Social bookmarking is all the rage. To borrow an over-hyped term, it’s a cornerstone of Web 2.0. Not surprising, social bookmarking is starting to spread quickly to corporate intranets.

For those who still haven’t used it or only heard about it social bookmarking is a way for users to publicly bookmark web pages and share those bookmarks with others through the use of keyword tags. These tags allow the users to organize and share their bookmarks.  Unlike traditional bookmarks, multiple tags allow bookmarks to belong to more than one category. Users can also search out other relevant sites and pages by tag or author.

Social bookmarking has been popularized on the Internet by sites and services by Del.icio.us, Digg, and Shadows. The hot rumor in Silicon Valley is that Google could launch its own social bookmarking service within days.

From the intranet perspective, social bookmarking is a taxonomy system developed and maintained by employees. A taxonomy that is always updating and refreshing as a living, breathing business system. You may have heard such a taxonomy referred to as a folksonomy.

IBM’s Dogear social bookmarking tool (source: IBM)

Not surprisingly and often leading the pack in intranet innovation, IBM is one of the first out of the gate in rolling out social bookmarking on their intranet, W3. In doing so, IBM has created their own bookmarking system called Dogear (see Social Bookmarking in the Enterprise).

Dogear features, people and process:

• No anonymous bookmarking
• Both private and shared bookmarks
• New content alerts via RSS or ATOM
• Collaborative filtering
• Advanced search by tag
• Bookmark listings by tag
• Bookmark listings by author name

I would think the advancing social bookmarking technology would make taxonomy vendors and uber search engine vendors such as Autonomy very nervous about their revenue streams.

RELATED ITEMS:

Podcasting the intranet at IBM

Intranet World Tour: IBM leads the World

IBM leads corporate blogging pack

© 2006 Toby Ward - Prescient Digital Media

I have decried on more than one occasion those who would flaunt HITS as a measure of success. How Idiots Track Success – my tongue in cheek definition of HITS (though I was not the first to use it when I first heard it about 9 years ago, I’ve certainly used this in enough speeches, workshops and articles to help popularize it) is certainly appropriate given the lack of proper business metrics for measuring success.

So without being too cute, here are some worthwhile metrics for measuring the performance of your intranet, portal or website:

Ø       Unique visitors

Ø       Cost per visit

Ø       User satisfaction

Ø       Return on investment

Unique visitors

If I visit the intranet and view 20 pages, registering 140 hits, my visit counts as a single visit regardless of the page views or hits. If I leave the site and return that’s a second visit – but I still am only counted as one unique visitor for the period in question (most companies track statistics monthly or weekly).

Why are unique visitors more valuable than visits or page views? Well it all depends on your perspective and what measures resonate best within your organization (particularly with management). The reason I like unique visitors is because it is easiest to determine your reach (% of total employees that access the intranet within a given period). If in one month you have 4,400 unique visitors and you have 5,000 employees then your reach is 88% (very good).

Divide the total number of visits by the number of unique visitors and you get another valuable metric: average number of visits per employee.

Cost per visit

Cost per visit, like ROI, sells well with management. Most executives still view the intranet as a cost center. As such, it is incumbent on us managers and consultants to help change that mindset. While ROI packs more punch, cost per visit helps soften the blow. What resonates better if your CFO asks you how much the intranet costs to operate?

Answer A: $300,000 per year

Answer B: 3 cents per visit

Solid intranets firing at above average value for employees garner three to four visits per day per employee. Multiplied by 10,000 employees and you’re looking at about 10 million visits per year or 3 cents per visit.

The answer to my question as to what resonates best with your CFO...? Well, it depends on how tight his suspenders or her shoulder pads are but I wager that nine out of 10 are far more likely to smile when you say “only 3 cents per user!”

User satisfaction

Don’t just track what your users do. Find out what they want and prefer. Log analysis metrics don’t any qualitative insight into what employees ‘want’ and ‘expect’.

I like to measure employee user satisfaction on a scale of 1-10 because people intuitively are more use to ranking movies, etc. on a scale of 1-10. However, many professional researchers would decry this approach and point out the inefficiencies versus a 5-point scale with Good and Very Good being the optimal scores. You need to find out what employees will respond to best, and what ‘sells’ best to those decision makers funding the intranet.

