The default home to 16,000 Google employees is Moma, the given name for the Google intranet. Moma’s mission: “Organize Google’s information and make it accessible and useful to Googlers.”

 

 

 

The Google intranet home page, with key content ‘greyed-out’

 

What the Google Intranet Looks Like is a case study look at the Google intranet, written by unofficial Google Bloggers Philipp Lenssen & Tony Ruscoe:

“On the top of the Google intranet homepage, you’ll find the logo reading “Moma - Inside Google.” Next to it is a search box allowing you to find information from Moma in general, information on specific Google employees, information on availability of meeting rooms, building maps and more. You can choose to include secure content or not via a checkbox. Another checkbox offers you to use “Moma NEXT" for a more experimental variant of search results.

 

To the top right, there’s an option to switch to iMoma, an iGoogle-style tool prepared by the company which allows further customization of the intranet start page. This way, employees may be able to select their own news and service widgets of interest to be displayed when they log-in.

 

The actual content of the homepage in the picture is split up into 4 columns. To the left, there’s a “My Office” section, with information for employees and a way to choose your own office for more relevant links. It’s followed by the sections “Survival Kit” and “My shortcuts.” In the middle columns, news gadgets are headlined “Welcome to Google!,” “Communications,” “HR” (human resources), “Company Info” and “Internal Google news,” all in common soft shades of Google base colors. The right column is listing Google teams."

This is a very limited, scatter-shot case study but it has some interesting screens.

 

The Official Google Enterprise Blog provides some insight into Google’s own intranet search engine with a sanitized screenshot of the search results produced on Moma.

 

 

Google’s Enterprise Product Manager Cyrus Mistry explains:

“This is an actual live screenshot (with some data sanitization, of course) showing what users see once they query for 'gfs'. You'll see that, in addition to the highly relevant search results, the user is able to see a variety of useful OneBox implementations such as Googler information and user-created bookmarks, they can segment their search to just tech documents, they can narrow their search even further, or, they can add their own KeyMatch if they didn't find the result they wanted.”

On a side note... Lessen & Roscoe say that a lot of Google employees don’t use Google’s own social networking site, and instead prefer to use Facebook…. Oh well, follow the leader J

 

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MORE INTRANET CASE STUDIES:

Intranet case study: HP

Intranet case study: British Airways intranet

Intranet case study: Canon Australia

Intranet case study: Atomic Energy Employee Portal

Intranet case study: Fidelity Investments (webinar)

Intranet portal case study: Vanguard Group Intranet

Intranet case study: McDonald’s Intranet

Intranet case study: SimCorp

Best practices case study: Sodexho USA

Intranet case study: Lowe & Partners

Intranet case study: Intrawest Placemaking

Intranet Case Study: Ericsson Group

Intranet case study: Perkins Eastman

Leading intranet case study: IBM’s W3

Intranet portal case study:

Intranet case study: General Motors (GM)

 

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Part art, but mostly science, information architecture should have little to do with best practices, and more to do with the needs of the target audience. In other words, other companies with successful intranets don’t necessarily translate effectively to your intranet; you need to understand what will work for employees.

Simply put, information architecture (IA) is a method of organizing or classifying information. It the world of intranets, an IA is most commonly represented as a site map or flow chart with the home page at the top, and the major sections or parent groups represented below.

 

Tertiary or third tier pages and sections are represented below those sections and connected by lines (like those in an organization chart) representing the working links between pages and sections.

 

In a recent study of some 56 intranets represented in a new report on Intranet Information Architecture by the Nielsen Norman Group, the study reveals that there are some sections or labels in the top parent group or major section pages that are quite ubiquitous including:

 

• News
• Human resources
• Company information

Nonetheless, what works in one organization does not necessarily work in another. News will ring as meaningful in most organizations but Policies can have a different meaning from one organization to the next; hence the need to understand employee culture and language when developing an intranet IA.

 

Just to give you a sample, here are the major parent or section labels at the top of the IA for five recent intranet clients of Prescient Digital Media (some were developed by Prescient, others represent an IA developed by the client prior to Prescient working with it):

 

1. Inside company – Our Business – People Place
2. News – Products / Services – Client Connect – Circulars – People
3. My company – Our projects – Our company – Individual spec – Specialties – Tools, forms & links – Help
4. Our Company – Marketing – Bus Develop & Program Mgmt – Employee Needs & HR – Internal Resources – Help
5. About company – News – How do I? – Employee Central – Organization – Customers – Processes

Frankly, I think some of the IAs and labels are appalling poor. But does my opinion count? What are the best practices that should be applied to these companies and their intranet IA? Or is the employee perspective the most important criteria?

 

The employee perspective trumps best practices every time. I have no clue what ‘Client Connect’ is but you can bet that the client’s employees do. That’s not to say that outside expertise and best practices should be ignored, they should be weighed and considered and used to influence the IA. Nor does it mean that better labels can't necessarily be found...

 

Each of the companies represented by the IAs above range in size from hundreds to tens of thousands of employees, and each represent incredibly diverse industries. Each has their own culture, their own vernacular, and most importantly, a ‘heritage information architecture’.

