Intranet managers and consultants are the consummate knowledge workers. And as Francis Bacon has screamed to us from over the ages, knowledge is power!

In particular, an intranet manager needs to intimately know:

·         the requirements of the business

·         best practices

·         the preferences and needs of employees

On the last point, understanding the needs of employees, there are a number of tools at the disposal of managers including log analysis, surveys, focus groups and usability testing.

Each tool has its place and its pros and cons. A recent attendee to a seminar of mine in Chicago asked me: “When is it best to do usability testing? User surveys? Focus groups?”

The answer is, of course, it depends. It depends on…

·         the organization’s culture

·         the present position of the intranet on the evolutionary curve

·         the extent of “research fatigue” at the organization

·         what data “sells” best

While not necessarily applicable to other commodities such as, say, consumer packaged goods, I prepared the following table as a quick cheat sheet for comparing the various tools applicable to researching intranet target audience requirements.

What to use first?

The enquiring mind was also having a debate with their boss about what should be done first – in-depth interviews or usability testing or focus groups or survey – when orchestrating their site design. I personally think it’s best to lead with in-depth interviews of the business stakeholders as the first step. It’s critical to understand what the business needs and expects from the site.

Generally speaking I like to do in-depth interviews first, followed by a target audience survey, followed by planning and information architecture and design, followed by focus groups, and then do usability testing once you’ve built a prototype. Focus groups can come at anytime… depending on the issues at play. Sometimes it’s good to do FGs up front if there are contentious issues or you want to explore new ideas or concepts. If not, leave them until after you’ve done your site plans and played with a couple of design concepts.

There are of course many subtleties to site research – and always exceptions to the rule. Many factors come in to play when choosing your research tools and the time to implement each. A lot depends on the culture of the organization and the intranet’s position on the evolutionary curve. For example, if money is the only thing that sells a project, it’s better to invest your time and energy in measuring return on investment.

A final note: never conduct the research yourself on your own product (website or intranet) as your results will be biased and the end result flawed. No, this isn’t a sales pitch (I’m busy enough as is!). I money is an issue there is always a way to conduct low-cost research… just make sure the person spearheading the research knows what they’re doing! (When we recently began work with a new intranet client who convinced us they need not do any employee research as they had recently completed a survey they proudly produced the survey… three questions, all open-ended.)

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© 2006 Toby Ward - Prescient Digital Media

The top two IT-related problems are operational incidents and staffing issues, according to a global survey commissioned by the IT Governance Institute (ITGI). A previous top priority, security has fallen to seventh on the list of the top eight IT priorities.  Compliance was reported to be the least important problem—likely due to the significant efforts that have been put into information security projects and compliance programs, such as those for Sarbanes-Oxley in the US.

The survey consisted of 695 interviews with CEO/CIO-level executives in 22 countries, and the full results can be found in the IT Governance Global Status Report 2006.The study assessed the C-suite’s IT governance priorities and actions executives have taken related to IT governance. It is a follow-up to ITGI’s 2003 report and tracks IT governance trends over the past two years.

The study found several improvements since 2003. For instance, IT is included more often on boards’ agendas—63 percent regularly or always include it, compared to 58 percent in 2003.

Even though 57 percent of respondents said IT is very important to the delivery of the corporate strategy, compared to 52 percent in 2003, the study found that CEOs are responsible for governance over IT in only 24 percent of the responding organizations.

"As in 2003, CEOs and business executives are still hesitant to discuss IT governance,” said Everett Johnson, CPA, international president of ITGI. “This finding is troubling because boards and CEOs are ultimately responsible for oversight over all major assets—including IT.”

Other findings include:

• IT is more critical to business than ever. For 87 percent of the participants, IT is quite to very important to the delivery of the corporate strategy and vision.
• For 63 percent of the respondents, IT is regularly or always on the board’s agenda (up from 58% in 2003).
• The IT department at more than half (56 percent) of the organizations surveyed understands and supports the business users’ needs.
• IT outsourcing is no longer seen as the most beneficial way to resolve IT problems—45 percent of US respondents believe it is ineffective.
• The number of companies that indicated they had no IT problems increased from 7 percent in 2003 to 21 percent in 2005.
• IT governance is not as easily implemented as respondents originally estimated.
• Only 9 percent of the responding organizations are not considering implementing any IT governance solutions—down from 17 percent in the 2003 survey.

The survey was conducted from July 2005 until October 2005.

One other interesting tidbit from this survey… a lot of non-IT clients often complain about IT being unresponsive and uncommunicative. Not surprising then are the results from the following question: “How regularly does your IT department inform the business about potential business opportunities enabled by new technologies?”

Never or sometimes was the response of 45% of the CEOs and CIOs. Only 55% said regularly or always. It would be interesting to repose the same question to marketing, human resource and communications managers… the finding would be far worse (I suspect). However, those same communications, marketing and human resource managers are just as guilty of failing to properly document, plan and communicate their needs. Instead, non-techie business people lean far too heavily on their IT families. IT is a corporate service, and not necessarily a driver of the business.

