PLEASE NOTE THE CORRECTED DATE. THIS WEBINAR IS THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 2, 2006.

A successful intranet requires a lot of smart work, hard work, planning and technology. Verizon is a company with an intranet that embodies this success, but not at the expense of innovation.

The giant U.S. communications company has a cutting-edge “technology digital workplace” that allows its geographically dispersed employee base to access corporate news, information and other important work tools via multiple online channels, including:

·    a voice-recognition portal that allows employees to get news, find out about jobs and send/hear emails over the telephone;

·    collaborative web conferencing;

·    and employee-managed forums, blogs and wikis.

The Verizon intranet

The new intranet or “workplace” has evolved well beyond a traditional intranet where employees click and pull information. Verizon’s Digital Workplace offers multiple access points to make it easier for employees to meet and do business. It's a place where access to information is unprecedented and geographic boundaries are eliminated. Verizon’s Digital Workplace is the total environment where employees create, innovate and communicate on all aspects of the business without the limitations imposed by divergent resources, face-to-face interaction and four walls.

If you’d like to learn more about Verizon’s success and its leading-edge innovation then tune into the next Intranet Insider World Tour: Verizon, Digital Workplace from Communitelligence.com and hosted by Verizon’s intranet guru Donna Itzoe and myself as the facilitator.

Intranet Insider World Tour: Verizon, Digital Workplace

Thursday, November 2

2-3:15 pm Eastern

• Find out about how Verizon provides multiple online gateways to access to applications and systems, news, project information and other tools that employees need to do their jobs.
• Learn how employees use a voice-recognition portal, instant messaging, blogs, wikis, text messaging, email and, of course, authenticated and unauthenticated web sites to collaborate and communicate real-time.
• Discover how Verizon breaks down the internal digital divide using by integrating new technologies integrated with innovative communication techniques

Reserve your spot on this key 75-minute Webinar: Intranet Insider World Tour: Verizon, Digital Workplace

Boo! Okay, really, that’s about as scary as I’m going to get here. After all I am talking about intranets... dull, boring, uneventful intranets. Hell, I may be passionate about them but I’m also a realist...

On the eve of Halloween, and having seen so many hundreds of intranets, I thought it would be fun to relate my top 5 scariest moments in my intranet years. Of course, intranets can’t really be scary in the literal sense so when I say ‘scary’ I’m really meaning ‘stupid’.

Warning: the following contains scenes with little or no graphic violence, some suggestive language and only hints of nudity and explicit conduct. Caution: Stupid managers and executives who can relate to these should hide under a blanket or shiver with embarrassment. (Some of these stories I’ve related over the years but are too amusing not to relate again...)

·    A COO who berated me for making her intranet manager cry when I gave their intranet an evaluation score of 3.5 our of 10 (when asked to rate the intranet themselves, her senior management rated the intranet even worse: 3 out of 10). Man, I’m a cruel bastard!

·    A CEO of a major financial services company with a horribly pathetic intranet with a a zero-dollar budget and was looking to cut funding further... “I think we’ve invested too much in technology already.” Blood from a stone anyone?

·    An intranet manager who put an animated cartoon caricature of a jogging Bill Clinton on the intranet HR home page. Said the intranet manager when asked the value to the business of an animated U.S. President, “... he’s sooo cute!” I guess Dick Cheney wasn’t sexy enough...

·    A Director of Human Resources: “I don’t understand why we need an intranet... I mean we have a pretty good phone system that cost us a lot!” Forget the phones; I think ‘telegrams’ are due for a comeback.

·    Any company, at any time, that chooses an intranet consultant based on a blindly designed mock-up. Forget about a plan, employee productivity, or ROI, what kind of colors and stock images will you use?!?!?!

Any scary or stupid tales to relate? Let me know and I’ll give it ink!

RELATED READING:

The Thirteen Scariest Things in IT

Is there any limit to Microsoft’s success, or their confidence (read arrogance)? For what is dubbed as “history’s biggest IT project”, Microsoft is making the final preparations to launch Windows Vista.

“Vista will be a real boon for PC buying, PC manufacturers and the PC industry because it has energy and excitement,” MS CEO Steve Ballmer told the MercuryNews.com (see Microsoft's top exec talks about Vista). “You get this really great new user interface. You get great new applications that work with that user interface. You get great new applications that work with that user interface. It's great that we have a new application that we do, Office 2007, that comes out at the same time. Some other new applications will highlight some of the key things in Vista.”

