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Sunday, October 30
Not all content is created nor need be equal
by
Toby Ward
on Sun 30 Oct 2005 09:45 PM PST
It’s not usability. It’s not design nor layout. The most important part of your intranet or portal is content. As I wrote on Get Strategic a few weeks ago, and to steal an old line from Bill Gates, content is still king.
But is all content created equal? Certainly not. Should it be? Definitely not, says intrepid aussie consultant James Robertson.
“I've written before than not all content needs to be of equal quality,” blogs Robertson in Let go of an obsession with intranet content quality. “More importantly, with all the challenges involved in delivering an effective intranet, is this really where we want to be focusing our efforts?”
Robertson is downplaying the importance of content, but that’s not his point. Were it his sole point, I would veraciously disagree because content is what the user seeks (be it in the form of a static page, an interactive tool or multimedia.
Robertson’s point is one of pragmatic use of available time and resources. “When there are limited intranet resources, a too-small intranet team, and no content management system, should we be picking on authors about the quality of content? Should we be spending our time conducting 2 hour to 2 day training sessions for all of our (100+) intranet authors?”
“I would argue that this is just intranet teams focusing on the aspects that they are most comfortable with, a practical and manageable issue to address. But it's also irrelevant when there is a need to develop a real strategy to create an intranet that aligns the site with real staff and business needs.”
If I’m interpreting him right, James is saying that there are differing levels of content and not all are as important as say, corporate announcements from executives or security policies. There are some types of content, perhaps United Way announcements or cafeteria schedules, that while important to some, shouldn’t necessarily be held to the same standard as the really important stuff. Robertson is right.
Standards and policies are requisite. They need not be overly bureaucratic or complex, but they are needed. However, focus your energies on the content that users really want including the big three:
- corporate news
- corporate policies
- human resource information
Empower content owners to look after their own content through the use of standards and even templates or a content management system (highly recommended as the ROI on these can be very beneficial) and focus on what you can reasonably control.
“Let go of this obsession!” writes Robertson. “I want to see presentations at intranet conferences about how to gain management support, on how to deliver new solutions, on how to meet the needs of specific staff groups. Not hour after hour on intranet content quality..."
RELATED FEATURES:
Content is still king
Auditing your 'king'
Intranet sprawl and renegade development
Protecting your goods
Thursday, October 27
Portals have stalled
by
Toby Ward
on Fri 28 Oct 2005 01:03 AM EDT
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.
RELATED FEATURES:
Intranet World Tour: IBM leads the World (discussion below)
Leading intranet case study: IBM’s W3
Wednesday, October 26
Intranet World Tour: IBM leads the World
by
Toby Ward
on Wed 26 Oct 2005 03:52 PM EDT
IBM’s intranet portal, W3, may be the very best in the World. I’ve not seen them all but I have seen hundreds of intranets over the past few years and IBM is definitely one of the best if not the best.
IBM showcased its goods during the Intranet Insider World Tour Series -- featuring IBM’s renowned W3 portal webinar hosted by myself and IBM’s Liam Cleaver (presented by Communitelligence.com – the brainchild of communications afficianado and all-around good guy John Gerstner).
IBM’s success is really, really impressive. Here’s just a sample of some of their numbers:
Ø Usage and value
§ 80% of IBM employees access the intranet daily
§ 68% view the intranet as crucial to their jobs
§ 1.7 million page views per day (or about 6 page views per employee per day)
Ø Employee retention:
§ 52% are more satisfied to be an IBM employee because of information obtained on w3
Ø e-HR
§ Employee satisfaction from 40% to 90%
§ Health care enrolment
§ Performance measurement, skill & career development
§ Compensation, stock options, pensions, insurance
§ Time off, transfers, eldercare, adoption, etc.
Ø e-learning
§ 52% of employee training delivered on the Web
§ 200,000+ received online e-learning
§ $284 million saved annually
Ø e-meetings
§ 40,000 employees use every month
§ Saves travel & setup costs
§ Combines instant messaging, presentations, voice
Ø ROI
§ More than $1.3 billion in cost savings ($683 million in direct cost savings)
IBM’s Intranet Portal: W3 (home page)
If you didn’t get a chance to attend this session then I strongly suggest you order the CD (visit the Intranet Insider on Communitelligence.com for details).
Tuesday, October 25
Blogs waste trillions$$$!!!
by
Toby Ward
on Tue 25 Oct 2005 06:19 PM EDT
“In 2005, Employees Will Waste 551,000 Years Reading them (blogs),” says Advertising Age, based on a ‘study’ of U.S. employees.
