Gerry McGovern says that you will earn more money if you start proving the value of the intranet. Sounds like something I would say (yeah, I know, a broken record).

Gerry is a firm believer “if you are in charge of your company's intranet you are in pole position to further your career.”

The bottom line: the vast majority of executives think the intranet delivers little value for the cost – and some believe it’s a waste of money. But most of these suits aren’t ignorant fools, they’re just ignorant. They need a sheppard to show them the way – to show them the money (see Measure your efforts).

Watch the vlog-like video clip Intranet Task Master with Gerry talking about the value of intranet measurement.

Every intranet should have a business case; a justification for being, including metrics that prove its worth. Along with user satisfaction, traffic metrics, and ROI, benchmarking information (what others are doing) is also important to know.

For the best possible data, the 2007 Global Intranets Survey (hosted and conducted by Jane McConnell) needs your participation. If you are an intranet manager or consultant then it’s in your best interest to spend 30 - 60 minutes completing this survey.  Every respondent will receive a complete report of the findings – which is very good intelligence for your intranet business case.

To participate in this year’s2007 Global Intranets Survey pleaseContact Jane McConnell.

The 2006 Survey revealed a number of key trends:

• 13% said their senior management perceived the intranet as "business critical
• 55% said their employees would be disturbed in their work if the intranet "went down" for 1 to 2 hours
• 60% say the main obstacle preventing the intranet from achieving its potential is that it is "too communication" and lacks integrated applications
• 70% say that a "lack of awareness of the potential role of the intranet" slows down strategic decision making
• 47% expect their intranet budgets to increase over the next 2 years
• Only 26% are required to measure ROI to justify new or current investments.
• Only 28% have implemented internal blogs and/or external blogs and/or wikis

Take the 2007 Global Intranets Survey by contacting Jane McConnell.

The 1980s and 1990s were tough times for British Airways. The new millennium was not kind either when in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, some analysts began to wonder if BA would survive at all and talked openly about bankruptcy for more than one airline.

Since 2002, the company has re-engineered an impressive turnaround with an aggressive focus on cost-cutting and productivity. In late 2002 its share price had slumped to below £100; today BA’s share price is hovering around £500.

One catalyst for change during the impressive turnaround, in a hugely challenging business and environment, is the BA intranet. In 2001, BA put in place an ambitious plan for a low-tech intranet with lofty targets. Building on what some would call an antiquated platform, Lotus Notes and Domino, BA built an intranet that is delivering a measured value of £55 (more than US$100 million) per year.

“I have to admit I do get envious when I hear about all the technology that others (companies) are using,” confesses Alan Huish, BA’s manager of employee self-service when asked about using Lotus Notes. “But you cannot argue with our results.”

Read my complete case study feature Low-tech, high-value intraneton Communitelligence.com

Getting the necessary support and funding for an intranet redesign is usually a struggle at most organizations, particularly when most view the intranet as a cost center – a necessary evil. To change this mindset, intranet managers need to show them the money.

Senior management are much more likely to invest in an intranet if they can see it delivering measurable returns, such as increased business efficiency, reduced overheads and enhanced customer satisfaction. Increasingly the intranet manager will need to put in place viable processes for recording and reporting intranet value, in short demonstrating a return on investment (ROI) and employee productivity.

Presented by Prescient Digital Media and Summers Direct Selling A New Intranet to Senior Management is a webinar to arm you with invaluable ideas and steps for building a business case for redeveloping or redesigning your existing intranet.

Date: February 27, 2007 & Time: 1:00 – 2:30 p.m. (EST)

Specifically, we’ll teach you:

• Priorities for building a business case
• How to measure return on investment
• How to identify very specific measurable benefits
• Best practices & case studies that measure ROI

To register phone 1-866-869-7969 or e-mail register@summersdirect.com

NOTICE: The British Airways intranet webinar has been rescheduled to March 15, 2007. See Intranet Insider World Tour: British Airways.

RELATED READING:

Selling the intranet to senior management

Infant intranets need executive loving

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Despite the advances in technology and the potentially massive benefits and impressive ROI accrued from converting paper-based forms to online submission, many intranets still host a majority of their forms in MS-Word and PDF.

James Robertson writes in Automating three types of forms that “the ‘rule of thirds’ can be used to categorise the different types of forms within organisations:

• One third are very simple forms, with no logic or complex rules.
• The second third have some underlying rules, such as simple workflow or basic form logic.
• The final third are best considered as applications, such as employee self service (ESS).”

The first two types, in Robertson’s estimation represent about two-thirds of all forms to be found on the intranet, are either very simple or somewhat simple to implement. The third tend to be more complex applications that often get the bulk of attention.

