A study by Hospitals & Health Networks (www.healthconnect.com) has found that the United States’ “100 Most Wired hospitals and health systems have, on average, risk-adjusted mortality rates that are 7.2 percent lower than other hospitals.” In other words, the study suggests that IP technology (Internet and intranet) is saving lives.

IBM measures a like statistic on impact of the intranet on the work health or well-being of its employees. IBM has one of the great intranets. And perhaps the biggest on the planet. They’re particularly good at measuring the success and performance of its main intranet portal, W3.

Regarding the work health or job satisfaction of their employees, 52% are more satisfied to be an IBM employee because of information obtained on W3 (the enterprise intranet home). Wow – what a great metric! Every company with an intranet should measure this.

Here are a couple of other great intranet metrics from IBM (compliments of IBM intranet gurus Michael Reither and Liam Cleaver):

• Workforce enablement: 68% view the intranet as crucial to their jobs
• Usage and value: 80% of IBM employees access the intranet daily
• ROI: Annual financial impact of the intranet at IBM is $1.31 billion

More than a billion dollars is very healthy indeed!

The Center for Media Research reports that professional workers are spending more and more time searching for information. The survey, HotTopics: 2001 vs. 2005: Research Study Reveals Dramatic Changes Among Information Consumers, commissioned by Outsell, reveals that professionals on average spend 11 hours per week gathering information – up from 8 hours per week in 2001.

Professionals are also looking to alternatives to the Internet with the corporate intranet being one of the winning alternatives.

As reported on V-Fluence, the survey reveals “67 percent of professionals now go to the open Web for information, versus 79 percent in 2001. Fifteen percent rely on their corporate intranets (up from 5 percent), and nine percent consult their colleagues (up from 5 percent). In addition when seeking information fewer now prefer to get it themselves (51% down from 68%) preferring to rely on regularly scheduled updates, members of their team, or their library.

Today's professionals spend 53 percent of their time seeking out information. Collectively, the time spent gathering and looking for information translates to an estimated. 5.4 billion lost hours per year for US corporations.”

The trend underscores a long held and regularly repeated belief that our ability to create information has outstripped our ability to accurately find and effectively use this information.

While search engines can help, they can also be a hindrance. As I wrote two years ago in The Search Isn’t Broken, We’re Broken, “One of the major and universal frustrations heard from Internet and intranet users alike is that corporate search engines "suck". But, are search engines the real problem, or is the issue more complex?

Despite "leaps and bounds" progress in search technology, which is quite advanced, compared to other Web technologies, inaccurate and irrelevant search results continually defeat users performing search queries. Though some search engines may be sub-par, the more likely problem is an absence of people processes and rules for managing information. 

How many times have you been to a website where the title heading is either the URL or is missing altogether? And, how often have you searched a corporate site for product information only to be given endless results that link to press releases that are three or four years old? Poorly organized and often out-of-date information frustrates users and erodes productivity.

“I think searching has become a more difficult process for everyone; this has less to with the quality of search engines and more to do with the meteoric growth in data,” says Josh Mugele, Director of Product Management at Semio, a California-based indexing and categorization technology company. “With more to search through, it's difficult for search engines to maintain high levels of both precision and recall.”

Despite all the hype about blogs and wikis, content management continues to a major driver of the corporate intranet. And productivity continues to be the principal driver for both intranet and content management.

Just this morning I had a client conference call with a Fortune 100 company and they reiterated that the number one issue or driver that will resonate with senior management’s acceptance and sponsorship of the intranet is ‘productivity’.

A recent study by IDC Canada, “The Push for Productivity: Provenance, Governance, and the Management of Content Assets” highlights that research continues to show that productivity remains the top issue for senior business management. The report provides the linkage to content management: “This focus on productivity provides a meaningful framework for content management objectives and activities.”

Furthermore it also highlights that content management is a business solution, not just a technology. “IT management needs to support information-based organizational agility and employee use.... to align IT activities with business objectives.”

Interestingly enough the study finds that only 42% of “general population” user organization generate all of their content internally.” The vast majority of most organizations with users (employees) that use (online) content have a combination of internal content and content from outside sources.

In other words, a lot of companies are buying content. Whether its news, or reports, data and analysis, content is a commodity.