For an example of other user satisfaction data you might glean from your employees, here are some sample results from a recent intranet client survey (online survey by invitation to 3,000 employees with a 25% response rate):

How often do you use the intranet?

 

Ø       100% of employees have used the intranet; only 5% don’t use it regularly

Ø       83% of employees use the intranet every day or multiple times per week

 

The following is a list of the major content categories currently available on the intranet. In your opinion, please rate the IMPORTANCE of each on a scale of 1-10 (10=Extremely Important; 1=Completely Irrelevant).

 

The most important content categories in order include:

Ø       Forms (cited by 86% as somewhat important or greater)

Ø       Policies & Procedures (83%)

Ø       News (83%)

Ø       What’s New (81%)

Return on investment

While few organizations are spending significant time accurately measuring ROI, it is important to 76% of the respondent companies in the Prescient Digital Media Intranet ROI Survey (see ROI Remains Guesswork At Most Companies).

Those that have measured ROI are finding significant value. Of those that measure or offer ‘rough estimates’ of their organization’s intranet, answers varied from $0 to $20M. The average annual ROI of respondent intranets fell just shy of $1 million ($979,775.58). The average company size had between 4,000 to 5,000 employee users. However, 40% of respondents had less than 1000 employees while 20% had more than 10,000 employees.

I’ve identified more than 130 line item benefits that can be measured for dollar value ROI (see my white paper Finding ROI) so there really is no excuse – there’s plenty to be measured.

Measurable ROI from hard benefits including cost savings and revenue from:

• less paper
• less hardware
• fewer headcount
• increased sales

Soft benefits include:

• increased employee productivity
• better customer satisfaction
• faster time to market
• improved employee retention

IBM, Oracle and Cisco all measure the impact and benefits of their intranet. And all of them have measured the value to be greater than US$1 billion. In fact, IBM has realized benefits from e-learning via the intranet to alone be more than US$284 million.

Of all the above measurements, perhaps the single most important is ROI. To maximize the intranet’s value and potential, you must secure the support of senior management. If you want their attention and support, you better talk their talk. Nothing gets their attention more than ROI. If executives view the intranet as a cost center, then it’s incumbent of the managers to prove and measure the value. Only through measurement will the intranet become a measured quantity and a proven asset.

RELATED ITEMS:

HITS – How idiots track success

Finding ROI

© 2006 Toby Ward - Prescient Digital Media

HITS are not a business metric. HITS are a server metric that vary greatly in scale in quantity from one site to the next and one page to the next. And yet the vast majority of companies who refer to their website or intranet in the same breath as ‘success’ most often trot out how many HITS they get.

“And last month the intranet got 100,000 HITS!” Big frigging deal.

Equating HITS to website or intranet success is the equivalent to a car dealership trumpeting their success in selling wiper blades and fuzzy dice instead of actual cars. (No disrespect intended to dice fans or other favorites such as the dashboard plastic Jesus or if you prefer Mohammend (hold the Danish cartoon jokes) or even Puff Daddy… or Diddy or whatever.

For those of you who have been around the web for more than a year or two, you have no excuse for continuing to equate success to number of HITS. Stop embarrassing yourself. If you really are new to the web or intranet then you’re forgiven and I’m happy to explain further (I apologize for the rant that is not intended for new web managers but intended for veterans who dam well know better or are completely incompetent or they just really like fuzzy dice).

HITS do not equal visitors. HITS do not equal page views. They never did so stop leaning on this over-used, over-hyped statistic. Amazon.com has dozens of HITS per page (look at their mess of a home page). Twenty visitors to Amazon.com could register thousands of hits. To confuse matters more, each page can have a different number of hits depending on the number of pictures, etc. You therefore don’t have to be a rocket scientist to conclude that thousands do not make a business metric of value. A few visitors does not make a success.

In fact, the only time as a consultant I refer to HITS on behalf of a client site is when I’m forced to because they have other client sites that track HITS because all the other sites do. For example, one client site gets about 200,000 visitors per month. Well, when every other site of the clients promotes how many millions of hits they get per month then 200,000 sounds trivial to the uninformed masses. Isn’t the client always right? Sort of…. sometimes.