HP’s intranet features 1,850 “e-services” and application. Just about any form you can imagine is an online service. Despite having a remote workforce that is mostly traveling, British Airways employees complete most of their forms online… many in the form of applications:

·         100% of internal (and external) recruitment is done online

·         100% of employee travel is booked online

·         75% of pensioner (retiree) self-service is done online (wow!)

·         80% of employees update their own contact information online (from 10% in 2003)

The number one application is e-Pay where employees access their paystub – delivering savings of $180,000 per year. These forms and applications are the primary drivers of $80 million in savings in the past year for British Airways.

Online forms make sense for a lot of reasons including making better the lives and jobs of employees. And they deliver a lot of savings and ROI.

Read James Robertson’s full article Automating three types of forms.

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The value of a really good intranet is considerable and immense. While usage, ROI, and employee satisfaction are typical and traditional performance measure for the intranet, the intranet is also leading to improved retention and job satisfaction.

At HCL Technologies, the intranet is a key component of its employee retention program (see Employees first` is the new mantra!, Business Standard).

Read my complete piece Intranet is key to good HR (Communitelligence.com)

To measure and increase the value of your intranet, please dowload the free white paper, Finding ROI.

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Intranets don’t deliver good ROI; applications deliver great ROI. Or so we’re told.

Why do stores like the Gap, Target, Nordstrom’s, etc. locate in malls? Malls exist because they attract a lot of shoppers and therefore retailers like the Gap are willing to pay a lot of rent to realize the sales and ROI that come from those shoppers. If the shopping mall doesn’t exist, a lot of retailers lose out. The stores don’t get the sales, and they don’t get the ROI.

The intranet benefits applications as the mall benefits stores. Intranets drive traffic to applications which reap the big ROI.

One of my favorite application ROI examples is the fantastic SuperSleuth sales lead tool on the SodhexoUSA intranet (see Best practices case study: Sodexho USA). SuperSleuth is an intranet application that encourages employees to submit sales leads and prospective clients via the intranet. Successful leads submitted via the SuperSleuth intranet page generate cash rewards of up to $1000 for the person making the submission. Sodexho says it has contributed to a 100% increase in sales leads in the past year and led to US$90 million dollars in managed volume (net client sales including sales by client).

The Sodexho intranet home, compliments of SodexhoUSA

("Revolutionizing Employee Communication", Angelo Ioffreda, Sodexho USA)

SuperSleuth is an intranet based tool that would be no means receive that volume of leads nor generate the dollars it does without the intranet to drive those leads. The intranet home page promotes the tool and generates the traffic that reaps the reward.

It’s no longer acceptable for an accountant or techie to tell you that you can’t count the ROI on the employee directory, or online expense form, or sales lead generator as intranet ROI. The intranet begets the tool that delivers the value and as such should be recognized as a successful delivery platform that delivers ROI.

While some tools like online benefits enrollment might still generate a high ROI without the foundation that is the intranet, others like SuperSleuth depend on the intranet. It’s fair to say, based on my anecdotal and measured observations, that many applications owe 50% of their value to the intranet.

Without the mall, many stores would scramble for customers – many enterprises are without a business model. Like the mall, the intranet ensures the success of its application stores and makes possible a business model that wouldn’t exist without a supporting foundation.

To measure and increase the value of your intranet, please dowload the free white paper, Finding ROI.

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For more intranet news visit www.IntranetReport.com

© 2006 Toby Ward - Prescient Digital Media

Middle managers spend more than a quarter of their time searching for information necessary to their jobs, and when they do find it, it is often wrong, according to results of an Accenture study.

The proliferation of different information sources within organizations was revealed by the survey as the most important reason why managing information is proving difficult.

Among the key findings:

• WASTED TIME:
• Managers spend up to two hours a day searching for information
• 42% said they accidentally use the wrong information at least once a week
• 57% of respondents said that having to go to numerous sources to compile information is a difficult aspect of managing information for their jobs
• NO VALUE:
• More than 50% of the information managers obtain has no value to them
• 53% said that less than half of the information they receive is valuable
• POOR MANAGEMENT:
• Only half of all managers believe their companies do a good job in governing information distribution or have established adequate processes
• 59% said that as a consequence of poor information distribution, they miss information that might be valuable to their jobs almost every day
• POOR FUNDING:
• Only 11% of finance and accounting managers — less than for any other function — said they believe that their company has invested enough in the right technologies to help them get the information they need

The amount of wasted time and money is staggering.

Every year there are several studies touting the same thing: employees are wasting too much time searching for information. But no one in senior management (few) believes these studies. However, I and the staff at Prescient spend hundreds of hours a year inside medium and large size corporations and not-for-profits and find the same thing from the many hundreds of managers and employees we talk to: “we can’t find anything.”

