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.

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)

Jakob Nielsen is a smart guy. The godfather of web usability knows his stuff. You only need to read his column (www.useit.com) to know that he knows he’s smart. He tends to where it on his sleeve, but he’s earned it – and I enjoy reading it.

As far as usability goes, he’s the king. He’s trying to be a real intranet guru, but he really has not proved he can move beyond usability. He over-emphasizes usability – which is an important aspect, but not the most important.

In my years of working on intranets, I have calculated the value of usability at about 15% of an intranet’s value – with content and planning & resources (governance, process, publishing, funding, staffing, etc.) representing 30% each.

Usability however has its place and Dr. Nielsen has written a great piece on standard deviation and the number of users to test when doing usability testing (see Quantitative Studies: How Many Users to Test?). In short, Nielsen says that testing “20 users typically offers a reasonably tight confidence interval.”

Read the rest of my article Usability overkillat my Intranet Insider blog at Communitelligence.com.

RELATED READING:

When to use what research tools

Leading an intranet redesign

Nexus of Intranet Success

ON A PERSONAL NOTE:  I celebrated my 7^th anniversary with my darling wife today! (That’s 13 years together now; 2 kids; 3 houses; and far too many air miles and not enough champagne!). We sipped Verve Cliqout next to the creek at sunset…  funny how anniversaries slow down as you age up with celebration in close proximity to yet more and more kids!).

Speaking of kids… my five-year old Rachel just graduated from pre-school and will be starting kindergarten in September (French bilingual kindergarten). *Sniff* they grow-up so fast! Congratulations sweetheart!

Why is the Ukraine in the final eight at the World Cup? How is that they’ve had such an easy schedule and teams like Mexico and Czech Republic drew such a tough schedule? Man, great goal by Beckham…. Heart-breaking to see the Aussies go down like that with 4 seconds remaining… I’ve never seen a team such as Italy so undeserving of their position, year after year. I’m not predicting that Ghana will upset Brazil, but if anyone can do it they can do it (though I wouldn’t rule out Argentina or Spain…).

A hearty welcome to our new clients at Prescient Digital Media: Alberta Family Health Practice and the Air Canada Pilot’s Association – welcome aboard!

Intranet managers and consultants are the consummate knowledge workers. And as Francis Bacon has screamed to us from over the ages, knowledge is power!

In particular, an intranet manager needs to intimately know:

·         the requirements of the business

·         best practices

·         the preferences and needs of employees

On the last point, understanding the needs of employees, there are a number of tools at the disposal of managers including log analysis, surveys, focus groups and usability testing.

Each tool has its place and its pros and cons. A recent attendee to a seminar of mine in Chicago asked me: “When is it best to do usability testing? User surveys? Focus groups?”

The answer is, of course, it depends. It depends on…

·         the organization’s culture

·         the present position of the intranet on the evolutionary curve

·         the extent of “research fatigue” at the organization

·         what data “sells” best

While not necessarily applicable to other commodities such as, say, consumer packaged goods, I prepared the following table as a quick cheat sheet for comparing the various tools applicable to researching intranet target audience requirements.

What to use first?

The enquiring mind was also having a debate with their boss about what should be done first – in-depth interviews or usability testing or focus groups or survey – when orchestrating their site design. I personally think it’s best to lead with in-depth interviews of the business stakeholders as the first step. It’s critical to understand what the business needs and expects from the site.

Generally speaking I like to do in-depth interviews first, followed by a target audience survey, followed by planning and information architecture and design, followed by focus groups, and then do usability testing once you’ve built a prototype. Focus groups can come at anytime… depending on the issues at play. Sometimes it’s good to do FGs up front if there are contentious issues or you want to explore new ideas or concepts. If not, leave them until after you’ve done your site plans and played with a couple of design concepts.

There are of course many subtleties to site research – and always exceptions to the rule. Many factors come in to play when choosing your research tools and the time to implement each. A lot depends on the culture of the organization and the intranet’s position on the evolutionary curve. For example, if money is the only thing that sells a project, it’s better to invest your time and energy in measuring return on investment.

A final note: never conduct the research yourself on your own product (website or intranet) as your results will be biased and the end result flawed. No, this isn’t a sales pitch (I’m busy enough as is!). I money is an issue there is always a way to conduct low-cost research… just make sure the person spearheading the research knows what they’re doing! (When we recently began work with a new intranet client who convinced us they need not do any employee research as they had recently completed a survey they proudly produced the survey… three questions, all open-ended.)

RELATED ITEMS:

Measure your efforts

Intranet ROI

Intranet kingdom remains an unknown quantity

Intranet measurement strategy (case study)

© 2006 Toby Ward - Prescient Digital Media

Building and maintaining a site map or site index is, like on-site Search, fixing the symptom and not addressing the true problem,” writes renowned usability guru Jared Spool in his most recent posting, What about Site Maps and Site Indexes? (thanks to James Robertson).

Mr. Spool is a smart guy. A web leader. A true guru. But he’s dead wrong on this issue. Well, partly wrong.

Jared maintains that if the site navigation or ‘scent’ is good, you don’t need a site map. Wrong. Even regular users go the site map once in a while. Yes, navigating the sites navigation tree or categories is preferred, followed by using the search engine, but sometimes users just want a site map to have a bird’s eye view of the entire site... to see how content relates to each other, particularly first time users.

Spool also intimates in his above comment that search is redundant if your navigation is good. Tell that to IBM, Cisco, Oracle or anyone else who has millions of pages on their intranet. I dare anyone reading this to ditch their search engine and then sit back and see what the employee or customer user says....