Here are some business intranet metrics that matter:

• unique visitors
• page views
• cost per visitor
• cost per page view
• ROI per unique visitor
• user satisfaction

For you old hacks… I know I’m preaching to the converted, but I also know you share the same sentiments and frustration as I. For those that are new to this, I’ll provide more detail on the how to measure for success in the next Intranet Blog installment. Stay tuned…

In the meantime, ditch the idiots and thire HITS, and pick up some intelligent metrics.

RELATED ITEMS:

ROI Remains Guesswork At Most Companies

Measuring the ROIs of Intranets: Mission Possible?

Intranet ROI

Intranet kingdom remains an unknown quantity

Intranet measurement strategy (case study)

© 2006 Toby Ward - Prescient Digital Media

Sadly, when most companies consider their intranet or website, they first think about the design. It’s even reflected in their language… “We need a redesign.”

Users, however, first and foremost put access to information as the top priority – but not the first consideration. A recent study confirmed that the first thing a user notices is the site design – a design that can motivate or de-motivate their use of the site. However, a user’s top priority is information access and ‘speed’ – or how quickly they get what they came for.

Nonetheless, despite the overwhelming and unnecessary emphasis on it (pause to think about the importance of planning, governance, content, usability, etc.), design still is important. In fact, a web user will make a judgment about your site within a blink of an eye – in the first 50 milliseconds (1/20th of a second), according to Canadian researchers at Carleton University (see First Impressions Count in Website Design). Through what is called the ‘halo effect’, first impressions can influence subsequent judgments and buying decisions.

“It is the first thing people think to change; the first thing people notice; the first thing people complain about; and it is the last thing that should be changed - the design,” says Catherine Elder, Consultant, Prescient Digital Media.

“Redesigning a website isn’t a simple matter. People tend to think that if they could just change a few colors, the font, and add a photo, their website will be a winner. Unless there is a solid foundation in the form of an information architecture that addresses user and stakeholder needs, the site will not be a success – and that is never pretty.”

The key to a successful design is understanding both the user and your organization’s needs and finding a marriage between the two, and that of best practice design and usability. Catherine walks through the design process in Design I: Making your site pretty can get ugly.

Related items:

Intranet Design Wars (back issue)

The best government intranet designs

Top intranets of 2006 – more than design

Engage your employees, and you will reap measured dollar rewards.

British Telecom (BT) uses an online idea jar for employees. Accordingly to Personnel Today (BT calls for employees' ideas), this idea jar has saved the BT nearly £100m (US$173 million) over the past four years.

BT Ideas provides a formal framework for encouraging staff to be creative and rewards them for any ideas that it uses.

Suggestions policy and strategy manager Arthur Wright said the project is being developed over the next year to try to increase the proportion of ideas implemented from 10 to 15 per cent.

The scheme uses the Internet and intranet to promote the initiative, but an incubator website is to be introduced to allow people to get in touch with other staff for help on developing their ideas.

Wright said, "People are immensely creative and want to contribute to the business - whether it's with little changes that make the job more satisfying or big changes than can have a dramatic effect."

Rewards can be significant - the company paid out £400,000 (about US$700,000) to employees last year.

Wright said, "Ideas don't come for free. If we have a good idea that saves us money or generates significant income, then we are delighted to reward the originator with 10 per cent of the savings or additional income up to a maximum of £30,000."

If executed properly, empowering employees as change agents can deliver powerful benefits – both for the company and for individual employees.

IBM has a similar program on their intranet called IDEAS – a heritage program for collecting suggestions online to improve a process or tool or product. Employees are encouraged to submit innovative ideas. All submissions undergo a cost analysis for potential savings. Recommendations good enough to implement are rewarded with cash payouts to employees. IDEAS delivered $17.1M in value in 2001 alone.

