Merril Lynch recently completed a survey of 100 CIOs in the United States and Europe on Internet readiness.

Asking them to rate on a scale of 1 to 10 (10 being ‘finished’), the CIO's where asked how far each respective company had progressed in implementing its Internet strategy.

The average response: 6.5. That’s 65% complete.

While not a priority for the vast majority of companies my guess is that if the same question was asked about the intranet the rating would be far less – perhaps a three or a four.

A good way to take this temperature reading at your organization is to ask all of your intranet stakeholders (key stakeholders, owners or content publishers that influence the future of the intranet).

Read more on Rating your intranet readiness (my article on Communitelligence.com)

Bill Gates announced at the CEO Summit the latest and greatest intranet offers namely Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows Live Search.

• Windows Live Search has  the ability to search by:
• file shares
• SharePoint sites
• Websites
• exchange public folders
• lotus notes databases
• customer repositories

The last two options are fascinating. Microsoft knows that a lot of companies use Lotus Notes and not SharePoint. But MS wants a piece of the Lotus pie.

Customer repositories mean customer databases and CRM systems. The MS octopus tentacles are reaching further

For example, new capabilities in Windows Live Search will provide a single point of entry and user interface to unify multiple search solutions. In addition, enhancements to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 will enable people to quickly connect with other people or subject matter experts and will add options that make search capabilities available to customers that might not be able to implement a full collaboration or portal solution.

Live Search

Rich filtering and customizable controls allow users to personalize their Live Search.

For example, through a single UI, information workers will actually be able to choose when and where to search based on multiple toolbars and query refinement options. Using natural search terms, Windows Live Search can return results in whatever way makes most sense to each information worker – inline, grouped by category, etc. Powerful previews and visualizations of the data can then help people more quickly determine what action to take.

 

To illustrate, a sales representative trying to find information about a customer she plans to visit could gather the needed data by accessing Office SharePoint Server 2007, initiating a search and pulling business data from a Siebel application in addition to gathering data off her desktop using Windows Desktop Search. However, the same search could be performed from within Windows Live Search to produce all of the relevant desktop, e-mail, intranet and Internet results. Furthermore, when the sales representative clicks through the results, she will see they are actually displayed from that same window. Windows Live Search displays full results without navigating away or opening additional applications.

According to IDC estimates, the expense of not finding the information needed costs an organization employing 1,000 knowledge workers is about US$5.3 million per year. While several major vendors have invested heavily in search across the Internet, computer desktops and company intranets, the search is ultimately over once the content is found.

Microsoft doesn’t view search as a standalone activity or the end goal, but rather a means to a greater purpose of finding the information a person needs to accomplish a specific task. The fact is, merely searching for and finding information isn’t useful by itself. People must be able to create, find, use and share information. More specifically:

• Create: Give people the software tools to capture and report about their knowledge and projects.
• Find: Improve individual and organizational productivity by quickly, seamlessly and securely connecting people to relevant information and expertise.
• Use: Enable people to easily organize and manage information so they can effectively analyze and apply the data to create or do something new.
• Share: Achieve greater business success by allowing people to clearly communicate and quickly share information with other people.

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, People and Expertise Location

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 will unify information management capabilities such as portals and collaboration, enterprise content management and forms, enterprise project management, and business intelligence. In addition to helping people share information, enterprise search is also a core area of investment with enhancements in relevancy, security and scalability. The upcoming release will provide powerful new information access and management tools through the Business Data Catalog, which allows people to search for structured data in line of business applications like SAP and Siebel.

One of the key technical challenges that companies face today is identifying individuals with key undocumented relationships or expertise and tapping into it. The U.S. will soon face the largest wave of exiting information workers as the baby boomers begin their retirement years. In fact, it has been estimated that in the next seven years as many as 25 million employees will exit the workforce. When they leave, the information and relationships that they’ve built over their careers leaves with them.

Office SharePoint Server 2007 adds a new dedicated Search Center tab for searching for people. This allows customers to connect with others in new ways by grouping people search results by "social distance." In addition, by leveraging the power of Active Directory, information workers can refine their people searches by department and job title.

A new add-on called Knowledge Network for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, expected to be available with the 2007 Microsoft Office system later this year, will further extend people and expertise search capabilities. Knowledge Network for SharePoint Server 2007 creates an automated profile that each user reviews before publishing to a server, making it easy to identify people by their undocumented knowledge and relationships.

For instance, to find someone in an organization with a specific skill, a person could enter search terms such as “C# programmer” and then refine the search by job title and department to find the appropriate levels of expertise. Information workers can even initiate a "brokered" introduction that leverages relationships across the organization to connect with other people by using the "Find People Who Know this Person" feature. The results then show the shortest path to a person by ‘social distance.’

Watch the Bill Gates webcast of this announcement: http://www.microsoft.com/events/executives/billgates.mspx

The greatest barrier to intranet success is politics. Technology, budget, skillset are all secondary barriers. The intranet is a political football.

Why is the intranet so political?

Well, most intranets are still viewed as cost centers and they don’t grab the attention and focus of senior management. As such, the current state and evolution of the intranet is left to middle managers mostly in communications, IT and HR who have limited power and decision-making ability, and a limited budget. However, the intranet represents the entire organization, not just a department, business unit or silo. Therefore, communications, IT, HR and all the other business units and corporate departments are left to cooperate and collaborate on a single channel representing all.

This cooperation and collaboration is of course usually in the absence of little or no direction from senior management. So, the kids are left to themselves to play nicely. Uh-oh.

