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Tuesday, January 31
QAS intranet case study – anatomy of a winner
by
Toby Ward
on Tue 31 Jan 2006 09:10 PM EST
A winning intranet has many successful qualities and features. The QAS intranet is a winner at many levels – rich with tools and demonstrable, measured value.
QAS is a World leader in address management and data accuracy solutions. Based on data secured from national postal authorities and other leading sources, QAS captures, cleans and enhances the integrity of name and address data. QAS has a geographically diverse set of 400 employees with offices around the globe in the U.K. (headquarters), U.S.A., Canada, Singapore, Australia, and across Europe.
A winner of a coveted 2005 Information Management Award for Knowledge Management, the QAS intranet, iQ, has many winning attributes including:
· A well defined plan
· Robust and flexible technology
· Rich applications
· Measured benefits & ROI
Read the complete case study QAS intranet case study – anatomy of a winner
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© 2006 Toby Ward - Prescient Digital Media
Monday, January 30
Intranets that don't reflect company
by
Toby Ward
on Mon 30 Jan 2006 04:18 PM EST
There are however some exceptions. I can think of one very, very large, blue chip organization. It has one of the finest intranets on the planet. However, it has a highly bureaucratic and political climate. I’ve had friends and colleagues work at the company and they only lasted a couple of years or less. Employee satisfaction is about 60%. You would think though, by judging the intranet by itself without the benefit of other outside influences, this company is highly progressive and deeply connected to employees. The reality is that the company does care about employees, culture and employee communications but it is so large that the bureaucracy impedes creativity and management politics dampens enthusiasm. Therefore employee satisfaction lingers at 60%. The intranet may in fact be one of the very best in the world, but employees don’t feel like the company is the best in the world to work for.
On the flip side, another client of mine with an employee population of some 3,000 has fairly high employee satisfaction. The average staff tenure is 21 years. The average employee age is well in to the 40s. The intranet (prior to a redesign) though was quite poor scoring a 4.5 out of 10 according to our advanced rating methodology (been applied to dozens of intranet). A healthy culture persisted despite a terrible intranet. Oddly enough however, there is a customer service corollary. At this company with a healthy culture and poor intranet, customer satisfaction was quite low. In fact, it was low customer satisfaction that got the attention of senior management that led to the complete redesign of the intranet as one of the chief drivers for improving customer satisfaction. Go figure!
Not all companies are created equal; nor are intranets.
RELATED ITEMS:
Intranet as a corporate reflection pool
© 2006 Toby Ward - Prescient Digital Media
Sunday, January 29
Intranet as a corporate reflection pool
by
Toby Ward
on Sun 29 Jan 2006 11:41 PM PST
The structure, function and quality of the intranet is often a reflection of the organization it represents – a reflecting pool of an organization’s culture and dedication to knowledge sharing and employee communications.
Of course, this is not always the case. I’ve seen some great intranets at companies that are not fun to work at (strong execution, poor culture). Alternatively, I’ve seen terrible intranets at good companies (strong culture, poor execution).
In Health Inspectors and Corporate Intranets Jeremiah Owyang writes a good blog about the intranet’s direct reflection of the organization…
“One could learn a lot from looking at an Enterprise Intranet, think about how it is:
- Structured (Silo’d or cohesive departmental sites)
- Information Flows (top-down, bottom-up, sharing or collaboration of information)
- Efficient and effective (web usability, organized information architecture)
- Demonstrates Corporate Unity (cohesive, holistic user experience, and branding)
- Is there Love and care for information (records kept up to date, single set of data which ultimatly translates to how employees deal with customers)
RELATED ITEMS:
Intranet Design Wars
© 2006 Toby Ward - Prescient Digital Media
What Blogs Bring to the Enterprise
by
Toby Ward
on Sun 29 Jan 2006 10:05 AM PST
Short notice but Bill Ives is conducting a workshop on what Blogs Bring to the Enterprise for the SLA at Bain & Co. 131 Dartmouth St. Boston, MA:
It starts at 9 AM with registration and networking. The workshop runs from 9:30 to noon. The combination of accessibility, transparency, and archiving that blogs provide has the potential to greatly enrich business communication. This session summarizes the insights gained from our interviews for Business Blogs: A Practical Guide and other sources. It addresses the use of blogs for enterprise applications such as marketing communication and knowledge management, as well as internal communication, project management, and collaboration. I hope to see your there.