One of my personal favorites is the Sodexho USA Sales SuperSleuth (recently highlighted in our case study and webinar Intranet Insider World Tour: Sodexho USA.  SuperSleuth is an intranet web page and application that encourages employees to submit sales leads and prospective clients via the intranet. The SuperSleuth intranet page generate cash rewards of up to $1000 for the person making the submission. Sodexho says it has contributed to a 100% increase in sales leads in the past year. Let me repeat: a 100% increase in company sales leads. In fact, the SuperSleuth tool has led to US$90 million dollars in managed volume (net client sales including sales by client). Proof positive of a killer application.

If you engage them, employees will come – and show you the money.

Swedish cell phone maker Ericsson, which also makes guided missile technology (who knew?! I wonder if Qualcomm is considering entry into the smart bomb market?!), has suffered some serious security breaches in the past few years. First a consultant stole information from the intranet and then five other employees were nabbed in a big espionage scandal.

Reporter.gr provides accounts (see Greece: The "Athens Gate" part of Ericsson's spy scandal says MP)of the Hungarian IT consultant who worked on contract for Ericsson, stole company information from the intranet and then tried to sell it on the Internet! (Not the sharpest knife in the drawer). According to Reporter, the man was holding out for a full-time job but turned to theft when he didn’t get it. Csaba Richter, a 26-year-old consultant, pleaded guilty to stealing documents on Ericsson's intranet and was sentenced to 3-years in jail.

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ON GET STRATEGIC: Warning: Google will search your taxes & love letters 

This is an interesting little ditty from the People’s Daily News in China:

1.4 million armymen surf Intranet in Chinese New Year holiday

More than 1.4 million officers and soldiers of the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) visited the PLA's Intranet during the week-long Spring Festival or Chinese Lunar New Year from Jan. 29 to Feb. 4.

During the festive days, many officers and soldiers surfed PLA's Intranet which also has recreational channels including movies, music and greeting-card service.

The Intranet, known as "The PLA Political Work Network," was officially launched in October last year, by integrating the Intranets of various political departments at the PLA Headquarters and major military units.

I wonder if the PLA soldiers have Internet access at all… my guess is no (hene the games, movies, etc.)? I must admit though I have not seen too many intranets with games, movies and greeting cards.

I wonder by how many multiples the Chinese PLA intranet is cheaper than the U.S. Navy-Marine Corps Intranet money pit? Or the U.S. Army behemoth?

See…

World’s Biggest Intranet (back issue)

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

U.S. military creating world’s largest interconnected network

Scandal rocks world’s biggest intranet

EDS – king of intranet pain

© 2006 Toby Ward - Prescient Digital Media

In the intranet world, the big hype for the past five years has consistently been reserved for portals. Though not necessarily a top priority for intranet managers and executives, the vendors and tech media have focused great attention on portal products as the savior of for the corporate intranet.

Some big changes occurred in the portal market in the past year…

• Independent portal vendor Plumtree was bought by leading application software company BEA
• Microsoft is investing big money (hundreds of millions of dollars) into evolving its Sharepoint portal product and merging MS Content Management Server (CMS) and Sharepoint into a single group
• Content management companies are aggressively pushing portal products (e.g. Vignette), and so too are other software companies (e.g. Oracle) 

Content management blur

The lines will blur even further between portal vendors and content management vendors as well as other software vendors such as document management and business intelligence. More companies will bundle previously separate offerings such as portal and content management such as Microsoft is doing. Oracle, SAP and Vignette all have portal products that bundle with their primary software solution.

As the lines blur between software application vendors there will be more consolidation in the market including a change in status for Vignette (a sale or merger or acquisition). Vignette has long been one of the premier leaders in content management systems(s). However, their CMS product is complex and expensive and suffers from many user complaints about how difficult it is to use. The Vignette portal product is relatively new and has not received much traction. Financially, Vignette continues to lose money on little revenue growth and until recently had a slumping stock price with growing debt. The President & CEO recently resigned and the stock price has grown in the past nine months with continued speculation about a possible acquisition by (or merger with) a larger company.

Ease of use

Portal products can be easy to use for certain functions, and lousy in other areas. Inconsistency is par for the course.

“We're going to see portals become friendlier to user employees,” says Shiv Singh, Director Enterprise Solutions, Avenue A | Razorfish.