Of course all know by now that….

• Communications sees the world quite differently than IT
• IT views the intranet far differently than HR
• HR are not technologists and are focused on people
• Business units have a laser like focus on their own markets and profit & loss
• Finance cares about the bottom-line which is not a driver of intranets
• Etc., etc.

And so the predictable happens: CONFLICT.

• Conflict over vision
• Conflict over ownership
• Conflict over application priority
• Conflict over content
• Etc., etc.

With predictable conflict, little consensus and no direction from senior management, the intranet stalls. Often, it stalls for years.

An additional problem lies with the traditional growth and evolution of the intranet. Initially, when intranets first came online in the early to mid-1990s, they were nothing more than a web brochure (a.k.a. ‘brochureware’) that sat on a small server under the desk of a Web developer who served as designer, writer and Webmaster.

Over time the intranet grows into disparate fiefdoms of many dozens or hundreds or thousands of independent intranets with incredibly confusing and differing navigation schemes, layouts, designs, etc.

Eventually someone catches on and says, “Hey – this is crazy! We have to consolidate these sites!” With the rational consolidation of intranet sites and services under a central site or portal, disparate departments and stakeholders such as corporate communications, human resources, IT and varying business units now must cooperate under a lone umbrella with a single intranet home page. Along with this ‘forced’ cooperation comes the predictable politics and competition for ownership of the intranet.

© 2006 Toby Ward - Prescient Digital Media

"Visual appeal can be assessed within 50 milliseconds, suggesting that Web designers have about 50 milliseconds to make a good impression," according to Dr. Gitte Lindgaard of Carleton University in a recent e-commerce Times article about a report published in the journal Behaviour & Information Technology.

Personally, I think that there is far too much emphasis on website and design. “We’re doing a redesign” is a common turn of phrase meant to convey a complete restructuring of the intranet or website, but it in fact emphasizes the look-and-feel. In my experience, the user, your target audience, determines what is important.

Most users ultimately are after content and it’s the navigation and content structure (information architecture) that determines their success in finding and using that content. Ensuring successful content, navigation and structure requires very strong planning and resources. Design and layout are key influencers, but they are not as critical as content and structure.

Prescient’s Catherine Elder writes that “design is meant to facilitate understanding in communicating a message.  Therefore, design has to be strategic and not just for the sake of being cool.  In Design III: Making and sustaining a good first impression, Catherine spells out some of the key elements and rules for effective web and intranet design:

• Good design – effectively using color, fonts and graphics
• Mind your manners – follow your brand and style standards including use of logos, typeface, color, use of photos and graphics, and position.
• Be consistent; even if you break the rules do so in a consistent manner.
• Understand your users.
• Follow your site strategy to fulfill set business requirements that you are measuring.

Read more of Design III: Making and sustaining a good first impression.

RELATED READING:

Design I: Making your site pretty can get ugly
Design II: Structure comes before design

Intranet Design Wars

Top intranets of 2006 – more than design

Don’t believe the hype; the portal is not a silver bullet.

In fact, the technology itself is only one small part of the equation. As far as cost goes, the cost to buy and license a portal solution is often a fraction of the cost. The time to implement the technology and to develop policies and processes to ensure it works according to plan can take months if not years. And lets not forget about the plan; a portal needs a detailed plan with objectives and measurable goals.

Janus Boye explains why portal products are “much less out-of-the-box” than expected in Enterprise Portals: Tip of Which Iceberg?:

There is an important caveat to all the generalizations above: portal implementations frequently differ with respect to scope. Some portals are designed to span an entire enterprise, while others seek to fulfil a specific business mission, often at a departmental level. Not surprisingly, different vendors target different scenarios. All vendors in the Enterprise Portals Report call their products "enterprise portals," but the reality is that they do better and worse across different use cases and vary substantially in complexity and cost.

Consider as an example the popular Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server, which may be a good fit for workgroup document sharing, but quite weak for e-business and self-service scenarios that involve participants from beyond the enterprise.

Read Enterprise Portals: Tip of Which Iceberg?

Since you’re reading this blog, you’ve bought into the value of social media. Web 2.0 and all of the social media tools that come with it – blogs, wikis, podcasts, RSS, etc. But your CIO is likely not a Web 2.0 convert.

A new survey by CIO magazine (see reveals the extent of their apathy. Not only have few CIOs implemented such social media tools in their own organizations, few even use them in their personal surfing of the Internet.

Only 36% of CIOs use blogs. Wow. Less use wikis, social tagging and podcasts.

CIOs are mostly pretty dam smart. Now it’s somewhat surprising that more aren’t reading blogs and using RSS to prioritize their reading, but I also know they’re extremely busy people.

As for implementing inside the enterprise, social media is not even on the radar.

Fine by me. I’ve seen enough intranets and enterprise applications and most CIOs have far bigger fish to fry. E-commerce, ERP, employee self-service, intranet and/or portal are all far bigger and more valuable priorities.

There’s a reason why social media is not a big priority. Get the house in order first and then worry about employee blogging. But do join us in the 21^st century and start using some of these new fangled toys in your spare time...

(Tip of hat to Carm Porco >> for highlighting the survey).

RELATED READING:

Blogging the intranet  

IBM leads corporate blogging pack

Study: Intranet blogging on the rise

McDonald’s beefs-up intranet blogs

Case study: PNM Resources CEO blog

© 2006 Toby Ward - Prescient Digital Media