Troubled intranets often share many of the same characteristic problems:

• No defined ownership
• No content standards and policies
• Site proliferation and ‘sprawl’
• Poor usability and navigability (“I can’t find anything!”)
• Low use and employee up-take

This was the case with Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. (AECL, makers of CANDU nuclear reactors) when I started to work with them two years ago. This case study was presented to today to the 2006 Information Highways conference in Toronto. Turning the dream into reality: Harnessing people power to create a high productivity intranet was a joint presentation with my colleague and client Andre Robillard, CIO for Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd.

A little more than two years ago when AECL started down the road to implementing a new intranet portal, the Canadian crown corporation was saddled with a number of challenges:

• Ongoing news and information not communicated in a timely and consistent fashion
• Business objectives and priorities not clearly communicated
• Absence of a Communication plan
• Too much reliance on email bulletins for communications
• Senior management not taking responsibility for communication
• Employee Intranet not effective:
• No governance or control
• No consistent look and feel
• Information not current or useful
• Publishing requires technical skills
• Difficult to find information

The old AECL intranet:

To address these challenges AECL hired Prescient Digital Media to develop an integrated communications strategy that addressed email communications, people and manager communications, and the intranet. Specifically, the process included the creation of a new intranet plan with a number of key priorities:

• Develop and formalize a governance model
• Develop an  intranet editorial policy
• Hire an Editor-In-Chief
• Develop Standardization policy that enforces intranet standards and limits individual intranet development
• Develop an email “Acceptable Use” policy
• Eliminate all stand-alone sites by consolidating them under a single intranet portal with a single navigation schema.
• Design a new “look & feel” that supports the AECL brand and communication needs.
• Deploy a full database content management platform and full employee self-service and online form submission

The process moved from planning to the technology selection (driven by an aggressive RFP that had a number of vendors work for the business) and an implementation of about 2.5 months of a new content management system/portal product (IronPoint).

New intranet portal: myAECL

Though launching a new intranet portal is all well and dandy, the work does not stop there. AECL still had a number of key issues to address in the months following the launch:

• Hiring and orienting a new Editor-in-Chief
• Developing daily news articles
• Setting up efficient content processes
• Migrating old environment to new
• Changing Behaviors
• Training content providers to use new tool
• Evolving Formatting standards and guidelines

Andre Robillard shared some of the key lessons learned in redesigning an intranet and implementing a new portal with new processes and standards. He has a number of recommendations for any organization attempting the same:

• Clearly define the communication problems in your organization
• Assess where you are today by polling staff
• Create a new communication plan based on best practices, employee feedback, and company needs
• Get executive approval of new internal communication plan
• Create a new Intranet design that provides staff with any easy to use tool, plus satisfies the communication plan
• Issue an RFP
• Implement using the 80/20 rule
• Use a vendor that does this for a living

By the way, have you noticed that the CIO keeps focusing on and talking about “communications” and not the technology?

CIO Robillard understands the driver is communications and customer service, and that the intranet portal is more than just a technology solution; it’s a business system to support the business. As CIO he’s just one of several owners on a governance council that also includes representatives from Communications, HR and Customer Service. I’d like to see more IT organizations like Robillard’s that are less concerned with ownership and more concerned with business results.

If you have a question about this case study – whether its related to process, content, technology, people, planning, etc. – feel free to post your question or comment below and I’ll get back to you shortly thereafter.

© 2006 Toby Ward - Prescient Digital Media

It’s been a hectic past couple of weeks juggling travel, clients, baby, blogging, etc. – with the latter suffering the most.

I had an interesting dinner with James Robertson of Step Two who was in Vancouver for the IA Summit. Over sushi and other nibbles at the Blue Water Café we discussed and debated the process for determining client organizational requirements for content management, and specifically workflow.

James isn’t a fan of surveys or focus groups. So, we agreed to disagree. But James has developed a very interesting process for working with a client to document and  prioritize an organization’s requirements for implementing a content management system. You’ll have to hire him to learn the full details but it involves locking the organization in a room for a full day or two and using cards (representing each functional requirement for a CMS, for example, workflow) and using glass beads to mark or ‘weight’ each of the top requirements (a few dozen in all).

The spicy tuna roll was most agreeable and so too was our joint conclusion of CMS workflow: everyone wants workflow, but almost no one uses it. With rare exception, most content is controlled by very few who use offline systems such as email to solicit and garner content approvals and edits – rendering built-in CMS workflow as redundant and often unnecessary.

“Somehow we need to spread the word that the "accepted wisdom" around workflow is wrong, and that new approaches must be innovated” says Robertson (see Workflow: we have a problem). “Workflow does, of course, work in certain circumstances. Where there is a well-defined, consistent and repeatable business processes, workflow rules can be used to automate them. This is the exception, however, with few (if any) editorial processes working this way for general web content.”

In my personal experience, the top priority of most CMS publishers is a true WSIWYG editor. Everyone promises and advertises a simple, user-friendly editor, but very, very few actually deliver. Of particular priority is a very simple if not automatic feature that strips out all MS-Word code (or cleans tags) and a simple to use syndication manager that allows the content manager to publish one piece of content in multiple places.

If you’re tighter on money than time, Step Two has a handy do-it-yourself Content Management Requirements Toolkit for aiding in the selection and implementation of a CMS.

--

I'm presently back in Toronto speaking this morning at the 2006 Information Highways conference. I'm co-presenting a client intranet case study Turning the dream into reality: Harnessing people power to create a high productivity intranetwith Andre Robillard, CIO for Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. (makers of CANDU nuclear reactors). Their intranet has come a long way since I first started working with them two years ago... tomorrow I'll provide the detailed highlights of a troubled intranet turned high-powered employee portal.