“Portal players are going to have to follow the Google Enterprise mantra - enterprise tools shouldn't take more than a few hours to install and should be extremely usable. Most portal packages take too long to install and don’t allow meaningful customization in a cost effective fashion. Too much time and money is spent solving technical problems rather than business ones.”

Personalization

All portal products offer user employee personalization options. However, very few organizations have actually enacted or properly implemented user personalization once they’ve purchased a portal product. Most employee portal implementations feature customization (e.g. choose the type of color or position of a content portlet or gadget) or role-based personalization that is pre-configured by the administrator (e.g. sales role page or site).

More portal companies will try to make it easy for organizations to role out and implement role-based personalization – something that largely relies a lot on offline planning and process. The technical implementation will be better and be augmented by enhanced consulting services not previously focused on by the portal vendor.

Social media

Blogging and RSS are of course huge phenomena as is other social media including wikis and podcasting. Portal vendors will increasingly hear requests for this type of functionality for integration into their products. Look for IBM websphere and MS Sharepoint in particular to tout these features.

We should also see the portal players integrate tools like blogging, social tagging and wikis into their portal packages. Many are catching on to the value of social media and its potential impact on the enterprise could be huge.

“Expect to see VOIP integration, blogging, user driven tagging, synchronous and asynchronous collaboration and of course enterprise instant messaging,” adds Singh.

Vendors to watch

The usual name vendors will be the movers and shakers:

• BEA
• IBM
• Microsoft
• Oracle
• SAP
• Interwoven

For more information, see Arnold IT’s complete list of portal vendors.

Portal versus CMS

Markets are blurring and becoming less distinctive to purchasers. So what’s better for your organization – CMS or portal?

“It really depends on their business drivers and user needs,” says Singh. “CMS products cannot integrate legacy applications well. Nor can they serve as the foundation of executive dashboards. They also lack strong personalization and customization features. On the other hand, a CMS does workflow very well and manages large amounts of content better than a portal ever could. So it really depends on the business’s needs and the users.”

Another factor to keep in mind: portal products are more complex and expensive than many CMSs and therefore the ROI can be less and your job selling a portal implementation is that much harder.

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Top 5 killer intranet mistakes

The promise of benefit portals

Portals have stalled

Microsoft’s planned evolution of the intranet

I normally don't dedicate a blog entry to cross-promoting another blog entry but... here goes:

People read differently online compared to reading for print. But make no mistake about it, people read online – a lot. (No need to go and read about the Super Bowl – my Seahawks lost).

 

Some would argue however that people only want quick hits of information online. A general argument for this can be made. For example, people are far less likely to read a book online than in print. Who wouldn’t?

See Web only for “small pieces of data?”

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The webmaster model is dead. Unless you’re a very small organization, argues intranet consultant and Step Two founder James Robertson, the intranet requires a team.

Writing in his recent column Intranet managers must be managers James also argues that there has to be a dedicated ‘manager’ overseeing the intranet:

An intranet 'team' of one is not enough, unless the organisation (or intranet) is very small. In the earlier article Roles needed in an intranet team, a very wide range of skills and responsibilities were identified for a successful team. The article Intranet teams: survey results and key findings also highlighted that the average size of intranet teams is three, with the team size growing to match the size of the organisation and the intranet.

In practice, this means that an intranet team will need to consist of an overall 'manager' (or 'coordinator'), along with several staff to do the actual day-to-day work on the site. Even then, the intranet team will have to collaborate very closely with other areas of the organisation to ensure that necessary skills can be obtained when needed.

The larger the organization, the more political the intranet becomes. In a medium to large-size organization, however, a steering committee chaired by executive level champions are almost highly recommended. This next generation model of intranet governance is collaborative, with committees representing the major functional stakeholders in Communications, Human Resources, Operations, IT and business units.

This model is most successful when the committee is championed by one or two key executives, often the CIO, the head of Communications, or HR. Instead of no owner, or one single owner, a collaborative team governs the intranet through the application of policies, standards and templates (seeRuling by committee).

RELATED ITEMS:

The Politics of Intranet Ownership

Collaborative Governance (Intranet Politics Part II)

Kiwis demonstrate progressive intranet leadership

Xerox Demonstrates Intranet Success (back issue)