© 2006 Toby Ward - Prescient Digital Media

San Francisco-based search engine firm blinkx has launched what it calls an entirely new way to navigate Web 2.0. blinkx calls today’s search process (read: Google) as a “disruptive experience -- users are forced to interrupt the activity they have at hand, go to a search engine, enter a search and examine the results for relevant material.”

Doesn’t sound to disruptive to me unless I’m surfing with my 1-month old on my lap and she vomits all over my keyboard (don’t you dare laugh!). Anyhow getting back to the pain and disruption of using Google, web and intranet users are now encouraged to download and use blinkx new Pico search engine, a free 1MB download (see www.blinkx.com).

Pico appears as “an unobtrusive series of channels at the top of your desktop, each representing a different type of content: news, blogs, video, Web, Wikipedia, images, shopping, and "people", which retrieves information from online communities, including MySpace.com.”

The Pico program sits on top of your operating software and reads your screen – whether its browsers, Word documents, or something else – and infers meaning and context from each. This is what has been referred to for years as an inference engine – something that Autonomy has been touting in form or another for years. Another related label is the dynamic composite applications. Dynamic composite applications can automatically respond to unknown needs such as a user ‘search’ request. They identify the relevant enterprise systems and applications on the fly and interact with them, effectively instructing them to deliver precise ‘slices’ of information that match each user’s specific needs. Users receive the personalized view of information they need without requiring any additional work on the part of the administrator. This is of particular importance inside the enterprise at the intranet level as so many of us knowledge workers are using so many tools and systems (browser, Notes, Outlook, MS-Word, MS-Excel, PDFs, etc.).

In addition to adding meaning or context to this information, an engine like Pico will then dynamically retrieve other relevant information from across the Web. Where Pico stands out in a burgeoning crowd is that it includes social media such as blogs, wikis, multimedia, social bookmarks, and even MySpace.com. Pico “does the searching for you, constantly updating its query, based on what's on your screen at any point in time.”

The user can then configure Pico folders called Smart Folders based on the content you’re reading – save what you’re reading or writing as a search and it will automatically populate your folders as well a single consolidated view. This is not too dissimilar but a step beyond what Google Sidebar does which is serve up relevant content based on the users needs.

Intranet example

A large engineering company was growing fast and had so many projects in the works that it was increasingly impossible for its employees to find and share the project information they needed to do their jobs well. They discovered that employees were spending a great deal of time re-creating analysis and re-doing work that had already been done elsewhere in the company.

For example, the company discovered that engineers on one project would often re-create engineering analyses and proposals that had already been done for another project, wasting time and money. Furthermore, account managers had no central place to quickly access necessary information for clients.

The company used traditional text-based search to try to retrieve information across the enterprise, but at best it picked out only keywords from documents and tended to produce either very wide or very narrow results. Furthermore the engineers felt that looking through long lists of documents wasn't really helping them find what they needed.

When introduced to dynamic composite application or an inference engine, this company immediately saw that they could streamline project delivery processes, and eliminate much of the redundancy that was costing them time and money. Using an engine such as technology by Blanketware Corporation’s Instant Workplace, they could create a project-specific workplace for each client complete with proposals, contracts, specs, tools, discussion groups, contact information, account reports, project plans and other information from across their disparate web-facing enterprise systems. Furthermore, when integrated with the profiling functionality of their portal, they could deliver different workplaces to a project manager and an account manager, even if they entered the same search query.

Dynamic application technology provides employees much better access to the broad range of relevant information they need to do their jobs well– be they customer service, project management, human resources, corporate management, etc. As a result, employees work faster and with higher quality, spend less time looking for information, and more time helping to keep their company ahead of the competition.

This is the space Pico has jumped into – not a new space, but an emerging one (see Carmine Porco’s Search Engines Don't Suck Part I).

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© 2006 Toby Ward - Prescient Digital Media

Nothing ruins a good intranet like intranet sprawl. Dozens or hundreds if not thousands of corporate intranet sites – all using different hardware, software, content, information architectures, etc. Confusing the users, wasting money, etc.

Just ask companies like IBM or Nortel who waste millions on maintaining thousands of intranet sites. The sprawl must be contained; the monster must be tamed.

Prescient Digital Media senior consultants Julian Mills and Tom Marciniak recently conducted a workshop on doing just that – taming the monster.

All organizations that disseminate information start with a dream: multiple websites integrating seamlessly into an intranet that minimizes the effort of managing content and maximizes stakeholder satisfaction. But for too many operations, the dream has become a nightmare, a Frankenstein’s monster of mismatched components that lurch onto monitors, terrifying audiences and causing managers’ sleepless nights.