Of course this issue of internal and external content probably sets off a lot of alarm bells for most as it does with me. Namely the key issues of security and governance. And there’s the rub: “Effective governance (policies, standards, ownership, etc.) will be critical to content-related success. The data suggests that content will continue to become more valuable, and that as it does, it is subject to unauthorized use by customers and business partners. Organization will need to take appropriate steps to safeguard content assets. At the same time, effective content management plays an essential role in enabling compliance with regulatory environments. There are multiple links between governance and content. There are multiple links between governance and content, which highlights the need for effective management in this area.”

Unfortunately, according to the study’s findings, only 13% of respondent companies  have “formal enforceable policies applying to all content within their organization that govern the length of time that content can be stored.”

In his May 23 Useit.com column Jakob Nielsen talks about intranet design and how more and more intranets are beginning to look alike.

“Homepage layouts are becoming more and more similar over time,” writes Nielsen in the Canonical Intranet Home Page.

With some exceptions of course, he’s right. More and more organizations and consultants are getting smart about universal practices with respect to layout, usability and content. Design is also being driven by off-the-shelf portal and content management solutions that standardize the design and layout.

Ultimately, if the designing organization knows the user audience well, then it probably understands that “speed wins.”

Employees want speed: to get information as fast as possible.

To achieve the speed principle, design takes a backseat to ‘effective information’ retrieval. As such, by default, design begins to become homogenous with other successful intranets that adhere to universal usability and layout practices.

Where I tend to diverge from Nielsen’s thinking is the emphasis he puts on usability and design. If you read his annual Intranet Design reports you might be left with the impression that usability and design were the two most important elements of a successful intranet.

Truth of the matter, based on my years of experience working with several dozen organizations, is that usability and design take a back seat to content and planning. In fact, Prescient Digital Media has a methodology for evaluating and scoring the value of an intranet and usability and design each account for about 13% of an intranet’s value while content and planning & resources (including governance, process, people, and funding) account for 50% of a site’s value.

Nonetheless, an intranet’s design should support and enhance the organization’s brand and culture while ensuring that employees are able to get the information they want, when they want, as quick as possible.

If you want to focus your intranet energies on any one or two areas, focus on content and process.

(Contribution from Catherine Elder) Your boss, usually in passing, tells you “by the way, I thought you could be our Webmaster.” You preen at the added responsibility, the show of confidence in your abilities, and the fact that Master will be part of your title. You pause to wonder if the job comes with a black belt or maybe a whip and chair. “It shouldn’t be much work” your boss tosses out with a wave. You slump a little, the pride you felt suddenly diminished by the off-hand comment.

Still you take the added role to heart. You look up information on coding and designing web pages on the Internet. You take courses in html, FrontPage and/or Dreamweaver, maybe even Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and Flash. You discover JavaScript and active server pages, and the list goes on. Soon you’re inundated. Everyone walks around saying “Just put it on the web” not having an inkling of the processes or the work involved. Processes that you had to develop because everything was a priority and they wanted it to be accessible from everywhere. But they say please, maybe throw you a compliment or two, or even pull rank. They also ask you to do a “quick spell check, maybe edit it if it doesn’t sound right and hey, can you add a cool graphic?” Then they add the backhanded compliment “it shouldn’t take you long.”

You mention to your boss that your job has really changed; all this web stuff should be added to your job description and hopefully to your compensation, as it has become a major part of your job. Your boss, or someone in HR, tells you that you’ll have to write your own job description – after all, you’re the only one that knows what you do. So you rewrite your job description to include editor, designer, project manager, tactician, negotiator, communications, technical advisor and other relevant descriptors. Your boss looks at you in surprise after reading it – you do all this? You raise your eyebrows and wonder if it’s still too late to ask for a whip.

This story isn’t just mine; I’ve heard it repeated several times by new and not so new webmasters. It’s not surprising that with the advent of websites in the 90’s the role of managing and designing them should grow organically rather than as a structured career. I recently heard someone say that with a content management system (CMS) they can all be webmasters and I cringed. While it’s true that the role of webmaster will gradually change with CMS’s there is still a need for managing, designing, and editing – whether done by one person or not, websites still need to be the responsibility of one person that understands their strategic value. A CMS is a great way to allow content owners direct input and control, but make no mistake, somewhere there needs to be someone saying yea or nea to what is going on on your website. And I still think a whip is a good idea…