“Fix the scent problems and the need for on-site Search diminishes quickly,” says Spool. This is correct. If your navigation is good, then search and site maps become tertiary considerations. But again, you may still have up to 5 or 10% of your first-time users heading to the site map regardless of the quality of your site scent. What is intuitive to one person, is not necessarily intuitive to another. I mean, I voted for George Bush, doesn’t everyone?!?! Just kidding, I’m Canadian and therefore can’t vote for George Bush. *Shudder*

“Investing resources in building an effective site map or site index is taking resources away from fixing scent problems,” says Spool. Dude, man, you couldn’t be more wrong. How many site owners are still custom coding a site map?!?! Very few. Any platform or content management system worth its salt automatically creates and updates your site map. If it’s automatic, then why ditch it?

Spool is write however to intimate that you should never, never rely on a site map as a primary navigation mechanism. First, maximize your navigation. Secondly, maximize the search engine effectiveness and its supporting meta tagging strategy and taxonomy. But don’t do the first two at the expense of a site map. Site maps are still appreciated by some, and expected by many.

GET STRATEGIC:

Linking web visits with offline sales

Most of us are very familiar with the frequent even natural tension between communications, marketing and IT. Techies see the world far differently than communicators or marketers. The common denominator for these groups must be the user. In The Enterprise User Experience—Bridging the IT/Marketing Divide Bob Goodman aruges that the both techies and marketers understand the importance and the significance of not only the user but the user experience (UX):

“This user judgment day occurs not only for consumer products, but also, in the case of enterprise UX, for internal products as well. For example, employees may fail to embrace a new intranet, extranet, or business application, because it doesn’t really connect with the way they do their jobs. The UX approach moves product concepts through iterative cycles of progressive optimization by letting real live users road test more and more refined models of a product. By involving users in the product design process, UX professionals bring to their teams the benefits of foresight and insight into “the street” before a product even rolls out.”

Notwithstanding the importance of the user however the first-movers and leaders should not go unnoticed. Benchmarking leaders and those that have blazed trails that you are only starting on can provide excellent intelligence and ammunition for growing the value of your intranet, portal or external website. (Thanks to James Robertsonfor highlighting this issue).

Despite the advances in technology and the cries and demands for more and better quality, portal solutions – more specifically their use in corporations – have barely evolved in the past few years. The same challenges that existed at the turn of the millennium continue to dominate today.

Continued corporate intranet challenges include:

• intranet sprawl; renegade development
• competing ownership and political issues
• limited or no personalization
• too many passwords; single sign-on not realized
• low user take-up; usage not living up to expectations
• complex, unfriendly publishing

Nielsen Norman Group has issued another ‘analysis’ on the state of corporate portals. Though author Jakob Nielsen does not indicate how many portals he and his colleagues actually studied, there are some 25+ organizations listed in the analysis (see Intranet Portals Get Streamlined).

Nielsen also believes there has been little progress in the past three years since his last analysis. “In fact, none of the forty-five best practices documented in the report's first edition have changed. Yes, we've gained many new insights, but what was good three years ago continues to be good today.

Of the biggest challenges and disappointing findings, Nielsen cites several:

• Portal solutions still don't offer satisfactory usability out of the box. This is more of a disgrace now than it was in the past, because we now know so much more about intranet usability. Vendors need to integrate this knowledge into their software.
• Single sign-on is still more a dream than a reality. It's one of the most desired portal features and creates huge savings in help-desk calls, but most companies are not yet there. Users still must log in again and again. Multiple sign-on does offer one usability benefit, however: it can help employees feel more comfortable about information privacy when accessing highly sensitive data.
• Personalization for individual users is still rare. Organizations continue to find role-based personalization more useful and to use it more frequently. For example, some companies present certain information or portlets only to people with a particular job title or people who work in a particular location.
• Governance has always been more important to portal success than technical issues, and this finding was even stronger in the new study. One popular approach is to create a steering group representing various business areas. Projects also need to establish firm rules for enforcing design consistency and migrating content and applications into the portal.
• ROI is woefully under-documented. Too few portal projects collect good productivity metrics, though some companies are now beginning to measure themselves against our intranet testing report's time-on-task benchmarks and using this data to compute their savings relative to average intranets. More typically, portal projects measure user satisfaction and usage. For example, Fujitsu Siemens Computers in Germany found that its intranet use tripled after the portal went online. (Doubled use is more common across the projects we've studied.) Since intranet use is completely voluntary, increased use is a strong indication that a portal helps employees do their work, though it's still an indirect metric.

These Nielsen Reports are not bad – they provide some decent insight. However, I’m not sure they’re worth the $200 or so dollars. Basically, companies volunteer their information in the form of case studies in the hope they’re chosen and singled-out as a success. These ‘case studies’ are mostly candy –they’re screenshots and sanitized looks at the current state of the intranet. Rarely do you get the real story and understand the real challenges, problems and shortcomings.

Yesterday on the Intranet World Tour featuring IBM’s W3, Liam Cleaver was exceedingly frank about IBM’s challenges – despite having one of the best intranets in the World. Case studies such as IBM’s are the real, true value case studies – where you are given insight into not only the successes but the challenges and problems (stay tuned for the next Intranet World Tour stop: Microsoft).

And there’s the rub: portals haven’t advanced much in the past three years and it’s because of many, many problems – some of which are cited above.