One of the keys to success for retailers such as Dell and Wal-Mart is inventory control. Knowing what inventory or products they have, how much of it, and how it relates to customer demand (e.g. what are they buys, when will it run out, how much do we need to order).

Your intranet or website offers a product: content (either static, dynamic or in the form of a tool or application). And content remains king. It is the most valuable thing you offer your employees or readers. But do you know the state of your content? Is it up to date? Who owns it? How much do you have?

Dell and Wal-Mart offer a practical lesson for the world of intranet: success is partly predicated on knowing what you have.

The challenge is volume. If your intranet is like most, then your intranet portal and/or sites have a lot of content. It’s rare that I work with a client intranet that has less than 100 – 500 pages of intranet content per employee. IBM has more than 10 million known pages (more than 300 pages per employee).

While knowing what you have is important it can be time consuming but highly worthwhile for a number of reasons:

• business continuity – ensuring employees have the right information to do their job
• cost efficiency – stale or wrong information or data can be eliminated
• employee productivity – maintaining and prioritizing information so that the most valued and used information is easily retrieved
• business priorities – determine what content and information is needed to drive an effective business

“Intranets grow and become more content heavy, ownership moves from one department to another, and business processes as well as their user base will change throughout content's lifecycle,” writes Paul Chin, an intranet consultant and writer, in Taking Stock: Intranet Content Audits. “Over time, content that goes unchecked can be lost, forgotten, or even become a burden on the system. It can be relegated to the darkest recesses of the system never to be seen again.”

Undertaking the audit is the most time-consuming task. We often recommend that a client use a web analytics tool such as WebTrends to identify all the pages and content on the various intranet servers and then visit each one-by-one to identify:

• content type
• content relevancy
• date of publish
• owner/author
• status: save it, update it, or delete it 

One client of ours at a 750 person company used two summer students armed with a browser and an MS-Excel spreadsheet to track and document all 10,000 pages on their intranet. It took them one month and a half to document all 10,000 pages (about 3,000 pages per auditer per month). The good news was they identified all the content and found that only 4,000 of the 10,000 pages were of any value. In one full swoop they wiped out 6,000 pages which saved them a lot of server space and maintenance costs not to mention helped preserve business continuity and accuracy of information.

Content is king therefore it needs care and pampering.

A web user or reader has one overarching priority: speed. Speed may kill on the streets but on the web “the faster the better.”

The challenge with giving your user quick unfettered access to the information they desire is striking a balance between the need for speed and an overly cluttered home page. If you provide lots of content, buttons and links on the home page then you may provide your users with faster access to content with less clicks. The risk of course is too much home page information that is overwhelming to the user. The tradeoff is clicks for speed.

Some websites like Amazon.com have had enormous success despite a busy home page. There is no denying Jeff Bezo’s success: Amazon.com is the most successful e-commerce site on the Internet. Period. But Amazon’s home page is scary and completely overwhelming. Amazon.com is not a model for site design, layout and usability. In these areas, it fails many tests.

When I told this to the audience of some 300 at last month’s IABC International Conference in Washington, D.C., (see The Site Is Right 2005) I was not surprised when I was challenged.

“How can you say that?” exclaimed one woman. “You can’t argue with Amazon’s success!”

Amazon.com’s success is largely due to its first mover status, unparalleled selection, innovative technology and entrepreneurial approach (strategy), and last but not least, it’s brand.

The Amazon home page contains about four screens of extremely busy and crowded content.

Amazon.com’s outrageously busy and crowded home page.

Perhaps Amazon will learn the lesson that Yahoo! now knows: there is a fine line between too busy and not enough speed. Traditionally Yahoo! has suffered from the same problem as Amazon: an overwhelmingly cluttered home page (mind you they have improved in recent years).

The Yahoo! home page

The Yahoo! home page has been reduced to only two screens versus the four of Amazon – but it’s still a massive amount of content and links (more than 150 in all). However Yahoo! has learned a lesson or two and is listening to their users. It recently hired a usability whiz and is currently in the process of redesigning the home page with a less cluttered look and layout.

Yahoo! hired Larry Tessler, a 60-year-old technology veteran and a former Xerox Parc innovator who invented ‘cutting and pasting’ to spearhead the redesign process. It’s huge job for the world’s most visited website that garners 15 million visits per day.

