Any of you fellow parents out there know that the wish list letter to Santa is a big deal. My daughter Rachel had her letter in the mail on December 1. Anything Barbie or Bratz is an instant winner. Frankly, I think they all look like cheap harlots.

Anyhow, I am not as well organized as my daughter so I figured I’d skip the letter writing paper and hit the blog with my intranet wish list for Santa. Gone are the dreams of the ol’ G.I. Joe, or the subsequent Star Wars action figures (though that Jar Jar Binks action figure is an instant collectible!). I’ve even given up on the Porsche and hockey season tickets. Instead, I’ve prepared a most reasonable wish list – all in the name of clients.

Dear Santa, having been a good boy (mostly) this year, I would like to request the following for the intranets of my clients (past, present and future):

1-     Senior management support – as you know all to well, as the CEO of a flourishing elven manufacturing conglomerate, the success of the intranet is largely dependent on the level of support afforded by the executive suite. As your case study reveals, the success of Santa’s intranet largely flows from the big guy in the big red suit. Please impress upon the elves and in turn all of their customers and clients that their respective intranets deserve more support (and funding) from the other big fat executives.

2-     Measured value – successful intranets deliver a ton of value – almost as much value as toys in your sleigh. From cost savings to increased sales and employee productivity, the intranet is a virtual Christmas stocking chalked full of goodies. Please convince more companies to measure the value of their intranets – particularly ROI and employee productivity. If they refuse, a lump of coal should suffice.

3-     A decent RFP – Santa, please send a fleet of your elves out into the market to teach purchasing, IT and communications managers how to write an RFP. With the North Pole’s purchasing power and financial genius surely you can impart upon these souls that a successful RFP is more than one or two paragraphs of requirements and 15 pages of legal mulch and schedules. As Donder and Blitzen have oft said, a thorough RFP to reconstruct an intranet has some at least a dozen (if not two dozen) pages of requirements and should include information architectures, site metrics (including number of pages requiring migration), required functionality and integration, etc. If teaching fails, then send that new reindeer Knuckles.

4-    Loose the design – Please ignore any letters that ask for an intranet redesign. Even the half-wit reindeers Prancer and Vixen know full well that the success of an intranet has nothing to do with design. In fact, design doesn’t even make it into the top 20 most important aspects of an intranet. Please deliver each manager seeking to reconstruct their intranet a copy of Transforming your intranet so that they may shake this deadly design virus. Or heck, give them an RSS feed of IntranetBlog.com. It’s particularly good reading when washed down with some shortbread and egg nog (the real stuff, not that sickly drool called egg nog lite. Be afraid of any food that spells ‘light’ as ‘lite’… be very afraid.)

5-     A gun – Actually, all I want for Christmas is a Red Ryder carbon-action, 200-shot range model air rifle with a special sight, a compass in the stock and a sun dial. I promise not to shoot my eye out. But I’d settle for world peace – and tall glass of real egg nog.J

ON A PERSONAL NOTE: We’ve crawled from under all of the freakish storms that have pounded the Pacific West Coast in the past few weeks. We survived, but unfortunately, the equivalent of many forests were wiped out (see some of the windstorm damage to the world famous Stanley Park where thousands of trees were toppled).

I won’t be working much over the holiday except for the odd sign-in and missive on IntranetBlog.com so please, no e-mail! I’ll be too busy having fun with family, playing hockey, skiing a lot, catching up on my reading and mostly sleeping (if the baby lets me).

Happy holidays, Merry Christmas, Happy Channukah, Merry Kwanzaa and Happy (insert religious festival here)!! Special kudos to the Iraq Study Group, Steve Nash and the Phoenix Suns for winning 15 games straight, Stephen Harper for calling Hamas for what they are, Sidney Crosby for taking over the NHL, and to everyone and anyone who gives generously to the less fortunate this year (my cause continues to be Unicef – click to donate).

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

An intranet is about 20% technology, 80% people and process. To change or redesign the intranet has in fact little to do with design, and everything to do with change management.

“Chances are that you sold the new intranet or new “innovation” to your team based upon a rosy picture of all the benefits it would yield, increased efficiencies and the best case scenario of how the solution would work,” writes Prescient Digital Media senior consultant Bianca Wong in Managing positive intranet change: Watch out for the J Curve .

“It’s called hype – and don’t feel guilty – everyone does it. After all, change is difficult, and without some hype, nothing would ever change.”

Bianca likens the gap between high user or management expectations and what is actually experienced in the short term as a common obstacle that can be best illustrated by the “J Curve” – where things get “worse before the get better.”

How do you manage high expectations and the J Curve gap? Read Managing positive intranet change: Watch out for the J Curve .

Some solid advice and lessons for IT, from eWeek (The Best IT Advice I Ever Got by Deb Donston):

1-     Don't prematurely optimize. Prove something works first and then optimize, because you'll never guess where the true issues lie and will waste a lot of time in the process

2-     Don't irritate the CFO. (Or, don't irritate the one with the money.)

3-     Multiply the estimated time by 3.5.

4-     Take calculated risks, or you'll be obsolete.

5-     Listen to your customers. They often are not involved soon enough in new initiatives.

6-     Managing IT = 80% people, 20% technology.

7-     The best leaders start with “How can I help?” and not “Follow me."

8-     Keep it as simple and as consistent as possible. Fiber-optic cable and wave-division multiplexing have terrific economics.

9-     Always check the punched cards.

I can’t speak much to punch cards and wave division multiplexing doesn’t resonate with me but I can sure speak well to the remaining points. Particularly 80% people, 20% technology (this is particularly true of intranets) and underestimating project time.