Thursday, January 26
The growing popularity of open source intranets
by
Toby Ward
on Thu 26 Jan 2006 10:07 PM PST
The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) is the latest to announce their decision to build their intranet based on the open source content management platform Zope (see Royal Bank of Scotland opts for open source intranet).
RBS’s decision follows a recent string of announcements from larger organizations who chose Zope or Plone (based on Zope) to power their intranet or content management platform. Other organizations now using Plone include the BrazilianParliament, UNC Healthcare and the government of New Zealand (see www.e.govt.nz and Ministry of Women's Affairs).
Plone is emerging as the real leader in open source web platforms. Plone features enterprise content management with workflow, role-based content, a search engine and even a wiki application. Non-techies can easily use Plone with little training. The system includes templates for news, events, documents, and photos. An additional 200+ templates and tools are also available for download.
In addition to complete platforms and content management systems, there is a plethora of open source applications for plugging into your intranet including:
- Employee directory (yellow pages)
- Project management systems
- Document management systems
- Help desk
- E-Learning systems
- And many, many more
Check out FreshMeat.net and do a search on intranet for an extensive listing of available open source intranet applications.
Caution: most open source tools are not ‘plug and play’. They require a lot of care and skilled people who know how to care for them. Nor are all open source tools created equal – extensive research and care in selecting such applications is tantamount to success.
Finally, don’t put the cart before the horse:
- Identify requirements
- Build a plan
- Develop evaluation criteria
- Rate and score solution options
If open source is a new game for you or your organization, don’t hesitate to hire an outside hand (for more information contact me through Prescient Digital Media).
RELATED ITEMS:
Open source intranets
© 2006 Toby Ward - Prescient Digital Media
Wednesday, January 25
Top intranets of 2006 – more than design
by
Toby Ward
on Wed 25 Jan 2006 09:57 PM PST
The Nielsen Norman Group (NNG) has released their Intranet Design Annual 2006. Headed by the king of usability, Dr. Jakob Nielsen, NNG claims this year’s winners to be the best intranets of 2006.
The report does feature some great intranets including one of the World’s best, IBM’s W3 (see Intranet World Tour: IBM leads the World ). However, the judging is highly suspect, reliant on volunteer form submission. How could you determine whether an intranet is good or not without actually seeing it and clicking through it? Well apparently a one-sided voluntary form submission with a couple of screenshots is enough for NNG. (If I tell you to fill out a form for an award, are you going to give me the full story or tell me what you want to hear?).
Unfortunately, the Design Annual focuses on design and usability. Sadly, Nielsen et al have yet to figure out that an intranet’s design (look-and-feel) is not a requisite for success. Design is in fact, the least critical of all they key intranet mandatory assets (see The Nexus of Intranet Success). Anyone who works on or manages an intranet knows that the aspects that truly determine success include people, process, governance, standards, resources, content and tools. Even usability accounts for only about 15% of an intranet’s total value to an organization.
Nonetheless, the report does show some good screenshots and some good examples of the dos. This year’s winners include:
- Allianz Australia Insurance, Australia
- ALTANA Pharma AG, Germany
- Bank of Ireland Group, Ireland
- Capital One, USA
- IBM, USA
- Merrill Lynch, USA
- METRO Group, Germany
- O2, UK
- Staples, USA
- Vodafone, UK
Unfortunately all the winners are big companies (median size: 62,500 employees) with big budgets. And 4 of 10 are financial service companies. If you can read such a report with a huge grain of salt, however, and you can stomach the US$148 price, then it is interesting fodder. Heck, I bought a copy.
RELATED ITEMS:
The best government intranet designs
© 2006 Toby Ward - Prescient Digital Media
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