Government organizations face unique challenges when setting out to tame the monster, starting with the focus necessary to organize the task. They can’t work with the obvious profit-drivers that enable private sector organizations to assess the damage being done when a monster enters their midst, or develop the return on investment (ROI) models that tell them the dream has been realized.

The ROI for a government intranet may not be derived from increased sales or profits, but it can be rapidly developed based on improving the efficiency of sharing and disseminating information, especially during an era in which political leaders promote government efficiency. After all, government departments exist to propagate information, so any initiative that demonstrably improves this core function will have an obvious impact on organizational goals.

Read the full article Taming the Monster: Creating an effective Government Intranet

While employee retention and benefits outsourcing continue to be the rage in human resources circles, eHR are also a hot topic.

According to a report on the BenefitNews.com highlighting the research of Forrester (EBN/Forrester Research 2005 Benefits Strategy and Technology Study), nearly one-quarter of companies in a recent survey plan on implementing a benefits portal in the next two years.

Of course the big benefit of HR portals is the big time cost savings on HR administration (i.e. paper pushing). Organizational Diagnostics is a management-consulting firm in California specializing in research in high-tech Silicon Valley companies. Over the past decade, it has conducted research on the effect of employee satisfaction on employee retention.

They conclude that for every two-percent increase in employee satisfaction, there is a one-percent increase in employee retention. Put another way, to the extent that you satisfy your staff with the resources and services they need, you can reduce employee replacement costs.

“Employee self-service has well-proven benefits to business—in particular, better service to employees while cutting down on HR’s workload. And the best way to deliver HR services is through an employee portal that gives workers single sign-on access to all services,” writes Drew Robb in Unifying Your Enterprise.

At IBM, e-HR is saving the company more than $500 million a year - $284 million in e-learning alone. But the benefits are far higher than just mere dollars. Since establishing e-HR, employee satisfaction with human resources has risen from 40% to 90%. The financial impact of such an increase must be immeasurable.

As for the intranet as a whole, IBM has some other very important non-financial metrics:

• Usage and value: 80% of IBM employees access the intranet daily
• Workforce enablement: 68% view the intranet as crucial to their jobs
• Employee retention: 52% are more satisfied to be an IBM employee because of information obtained on w3

(source: Liam Cleaver, IBM, From Intranet to the On Demand Workplace)

When employees are satisfied, they stay on longer, their productivity rises and training costs fall. The combination of a higher employee job satisfaction rating, along with improved knowledge and experience, leads to better customer service.

Studies show that employees who were highly satisfied with their intranet or corporate portal also had a high level of job satisfaction. Conversely, those who were very dissatisfied with their intranet or corporate portals were much more likely to be dissatisfied with their jobs. Other research has shown that effective internal communications – often the responsibility of HR – is a driver of job satisfaction. Since the portal functions as an online communications tool, it naturally flows that a significant correlation between the effective portal and higher job satisfaction would exist.

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The world’s biggest, most expensive and troubled intranet – the U.S. Navy-Marine Corps Intranet (NMCI) – has delivered good news this week. Intranet user satisfaction for the fourth quarter ending December 2005 hit 74%. Unfortunately, user satisfaction fell 4% from 78% during the third quarter.

What’s the good news you ask? Firstly, the Navy and Marine Corps intranet team has the intelligence to ask for their soldiers, sailors, marines and civilian employees’ opinions once per quarter. NMCI is measuring and tracking user satisfaction and acting on it to improve the end product.

The second reason that this is good news is that more than 19,000 Navy and Marine Corps personnel took the time to take the survey – a survey that is done once per quarter! Now there were 141,000+ surveys sent out (big organization the Navy and Marine Corps), which is a response rate of 14%. That’s not bad given they do a survey once per month and many of those personnel are focused on saving lives. (I’ve worked with dozens of companies and their intranets and talked with hundreds of others… and there are a lot of companies that won’t free up a few thousand dollars for one survey a year! These companies prefer to guess at what their target audience needs. Shameful, but true).

The other good news this week is that the Navy has appointed a new chief to oversee the $8 billion intranet. A reorganization in the ranks made NMCI director Rear Admiral James B Godwin III the program manager mantle reporting directly to The Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Research, Development and Acquisition. The reorganization also has led to restructuring of the Navy and Marine Corps program offices as well as “realignment of server consolidations and legacy network reduction.”

Let’s hope the changes are more than just window dressing for a project riddled with issues. Rear Admiral Godwin is given the chore of cleaning-up what has been a messy project suffering from bad public relations, cost problems, vendor (EDS) issues, security issues and even a lobbyist scandal (See $9 Billion Bugs for U.S. Navy-Marine Corps Intranet and World’s Biggest Intranet and Scandal rocks world’s biggest intranet and EDS – king of intranet pain).

On another note, it looks like the Rear Admiral’s team has given the NMCI a tweaked design. Quite honestly I think it’s rather weak… but 74% user satisfaction is a far more important metric than what I think…