For example, the average intranet redesign time is about 9 – 18 months. There’s just too much to do and account for – it’s complex, really complex. And when a project is 80% people and you’re managing a political football like the intranet, then you better believe it will always take longer to fix than you can imagine (though not always 3.5 times longer than the initial estimate).

Most clients balk or try to bargain when we (Prescient) state that a proper intranet assessment and plan takes 3-4 months. They try and negotiate less time and that’s fine – the client has pressing priorities that we strive to make. But it is almost always the client that can’t move any faster than that – particularly when it comes to scheduling meetings of the project team and stakeholders. It often takes 3-4 weeks just to find a meeting where everyone can get around a table at one time. The other big time waster is approvals – getting internal approvals and team consensus always take 3.5 times longer than you think!

The following is the magic quadrant that I developed for portal solutions (re-posted because of a broken image in the original The big deal about portals).

Undertaking a magic quadrant is in fact a dangerous proposition given the:

• immaturity of the market
• huge number of variables from one product to another; and
• imperfect and imprecise nature of a magic quadrant.

So, this analysis is limited purely to corporate strength (financial viability – Y axis) and technical robustness (complexity – X axis). It does not necessarily take into account the particular strengths and weaknesses of each solution versus another.

This analysis graph does not constitute a full or deep analysis. It is a snapshot in time based on product reputation, review and corporate strength (financial viability) and it only considers a small percentage of the vendors. Nor does it represent an exhaustive analysis of any of the products. By no means should this represent a recommendation or caution for any product or vendor. The magic quadrant is purely a representation of only the author’s cursory, surface examination of some of the vendors.

Of course, like any magic quadrant, this diagram is imperfect. It is impossible to completely slot one vendor into one neat little box. Inevitably, each vendor has qualities that could appear in three or four of the quadrants. Hence the cautionary disclaimer language.

Read the full article The big deal about portals.

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For more intranet news visit www.IntranetReport.com

© 2006 Toby Ward - Prescient Digital Media

The $10 billion Navy-Marine Corps. (NMCI) intranet is not meeting its goals. The 10-year project steered by EDS has not met most of its key objectives.

Worse yet, 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 – subsequently valued at $12 billion – has met a paltry three of 20 performance targets set for the intranet.

Yet again there’s proof positive that without a plan, most intranets fail and die. Many die a slow death, but they all die without a proper – and implemented – plan.

"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.

The consolidated voice, video and data network links hundreds of thousands of military and at its peak will connect more than 500,000 sailors and Marines at about 1,000 locations across the planet.

NMCI intranet facts from EDS:

• More than 500,000 users are on board NMCI. Only the Internet is larger.
• More than 305,000 seats are under EDS management – a single seat, such as a workstation or laptop, can support more than one user.
• More than 260,000 seats have been transitioned to the end-state NMCI environment.
• More than 346,000 seats are on order.
• NMCI and EDS operate:
• Four network operations centers
• Three enterprise help desks
• Sixteen (of 19 planned) classified server farms
• Thirty-one (of 31 planned) unclassified servers farms
• More than 350 sailors have attained IT-related certifications at no cost to the government, including the Department of the Navy’s first three Microsoft-certified systems engineers.
• Improved security is unquestionably NMCI’s greatest value:
• In 2005, NMCI's security stopped more than 20 million attacks on the network.
• Each month, NMCI traps, quarantines and disinfects approximately 70,000 viruses.

Read GAO’s entire evaluation report.

RELATED READING:

$9 Billion Bugs for U.S. Navy-Marine Corps Intranet (back issue)

World’s largest intranet now valued at US$12 billion

Good news and good news for world’s largest and most troubled intranet

The General Motors intranet portal is a case study in creating a single, unified portal access in a sprawling enterprise of decentralized business units, far flug geographic locations and many different work cultures. It takes a massive effort to create a single portal environment in an organization of more than 300,000 in 33 different countries.

 Read the entire case study Intranet case study: GM’s mySocrates.

(Chicago, IL) There are good portals. I'll admit it. Most of those good portals admittedly are the portals created by the vendors that made the software. IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft come to mind.

The problem is that most of the out-of-the-box portal solutions that I’ve seen implemented are very… well, they’re poor. I’m trying to be kind, but I’ve seen too many dismal representations.

Below are four portals, from four different organizations. I won’t identify the organizations by name because I don’t want to embarrass anyone. But they’re all the same… more or less. The same box-like pages with remarkably similar information architectures, colors and links. I mean these portals have the same section names like My Pages, Communities, Collaboration, etc.

And yet these are remarkably different companies, remarkably different industries, and remarkably different employee bases. So why should they have portals that are facsimilies of each other?

Portals can deliver a lot of benefits. The promises are huge, and some of the successes have been impressive. But portal solutions also represent a lot of pitfalls.

Read the full article The big deal about portals.

Most intranets have humble beginnings that grow and grow and then, like a weed, grow out of control. Fidelity’s intranet began at the grass-roots level in the mid-1990s, and since then has undergone three formal design iterations – with many smaller enhancements along the way. 

In 1997, the first official corporate intranet introduced content integrity standards, a cohesive information architecture, and a standard look and feel.  In 2002, the introduction of portal technology allowed content to be targeted to employees based on criteria such as business unit, region or role, and enabled each employee to customize the homepage to best meet their needs. The portal’s user interface got an extreme makeover in 2006, with a streamlined appearance, added functionality, and improved performance.