Tessler and team have been quiet about the process so far but has provided some hints in an article Carefully Clearing Yahoo's Clutter in Business Week. “One thing I've been pushing hard since I got here is that using Yahoo! should be a delightful experience," Tessler told Business Week.

Business Week also took an educated stab at estimating some of Yahoo!’s design tactics: “Expect him (Tessler) to take advantage of more advanced Web browsers, and he may reduce clutter by "hiding" material so users can opt to see more news, for instance, by rolling their mice over a topic. That would be a big improvement (sic). But he has a long way to go before Yahoo is a delight.”

MSN knows this lesson too. It recently redesigned its home page and eliminated 25% of the links that were on the previous version. The same lesson should also be learned and applied to your corporate intranet.

As I’ve written before, one of the great rewards of being a traveling intranet consultant is the opportunity to learn from many organizations, clients and colleagues about their intranet success and failures.

I’ve had the privilege to come to know and learn why Xerox continues to be an intellectual leader which is well exemplified by their intranet portal, WebBoard.

WebBoard is actually a series of internal websites but they are held accountable to defined governance, style and standards. The governance model is what I consider text-book ideal for most organizations (though what is good for one is not necessarily good for another). The intranet is owned by corporate communications but ultimately governed by a small senior executive team. Policy includes effective use and intranet development – with guidelines on content, technology, etc.

This policy and the accompanying standards create a unified, seamless user experience that is a hallmark of most successful intranets.

“It brings people to one seamless experience from an intranet perspective for broader employee access to tools and information,” says Karen Allen, Manager of Employee Communications and the Xerox WebBoard. “There’s a sense that it is familiar, you’re not jumping to different sites or experiences – we’re trying to create a simple, seamless experience so users know what to expect.”

The home page features true portal functionality including individual personalization and role-based customization (e.g. human resources professional, marketing communications, internal information, technology support, etc.). Customization options include stock market ticker, news sources (still working on external news feeds), organization news, weather, and formatting options.

All 58,100 Xerox employees have intranet access and the site enjoys 3-4 million page views per month – roughly two page views per employee per day. Not bad at all. That’s an engaged user population.

I believe however the key to Xerox’s intranet success has been their strategy. They developed a plan with defined objectives and goals and they engaged and involved both employees and senior executives in developing their strategy.

How secure is your intranet? The IT department has likely has gone to great lengths to protect financial and customer systems and databases but have they applied the same rigor to the intranet or portal?

Intranets and portals have grown exponentially since becoming mainstream in the early 1990s. Some are millions of pages large. However, the intranet has typically taken a backseat as the poor cousin to customer websites.

“Although media and management attention is focused on protecting external-facing sites from security threats, identity theft and other online vulnerabilities, intranets should not be overlooked,” writes Peter McKay, CEO of Watchfire in a recent Federal Times article When securing information, don’t overlook intranet. These sites can easily be compromised, and government IT executives are now realizing the need to expand security and privacy practices to agency intranets.”

If you’re a communicator, HR or marketing person responsible for the intranet then you need to ask the right questions of your IT department. First and foremost is understanding what you have, what is available to a wider audience, and what is specifically being done to secure it.

“Only by understanding the intranet environment — the domains, websites, directories, content, servers, technologies in use, and the policies and standards in place — can agencies ensure that they have adequate control of this information and its delivery,” says McKay. “The first step is to conduct an agency wide (assessment) to evaluate the size and complexity of the intranet. By conducting a thorough assessment agencies can effectively evaluate risks. Managers can then make informed decisions about risk mitigation as well as server and application consolidation.”

Things to look for:

·         Identify systems and servers not up to date or otherwise not conforming to IT standards

·         Orphaned content and rogue intranet sites and servers

·         Applications that work or communicate outside the firewall

McKay recommends several key steps to “effectively manage the compliance risks and costs of managing agency intranets:

• Conduct an inventory of internal Web properties to better understand the Web environment. Knowing how many sites and servers you have, the technologies in use, and the technology policies and standards your agency employs will create a more secure and productive intranet environment.

• Scan your intranet with an automated solution to identify vulnerable areas, including forms that may be inconsistent with internal privacy policies or may lead to information leaks.

• Understand what employee and citizen information is being collected and published on the Internet and intranet. The intranet is used to publish sensitive information, including human resources forms and employee health care information. Full knowledge of all online data-collection methods is critical to effectively managing Web privacy.