You could say that the new version of Windows, and its new version of MS-Office and Sharepoint hot on its heals, is an indication that MS is in the throws of reinventing itself. Well, not really. But they are certainly doing their damnedest to energize their battered stock price (about $7 less than it was at the start of 2002), their flat income and its continually maligned software from bugs, outside attacks, and rhetoric from the developer community that likes to put rival Apple on an evangelical pedestal.

Vista Sidebar & Gadgets

Vista though has not captured the attention and buzz that previous launches enjoyed (think Windows 95 and XP). But MS is trying.

Here’s what we know about Windows Vista:

• Business customer rollout (Christmas 2006); consumer rollout (early 2007)
• Slick new user interface (look-and-feel and navigation) with lots of graphics, animation and motion video as well as translucent window borders
• Main screen sidebar with ‘help’ gadgets including a calculator, a news reader and a currency converter.
• A window flipper where the user’s current open windows flash through a full rotation akin to a slide show
• Additional security including tougher treatment and protection against viruses (my favorite is that it apparently warn you when ANY program is to be installed on your computer including spyware and trojans) and the ability to see if anyone (such as your neighbor) is piggy-backing on your wireless network
• Users (e.g. parents) can restrict online activities (by age or by content type) such as blocking certain games and limiting computer use (Vista will also produce usage reports on where the child or user goes and for how long
• Multimedia tools for better managing photos and videos including meta tags and instantly turning photos into videos
• Hinted but not really confirmed: Vista will be able to connect to Xbox 360 and allow gamers on each platform to compete with each other

How eager is Microsoft to have you buy Vista? Well, while Vista will NOT be available for consumers in time for Christmas (despite its original plans), there is a ‘coupon’ of sorts for those of you planning to buy a computer this season. MS has announced a Vista upgrade program, which gives the buyer a

“not necessarily free Vista upgrade”. MS estimates this coupon program will cost them $1.5 billion in revenue.

Individual Vista upgrades should cost between US$100 and $260. For more information, visit www.WindowsVista.com.  

Are there any geeks out there that can recite most of the scenes from Life of Brian? No I didn’t think so...

Most of us North Americans will always liken British humor to Monty Python (or FaultyTowers). Of course Yes Minister and The Office certainly have their fans, but Python continues to be the standard bearer of British humor from our western colonial perches.

Preceding my keynote address (Building sustainable leadership support) at this year’s IBF LIVE 2006 were a couple of actors who did a four minute ditty on intranets in that classic Monty Python-esque chat amongst chaps. There were only polite snickers from the all-European audience, but I thought it was funny... but what do I know? I’m just a slow-witted Canadian (with an American-Irish lineage and influence).

Here’s an outtake (which I imagine is John Cleese and Graham Chapman so I’m going to call them as such):

John C: I didn’t even know you had an intranet?!?

Graham C: Oh god yeah, our intranet is HUUUGE! Yes, in fact, we like to call it an intranet portal.

John C: Ahhh yeah.... right. *deadpan* What’s that then?

Graham C: *pause* What is it?!

John C: Yeah.

Graham C: Well it’s quite complex to explain really... it’s like an intranet, but it’s got more... sort of... you know, stuff.

Graham C: Right. You mean it’s a BIG intranet?!?!

John C: *proudly* Oh you could say that! Yeah, Yeah. And you?

Graham C: Oh yes, yes, we’ve got an intranet as well.

John C: Big?!

Graham C: Enormous!

John C: I should say huge actually... ours is actually GIGANTIC!

Graham C: Well, ours is humongous, really. *deadpan* You can’t really buy a bigger one.

And so on...

--

If you’d like to hear this bit and the entire first hour including my entire keynote address (where I also lamely poke fun at Canadians, Americans (my kin! please don’t flame me!), George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Microsoft and techies).

The entire MP3 which includes:

• Two chaps comparing their intranets (00:00 – 4 minutes)
• Conference day overview by IBF LIVE Chair Paul Miller
• Conference notes by Paul Levy
• Keynote speaker introduction by Paul Miller
• Keynote speech by Toby Ward (begins at about 13:30)

Download the entire MP3 here: http://www.mediamemory.co.uk/IBF06Part3TonyWard.mp3  

Intranets are still in their infancy, and they require more involvement from senior management. These are two of the major bang-on conclusions of Jane McConnell’s superb study on intranets ("Intranet Strategies Today & Tomorrow").

