on September 23 (12pm EST). Contact us directly to secure an advanced spot on the webinar.

 

ADDITIONAL READING

Intranet Governance

The Politics of Intranet Ownership

Collaborative Intranet Governance (Intranet Politics Part II)

Intranet management is plural

Why is the intranet so political?

Technorati Profile