Staff at all levels are wasting far too much time searching for information and the intranet is often a cruel hoax; often touted as the ‘one-stop’ source or gateway to ‘all your information needs’ the intranet almost always fails the unreasonable expectation. The problem is part planning, part information architecture, part process, part people, and part funding.

If corporations would spend more money on their intranets, instead of treating it as a cost center, these same corporations would have more productive employees. Ironically, CEOs and senior management are absolutely obsessed with employee productivity. Employee productivity, along with competitive advantage and shareholder return, is a major priority. But little is done aside from cost cutting.

The onus is on you, you the intranet manager or consultant. You have to build the business case that sells the benefit for rebuilding or redesigning the intranet in such a way that employees spend less time searching, and more time doing their jobs.

To measure and increase the value of your intranet, please dowload the free white paper, Finding ROI.

Read more…

Intranet redesign: building a business case

Intranet Business Case (back issue)

Measuring Intranet Value: Proving & Delivering ROI

Fixing a broken intranet

Intranet Business Case (back issue)

The number one most repeated call to your IT help desk relates to a forgotten password. Give your employees the tools to get their own password without having to engage an expensive techie, and you could save hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Some may have read my recent article Dialing for intranet dollars that highlighted one financial services client that was able to reduce employee calls to the internal help desk by one-third, almost 40,000 calls per year (at $18  per call) – yielding an estimated savings of $697,115 per year. Enough to pay for the intranet redesign many times over. A big portion of these help desk savings comes from password retrieval self-service.

Identity management is a solution that helps, among other things, with password retrieval self-service.Just such an identity management solution has saved UPS a bundle.

(Baseline Magazine) By using identity management software, however, UPS has automated some processes involved with giving employees a digital identity and a password for access to its corporate portal or other applications. One benefit: The help desk now receives 24,000 calls a year to reset passwords and update employee profiles, a decrease of 16,000, or 40%, from past years when identity management software was not in place.

Read Tracking Digital Identities: No Holiday for UPS

To measure and increase the value of your intranet, please dowload the free white paper, Finding ROI.

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Looking to squeeze more time out of your laptop battery while traveling during the holiday season? Here’s some handy pointers from Microsoft: Keep Your Laptop Powered Up Longer.

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For more intranet news visit www.IntranetReport.com

© 2006 Toby Ward - Prescient Digital Media

From the Intranet ROI webinar, here are (with some paraphrasing) some of the questions and answers on return on investment (ROI) and intranets:

Q – How do you get people to measure costs in the organization?

A- As the participant alluded to in so many words, it is difficult to get people to find, measure or share their often guarded cost data. However, the only way to measure ROI is to first determine the costs, and then measure or project the future value. Therefore cost measurement begets ROI measurement. Getting fellow managers and employees to go out and gather cost data is an exercise in motivation.

At Prescient, we conduct a team workshop with key managers from IT, Finance, Operations, Human Resources, Communications and others that might be relevant keepers of cost data that might include business unit or corporate service managers.

After introducing the concept and using case studies and benchmark examples we use a detailed matrix and review some of the 150+ measurable ROI benefits that can be accrued to an intranet or portal. Benefits are reviewed and agreed to and individual participants are assigned ‘homework’ to hit the books and to get the data (e.g. the current costs of operating the IT help desk, independent intranet sites, e-mail servers, etc.). See the Intranet ROI Workshop for more information.

Q- How does Cisco or others determine what goes on their home page?

A- Known intranet leaders such as IBM and Cisco have had intranets for more than a dozen years. So, for starters, they’ve had a lot of practice. Secondly, in those years, they’ve spent a lot of time getting to know employees and what they want. A lot of time has been put into tweaking and enhancing as the result of studying web logs, conducting user surveys, focuses groups and usability testing. Not to mention implementing best practices.

But it’s not just delivering on employee needs and expectations, but also those of the organization as a whole including management requirements and strategic goals. At IBM, the intranet home page is a personalized portal powered by Websphere. So the end user has the ability to pick and choose some of the content that appears on their home page (see

At Cisco, no personalization is delivered, but the user has the option to choose their own hot links or “My Links” – individual bookmarks that appear on the user’s home page. There is also role-based dashboards or pages that are targeted to specific employee roles such as new employees, managers, administrative, engineering, sales, and others.

How does understanding employee requirements relate to ROI? The intranet has to deliver value for employees to use it. If you build it... and employees don't see value in using the intranet, they will not come. If they don't come, you won't get the ROI.

To measure and increase the value of your intranet, please dowload the free white paper, Finding ROI.

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For more intranet news visit www.IntranetReport.com

© 2006 Toby Ward - Prescient Digital Media