551-thousand years “wasted.” This is the equivalent of trillions-of-dollars in lost revenue.
“35 million workers -- one in four people in the labor force -- visit blogs and on average spend 3.5 hours, or 9%, of the work week engaged with them, according to Advertising Age’s analysis,” writes Bradley Johnson in Advertising Age (see What blogs cost american business). “Time spent in the office on non-work blogs this year will take up the equivalent of 2.3 million jobs. Forget lunch breaks -- blog readers essentially take a daily 40-minute blog break.”
What?! You’re reading my blog, as we speak, at work?! How dare you waste company time and money!! For shame!!
Yes, that hollow squishing sound is resonating from my firmly planted tongue in the side of my cheek. It’s drilling a hole powered by sarcasm and incredulity. Incredulous as I have lost my faith in Ad Age if that’s the type of ‘infotainment’ they’re passing as journalism. No offense Bradley, you’re a fine writer and I’m sure a great guy, but this story is flawed.
In short, this is not a real study – and certainly not scientific – and the findings are flawed. For example, an important point that I strongly question:
"Based on ComScore's tally of blog categories, this suggests just 25% of blog visits directly connect to the job. Employees this year will spend 4.8 billion work hours absorbing wisdom from other blogs that may enlighten visitors but not amuse the boss."
This is a massive assumption that would cost a professional researcher his
or her job. Just because 75% of blog categories are not related to jobs
doesn't mean it is what people are reading when they are at work – or at play.
It's important to note that I read a lot of blogs and I also write and lead a couple of blogs so I base my comments on a lot of experience.
Another finding:
"Count all business blog traffic, half of tech and media blogs and
one-fourth of political/news blogs as directly related to work."
Haha – an incredible leap of faith! Even if it was true how does anyone know which
half of tech blogs people are actually visiting during the work day? What if
it is the half that is work related? Who decides which tech blogs are
work-related or not? What is a work day?
My work day typically begins at 7am and ends at about 11pm with blocks of time dedicated to family, meals, etc. in between. In fact, I began working at 4am this morning, but that’s not typical. My point: there is no typical workday and we don't fully understand with any certainty at all what people are reading during what should be productive work time, and we're only guessing at what blogs are considered work and not work.
I was just researching digital video cameras online. On the surface that could easily be assumed as "non-work". However, I'm looking to buy a new video camera to record our usability tests with client users. That most certainly is work that could easily be assumed as play.
Finally, the Advertising Age survey – like many other surveys conducted by magazines today has a questionable sample size and methodology. I’ve not gotten a firm answer on this, but I believe it was an online survey of subscribers – a self-select survey and only a sample of niche readers, mostly tech heads, not a sample of the total working population of the United States. They invited 5,000 readers to complete the survey. Typical response rates to these invitations average between 1% and 2% -- making the likely response rate to this survey likely in the neighborhood of 50 to 100 respondents (a paltry unrepresentative sample). Therefore the survey findings are completely invalid and only guesswork that are conveyed as being reality.
I asked the writer, Bradley Johnson, Editor-At-Large for Ad Age, about the study and challenged him on the validity. Johnson says “that Advertising Age's analysis, as we noted in the story, is a "best-guess extrapolation done by reviewing blog-related surveys and data. This was not based on an Ad Age survey; it is a best-guess review.”
Of course, that the ‘study’ is not in-fact a study at all but a best-guess is completely glossed-over and hidden in the story.
Don’t believe the hype. Be careful of what you read and don’t feel guilty about reading worthwhile blogs that build your knowledge and intelligence for your job. Use a grain of salt with every blog – including this one (www.IntranetBlog.com) – and always dig deeper to understand the methodology of any study that makes outlandish claims that seem excessive or too good to be true.
RELATED FEATURES:
McDonald’s beefs-up intranet blogs
Blogging The Intranet
Sunday, October 23
Study: Intranet blogging on the rise
by
Toby Ward
on Sun 23 Oct 2005 10:53 PM PDT
A new study reveals that blogging on the corporate intranet may be rising dramatically. A Guidewire Group Market Cycle Survey, “Blogging in the Enterprise” (thanks to Shel Holtz for drawing attention to this) finds that 53% of respondent companies are already blogging and an additional 35% of respondents plan to begin corporate blogs within the next year.
While the survey is not a scientifically significant sample and should be taken with a great grain of salt (a very small sample of 140 respondents and the survey was self-select (voluntary) of tech magazine readers), the Guidewire study does provide some excellent insight into corporate blogging.