“Senior management perception of the intranet is out of sync with reality on the ground,” says Jane, a France-based intranet consultant (who works internationally) and author of the NetJMC Blog blog.  “They are largely unaware of the usefulness of the intranet for employees for their work. 55% of the respondents say that if the intranet were unavailable for 1 to 2 hours, employees would be disturbed in their work, yet only 13% of the respondents say that senior management perceives the intranet to be “business critical.”

No surprise there. The weakest intranets have the lowest level of involvement and active support from senior support. The best intranets have incredible senior management support.

Is it any surprise then that decision-making is an issue for most organisations? “Lack of awareness of the potential role of the intranet” is cited as the top obstacle for decision-making. Of course, there would be no problems with decision-making if there was in fact a senior management champion at the same organizations.

Money begets executive support. The study also found that, intranets lack sufficient funding and resources (though that almost half of the respondents expect their budgets to rise in 2007.

Jane’s study found that “almost 40% of the respondents have or plan to have internal blogs, significantly higher than the current or planned external blogs (around 15%).”

I still find it surprising then that given the current state of the intranet – what I referred to as ‘piss poor” and James Robertson referred to as “sh-te” (at this year’s IBF Live 2006) – that so many managers are obsessed about blogs, wikis and podcasting. They should be concerned about planning and governance and the role of executive management as part of that governance. But hey, blogs are certainly more sexy than governance models!!

Study participants represented 101 organisations headquartered in Europe, North America, and Asia Pacific, ranging in size from under 5000 to over 100,000 employees. Nearly 60% of the organisations operate in over 20 countries, and over one third have from 2 to 4 official languages, making the survey population very international.

“I don’t give a dam about the color… it’s about how you get things done.”

Poignant, but all-true words of Alan Huish, Employee Self Service and Intranet chief at British Airways in his presentation “Connecting Frontline Employees Globally” at IBF LIVE 2006 in London.

Despite the force of his words and practiced conviction, the sage wisdom is delivered with a dry wit and warm if not collegial appreciation for the attentive audience. And he’s right. The British Airways intranet is proof positive; nothing fancy, flashy or cool, just highly effective.

 BA Intranet (Source: Alan Huish,

“Connecting Frontline Employees Globally”, 2006)

Here’s a telling statistic of how connected employees are at BA: there are 48,000 employees worldwide, many of which are in the sky, in airports, on the road, and despite the lack of desk jockeys, the intranet gets up to 23,000 unique visitors a day. Wow.

How do they do it? They don’t give their employees laptops to travel with. There are few kiosks for them to access. In fact, BA has about 120 intranet kiosks at their big hub at Heathrow International – and their barely used.

“The key,” says Huish, “is home access: the lion’s share of access is from home.” Employees access the intranet from home – or from any browser – via a .com address with a user id and password.

Some other measures of success:

• 300 trained publishers using Lotus Notes as a publishing tool
• 94% of all employees access the intranet every month representing 6.5 million page views per month
• 100% of internal (and external) recruitment is done online
• 100% of employee travel is booked online
• 75% of pensioner (retiree) self-service is done online (wow!)
• 80% of employees update their own contact information online (from 10% in 2003)
• 33% of all training is conducted online
• $80 million in savings in the past year and a $110 million annual target

The number one application is e-Pay where employees access their paystub – delivering savings of $180,000 per year.

Huish adds that the keys to success include planning and governance with strong governance from a small cross-representative team fueled by clear transformational targets and measures.

ON A PERSONAL NOTE:

E-MAIL ALERT!! Apologies to anyone who sent me an e-mail last Wednesday or Thursday and didn’t hear from me. Please re-send as my computer broke on the way back from London…

A belated Thanksgiving to all my fellow Canadians who rightly celebrate in October –not on football day in November! Thanksgiving was a lot of fun with family but I am rather sick of turkey. I need a big Christmas ham this year…

My baby girl is getting more teeth… and she said both ‘dada’ and ‘mama’ on the same morning (only minutes apart!). What a sweetie J

Here’s an interesting factoid(s): the MVP of the NBA is Canadian Steve Nash (BC); the MVP of the NHL is Joe Thorton (ON); and the probable MVP of the American League (MLB) is Canadian Justin Morneau (also from BC). Ahhh, we are quite the breeding ground…