• Understand exactly who has access to this sensitive information. Proper technology and security controls will allow employees to see only the information required to do their jobs. Often, contractors are granted access without careful consideration for all the information they may have access to.

• Consider applicable security, privacy and accessibility legislation such as the 2002 Federal Information Security Management Act, the 2002 E-Government Act and the 1998 Rehabilitation Act amendments.

 Did you know that IBM had about 10,000 intranet sites and it has taken years to reduce this to about 6,000 intranet sites?

“Slow and steady wins the race.”  There are dozens of fables about how the underdog or the “little guy” came out ahead in the long run, and these lessons can give you food for thought when approaching your intranet launch and how your organization achieves success afterwards.

It’s not the best idea to break into a sprint as soon as the starting gun goes off.  Providing your departments with access to a robust content management system and some web space without first implementing a site governance model can be akin to handing gunpowder to a baby.  Unfortunately, this is what many organizations do when releasing an intranet, to “just get it out there”.  A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and before you know it--boom!--you have unmanageable site sprawl.

And you don’t have to be a company the size of IBM to have intranet sprawl. It’s not uncommon for most medium size companies to have hundreds of intranets (I’ve seen ratios of 1 intranet site per 10 employees). Just imagine the wasted money and resources by not pooling those costs together....

Often the most successful intranets start off in a very humble way (especially in smaller organizations), with not much more content than employee classifieds or the company phone list or even a cafeteria lunch menu.

Some organizations grow their intranets organically, with a department or an employee quietly taking charge, perhaps as a pet project, occasionally enhancing it with features that specific departments ask for.  The intranet can sit collecting cobwebs for months before more staff become aware of its presence and usefulness.  Managers begin to ask for more and more additions, until suddenly the site captures the interest and imagination of employees, and the intranet becomes well liked and indispensable. 

These “organic” sites may not be pretty to look at, but tend to iteratively improve over time.  It’s the distribution of easy-wins and low-hanging fruits that allow an intranet to gain “traction” and acceptance and drive more employees to the site.  Growth comes slowly over a long period of time, but the site becomes indispensable in the process.

Planning out your site deployment, placing some structure around how it’s managed, launching tools and content that will engage staff and listening to feedback, will make it the “go to” site when they start their work day. 

And in the end a little preparation, practice, and thought is going to allow you to gain the traction your site needs to make it to the finish line.

A clever and obviously well funded high school in Price Hill, Ohio is demonstrating some clever innovation. According to The Price Hill Times (Elder's digital studio allows endless creativity), Elder High School is using a state-of-the-art production studio to produce and stream full news broadcasts including live sporting events via the school intranet:

PRICE HILL - ElderHigh School's new state-of-the-art digital production studio is allowing students to endlessly explore their creative capabilities.

This past summer a room in the SchaeperCenter was transformed into the studio, which doubles as a workspace and classroom complete with the latest digital production computer equipment.

"Our boys' creativity is unbounded," said Jerry Hamburg, Elder's technology director. "Anything they can think of, they can do right here in this studio.”

Students began using laptop computers last year to complete class projects and produce video broadcasts of sporting events and school activities for their Web site, www.elderhs.tv. But the new studio provides them with the resources to take learning to the next level, he said.

The room is stocked with two high definition camcorders, studio-quality lighting, a green screen, news anchor desk, several laptop and desktop computers, scanners and a high-powered computer with the newest digital production software, he said.

"We are the first school in the state to have high definition camcorders, we're exactly on the leading edge," Hamburg said. "We can replicate what any professional studio does.”

Elder students will use the studio when producing video for the Web site and creating broadcasts for the streaming Web cast on the school's Intranet, he said.

Students in the video club will also use the technology to make videos for their peers and community organizations, and students in courses such as history, film study and digital production will use it as an innovative approach to learning, he said.

"One of the great ways to learn is by doing hands-on projects and learning visually," he said.

Last year Elder students worked with the Price Hill Historical Society to make a video about Price Hill history, and this year students will make a documentary featuring the first-hand accounts of World War II from local war veterans.

Students can film a teacher conducting a science experiment, post it on the Intranet site and then other students can view it before class so they know exactly what they have to do, he said.

Hamburg said, "It is unbelievable what we can do here."