Key benefits cited by the Guidewire survey:
- Improved internal communications (77%)
- Replacement of other exiting work processes (41%)
- Replacement of email (39%)
An interesting note for the intranet watchers: of those companies that do use blogs, 91.4% have internal (intranet) communications blogs compared to 96.6% have external communications blogs. My, the gap is narrowing.
The big guys upstairs continue to be big users of the intranet blog. More than 40%
reported they have a CEO blog.
Here’s just some of the companies that I’ve wrote about as having intranet blogs:
- Disney
- Microsoft
- IBM
- Ziff Davis
- McDonald’s
- Siemens
- Intel
- Infoworld
- Oracle
- Many, many more
IBM alone has more than 4,500 registered blogs and is suspected of having more than 10,000 on the corporate intranet. IBM used a wiki to establish formal internal blogging policies using the employee populace to create and refine the policies on the wiki (the IBM intranet also features several hundred wikis).
RELATED ARTICLES:
McDonald’s beefs-up intranet blogs
Blogging The Intranet
IT’s top priority? Improve the intranet
by
Toby Ward
on Sun 23 Oct 2005 10:45 PM PDT
I’ve known a few battles between IT and Corporate Communications during my time as an intranet consultant. Both like to control, but both have different priorities and different views of the world.
However, IT and Communications must work together if you’re to have a successful intranet.
Here’s an interesting stat from a Forrester survey of 2,000 IT managers: 61% of surveyed managers feel the search engine is the area requiring the most improvement on the intranet.
In terms of dissatisfaction, only the IT Help Desk ranked lower than the intranet. Only 44% of managers say that it is easy to find information on the intranet.
I’ll bet a shiny quarter that this is one area that both communications and IT can agree: the intranet needs to be better.
There you go. All you need is a process which should begin with....
1) Documenting the priorities and feedback of every intranet stakeholder (owner, contributor)
2) Documenting the needs and preferences of employees
3) Understanding and documenting intranet best practices
Once you’ve done the above, you can put together the plan that makes it happen... Check out The Nexus of Intranet Success for an overview on this process.
RELATED FEATURES:
Nexus of Intranet Success
Thursday, October 20
McDonald’s beefs-up intranet blogs
by
Toby Ward
on Thu 20 Oct 2005 05:33 PM EDT
While booming on the Internet, blogging on the corporate intranet is only in its infancy. But corporations are taking note.
Companies like InfoWorld and Disney are doing it and there are software companies that are selling blogging software specifically for the intranet including Technorati and Six Apart. IBM now has more than 10,000 blogs on their intranet.
Kevin Newcomb has written an interesting piece on ClickZ on the use of blogs by McDonald’s employees:
“Last week, the company began an internal program that introduced corporate blogs, available only on the corporate intranet, behind the firewall. While this is seen as a small first step, it's an important one in a company the size of McDonald's, said Steve Wilson, senior director of global Web communications for McDonalds. Wilson spoke to a crowd of bloggers and curious marketing folk at Monday's BlogOn social media summit in New York.”
Read McDonald's Dips Toe In Blogging Waters
Tuesday, October 18
Intranet ROI
by
Toby Ward
on Tue 18 Oct 2005 11:43 PM EDT
Everyone talks about ROI. Almost all companies want and demand ROI, but when it comes down to measurement, most roll over. Talk is cheap, intranets are not.
A 2003 study of 240 intranet managers and consultants undertaken by Prescient Digital Media revealed that only 6% of organizations undertake ongoing, specific measurement of the ROI of their intranet. Occasional measurement is undertaken by only 26% of organizations and 51% either do no measurement, don’t know if they do, or only guess at the ROI. 18% are considering ROI measurements.
While few organizations are spending significant time accurately measuring ROI, it is important to 76% of the respondent companies.
One survey respondent summed up the average management attitude with respect to ROI of the intranet:
“Although ROI has not been established in our current intranet we do see the potential and the need to create a more efficient intranet to be able to reduce costs and engage employees in a more direct method,” said one ROI survey respondent.
I guarantee you nothing has changed since I undertook that study. However, where there’s a will, there’s a way.
Those that have measured ROI are finding significant value. Of those that measure or offer ‘rough estimates’ of their organization’s intranet, answers varied from $0 to $20M. The average annual ROI of respondent intranets fell just shy of $1 million ($979,775.58). The average company size had between 4,000 to 5,000 employee users. However, 40% of respondents had less than 1000 employees while 20% had more than 10,000 employees. So, despite the male ego’s predilection to the contrary, size doesn’t matter – and size doesn’t necessarily equal value.
But really *who cares*? Show me the money. If I read one more damn column by some so-called IT guru, pundit or columnist who talks about the importance of ROI and yet never offers any numbers then I’ll show you a pretender who likely has never measured ROI before.
