The Standard Group (Nairobi, Kenya) has published an interesting read, Propoganda and rumors at work:

“Many managers share the same fears. However, most don’t worry too much about how little control they have over the flow of information within the organisation a significant factor in shaping morale. Should they be more paranoid about the nuggets being shared at the water-cooler or over the company intranet? Are they spending too much time guarding against external attacks to the company’s reputation or the reputation of its products, and too little guarding against more mortal internal blows.”

If done properly there’s a good case for extending discussion boards, wikis and blog tools to employees – perfect tools to open a centralized dialogue of many people.

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.

Recommendations:

Does Your Intranet Measure-Up?

Intranet ROI

Marketing the intranet

#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.”

Recommendations:

Getting To Yes - Tips for winning funding for projects

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.

Recommendations:

Nexus of Intranet Success

Is Your Intranet Headed for Extinction - Part II: Planning for Success

#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:

Ruling by committee (with IBM case study)

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

OTHER RELATED READING:

Cadillac vs. Hyundai CMSs

Pssst, wanna buy a CMS?

Content Management Proves Costly Without Planning

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).

Viruses are a threat. Denial of service attacks are scary. Your employees, however, are your biggest threat.

While 98% of Canadian business leaders and decision makers believe it is important for a company to secure sensitive data.

A recent Fusepoint/Sun Microsystems/Leger Marketing survey reveals that business leaders believe the greatest threat is not from a malicious external attack, but rather from the hands of an uninformed employee. The research showed that 46% percent of respondents said that employees who accidentally download security-compromising viruses, spyware or adware pose a greater data security risk to a company than external agents like hackers, cited next at 40%.

Of the 556 executive interviewed for the survey, 55% say that their confidential and private data is at risk of an attack, despite the fact that most consumers (58%) would immediately terminate their relationship with a company that compromised their personal information.

Poll results also showed that more than one in 10 Canadian consumers (14%) believe they have already been a victim of identity theft with 38% of respondents saying they know someone who has been a victim of identity theft. In addition, 74% of consumers believe that everybody – including those possessing advanced technological know-how – is at equal risk of identity theft.

“With the exponential growth in the volume and sophistication of online threats, executives must heed their customers’ calls to take the necessary steps to protect their data and infrastructure from being compromised,” said George Kerns, President and CEO, Fusepoint Managed Services. “This is not a simple business issue. It’s a fundamental matter of trust.”

“Smart enterprises know security and privacy are good for business, and yet many companies in Canada and around the world don’t take this message to heart,” said Andy Canham, president of Sun Microsystems of Canada Inc. “Any business that values their customer base will invest in systemic security practices that ensure they manage security risks, and meet compliance regulations, as well as achieve business growth goals.”

Another 14% believed the greatest threat would come from disgruntled employees who gain unauthorized access to information.

“The reality is that many businesses are operating under a false sense of security, as all too often we see corporate networks become compromised by an ‘igloo effect’ of sorts,” said Dr. Clemens Martin, University of Ontario Institute of Technology. “All it takes is one ill-advised employee to unknowingly compromise a network’s hard outer shell, and all other security measures in place could simply melt away.”

RELATED FEATURES:

Protecting your goods

Securing your intranet from the inside

Intranet sprawl and renegade development (back issue)

Email and intranet are biggest wireless threats

Australian telecom giant Telstra recently announced they were eliminating 12,000 jobs. Unfortunately for the so-called modern communications company, their own internal communications appears to suck dingo. While Telstra has announced the layoffs (no doubt the announcement is intended to impress the stock market watchers) it has communicated very little with employees.

In fact, to quell panicky employees fearful for their job, Telstra internal communications circulated an e-mail with a few Q&As (An e-mail; how progressive! My god, what thinking! What planning! What communications!). Unfortunately for all involved, the e-mail was horrendously written, contained grammatical errors, was limited to the worst cliché stock answers ever written, provided virtually no information, and in sum was so horrendous that it ended up in Australian newspapers that added their own brutal commentary and opinions of Telstra’s communications.

This from The Daily Telegraph via a reprint in The Advertiser (Emails tells little of sackings):

“THE questions make perfect sense. Pity about the answers.

Telstra has found an impressive array of ways to say almost nothing in a Q&A to help staff understand looming job cuts.

An internal e-mail containing the Q&A sent to worried employees yesterday begins by posing this question: "How will these changes affect my job?"

The answer was anything but illuminating - it wasn't even in proper English.

"You will continue doing what you are doing and continue to report to their [sic] current on-up [sic] manager, unless advised otherwise," it said.

The answer to the second question - "Will there be any redundancies?" - was less helpful and arguably misleading: "No jobs are redundant and no employees will be retrenched at this time. There will be some redundancies in the future. However, we are working through the details of the new organisation."

This advice was provided despite a Telstra spokesman confirming that hundreds of jobs would be cut (this after an announcement of more than 10,000 job cuts).

Staff hoping for advance warnings about redundancies would have been disappointed. The e-mail said: "You will be told about any specific changes in your work area as they arise. You should direct specific questions to your line managers and you should keep monitoring the Telstra Services intranet site for further updates."

As for what to tell customers, the answer was straightforward - nothing. Question 15: "Do customers need to be notified of this change?"

And the answer: "It is important that this transition activity appears seamless to our customers. We do not believe that customers need to be notified at this time."

The only employee who should be immediately sacked is the communications genius behind that communications plan (and writing). Mind you, how progressive of Telstra to encourage employees to keep monitoring the intranet for more information.

In the words of Ewan McGregor (Trainspotting), “What a bunch of wankers.”