I’ve identified more than 130 line item benefits that can be measured for dollar value ROI (see my white paper Finding ROI) so there really is no excuse – there’s plenty to be measured.
Measurable ROI from hard benefits including cost savings from:
· less paper
· less hardware
· fewer headcount
· increased sales
Soft benefits include:
· increased employee productivity
· better customer satisfaction
· faster time to market
· improved employee retention
IBM, Oracle and Cisco all measure the impact and benefits of their intranet. And all of them have measured the value to be greater than US$1 billion. In fact, IBM has realized benefits from e-learning via the intranet to alone be more than US$284 million.
(Figures compliments of Liam Cleaver, IBM,
“From Intranet to the On Demand Workplace”)
As impressive as those numbers are you don’t have to be a large technology company to realize measured ROI benefits. One client of mine, a small investment firm of several hundred employees was able to identify numerous areas for cost savings/cost avoidance including:
- Software Distribution – software program downloads via intranet instead of relying on an IT professional to personally and individually install the software on – saving time and money.
- Newsletter – news and announcements disseminated online via the intranet home page rather than having to use printed materials – saving printing materials, distribution costs, and production time.
- Phone Directories – phone directory queries conducted online via the intranet home page rather than relying on printed phone directories – saving printing materials, distribution costs, and production time.
- HR Forms – all human resource related forms downloaded via the intranet – saving printing materials, distribution costs, and production time.
- HR Benefits Materials and Enrollment – benefits materials examined and online enrollment via intranet – saving printing materials, distribution costs, and production time.
- Expense Reporting – expense forms found, downloaded and submitted via intranet rather than traditional manual method – saving printing materials, distribution costs, and production time.
- Time Tracking – Rather than traditionally finding and manually completing time tracking forms, complete forms online via the intranet – saving printing materials, distribution costs, and production time.
- E-mail Usage – enforcing e-mail etiquette policies and in-turn eliminating the costly dissemination of unnecessary e-mail and attachments saving significant server space and costs.
- Content Management – savings derived from using CMS to publish versus the older, traditional means of hard-coding pages – saving production and technology time.
- Information Retrieval – using intranet as an information repository and retrieval system reducing the time otherwise expended by employees searching and retrieving business-critical information and data by more traditional means – saving employee time and improving employee productivity.
- IT Help Desk – savings derived from fewer calls to the Help Desk and more self-service help directly from intranet
All total this client measured savings from only 12 measurable benefits at a 2-year value of more than $1.5 million. Their investment in the intranet was less than $200,000. Therefore the 2-year ROI was more than 700%.
Many organizations will continue to show interest in ROI; most however won’t demand it. Just because it’s not demanded though doesn’t mean you shouldn’t find it. If you don’t find it, you’re not proving the value of the intranet or portal. If you’re not proving the value, you’re limiting its value and potential because you will fail to garner the necessary resources to build and increase its value.
Hey, if you can make the business case to build-up the intranet and portal then I guarantee it will do wonders for your career. Demand ROI. Demand it from staff and your consultants.
To measure and increase the value of your intranet, please dowload the free white paper, Finding ROI.
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RELATED ITEMS:
Finding ROI
ROI Remains Guesswork At Most Companies
Sunday, October 16
Intranet kingdom remains an unknown quantity
by
Toby Ward
on Mon 17 Oct 2005 12:07 AM EDT
The corporate intranet or portal has always played the poor cousin to the customer-facing Website. Most executives have traditionally viewed, and sadly continue to view, the corporate intranet as a cost-center with little perceived and almost no measured value.
In fact, some executives I’ve interviewed have proven to be down right daft (see Stupid begets stupid). A CEO of a major financial services company with a horribly pathetic intranet that barely earns the title ‘intranet’ was famous for saying: “I think we’ve invested too much in technology already.” This company makes money hand over fist.
Another, a Director of Human Resources, once told me during a business requirements analysis for crafting a new intranet plan, “I don’t understand why we need an intranet... I mean we have a pretty good phone system that cost us a lot!”
However, you’ll have to forgive some of these folks as god bless them they just don’t know better given their unshakable faith in the fax machine, telex, and their respective assistants who can type their handwritten emails.
While intranets while likely always play second fiddle to the Internet sites with the larger budget and customer focus, they are catching up. A centralized intranet or portal home page was still largely a rare commodity in the mid-90s. Today, almost all large size organizations have them – in the form of an off-the-shelf portal product or something custom-built and pieced together by the internal IT team (though usually lacking the level of customization or personalization options that characterize many of the portal products offered by leaders such as Plumtree, Oracle, |