 

This last point is critical, and often discounted at many organizations by many consultants who want to showcase their ‘expertise’ in IA by reinventing a company’s information vernacular. If every employee in the organization has been using an intranet for years, and has very often used the HR section that is a well-known destination, does it make sense to rename it as ‘People’ or ‘My Work’...? Probably not, but it’s the employees’ decision.

 

There are four key tools for engaging employees to help craft and test and IA:

 

• Usability testing
• Card sorting
• Focus groups
• Log (metrics) analysis

Using multiple tools judiciously and impartially are tantamount to developing a successful architecture. Collectively, employees know the best IA for the organization (did you know that for the old ‘guess the jellybeans in the jar’ that the average guess of all the guesses is almost always closer than the closest guess? Think about it….)

 

Tapping employee knowledge requires care and skill without prejudice and an appreciation for the unique culture of the organization. An information architecture should principally be driven and designed by employees, with the outside influence of best practices, but not at the expense of common sense and cultural legacy.

 

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Employee use of Facebook while at work could have or broach upon some serious security issues not necessarily seen on the surface. The use of Facebook as a developers platform for all sorts of tools and applications that use and promote personal information should catch the attention of corporate security folks.

ZDNet’s Phil Windley correctly postulates about the potential problems and the potential Pandora’s box for secure and highly confidential corporate information (see Social networking needs identity delegation strategies)…

"Ever since Facebook opened its platform to outside developers, thousands of applications have been built on top of Facebook. Some have tens of thousands of users and have become part of the everyday experience for many Facebook customers. The viral nature of Facebook means that well designed applications spread like wildfire.

Many of these applications ask users to enter their credentials for some other service so that they can provide a Facebook interface. Unfortunately, users are all too willing to do that if the application offers even a small benefit. Often these applications use the user’s credentials to find the email addresses for the user’s associates in the service and invites them to start using it. 

Suppose, for example, that someone wrote a PeopleSoft application for Facebook (maybe someone already has) that worked through user credentials. When you set it up, it asks for your username and password in PeopleSoft and then authenticates as you and starts digging around. You get a nice dashboard widget of your PeopleSoft data on Facebook, the app gets a ton of data. 

In an age where more and more organizations are deploying single sign-on solutions across the enterprise this is downright dangerous. The credentials you give might be the key to everything including your 401K account and direct deposit access on the employee portal. Yipes!

You don’t think your employees would do this? After all, it’s against policy isn’t it? Think again. I found in some non-scientific surveying that people don’t equate typing their login credentials into a Facebook application with giving them to a co-worker or friend. You may want to clarify that before the trouble starts."

Not convinced?

Check out this story from Forrester’s Charlene Li who made an online purchase that was advertised to all her friends via her Facebook profile thanks to the Facebook Beacon application (see Close encounter with Facebook Beacon):

"Earlier this week, I bought a coffee table on Overstock.com. When I next logged into Facebook and saw this at the top of my newsfeed… (Facebook directly referencing the exact purchase, the exact product (a coffee table) with name and a link to the product, made by Charlene herself).

I was pretty surprised to see this, because I received no notification while I was on Overstock.com that they had the Facebook Beacon installed on the site. If they had, I would have turned it off.  

I used my personal email address to buy the coffee table, so I was puzzled why and how this "personal" activity was being associated with my "public" Facebook profile.  

Facebook Beacon is merely a small piece of script that allows the partner site to put a cookie on your  browser. So when I bought the table, an Overstock cookie was created, which then transferred the information to Facebook. Facebook then checks to see that the same browser is logged into Facebook, and shows the information. I'm not sure of all of the details, but I suspect that if I had logged into my "personal" Facebook account first (yes, I have two Facebook accounts and unless you know my personal email, you won't find my truly personal Facebook profile), that Overstock activity would have been logged to that Facebook profile."

I’m a big fan of Facebook, but it poses some serious security and privacy concerns for more than just individuals. Corporate IT and Security officials would do well to not only monitor Facebook activity, but to intimately know and understand the types of applications being used and developed for the Facebook community. 

Cavaet emptor (buyer beware).

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RELATED READING:

Facebook used as an ‘underground’ intranet

Serena Software Adopts Facebook as Corporate Intranet

The Facebook Revolution

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Almost 1 in 3 users find their company intranet is not useful in relation to daily work, according to the Annual Intranet Research Report by the Irish Computer Society (ICS).

 

Hardly surprising as most executives don’t give a dam about the intranet and are too stupid to see the potential value of the intranet to the greater organization. These are the same dolts that pay cheap lip service to “investing in employees” and the need to become “an employer of choice” in face of the great talent crunch. The intranet is a cost center, and as long as they continue to view the intranet as a “cost” and not an “investment”, the intranet will continue to suffer from chronic under-funding and deliver little value to the average employee.

 

This is not the case in some organizations, but the intranet is sub-par in the vast majority of organizations. The numbers in this report, with a sample of over 2000 companies, prove exactly how sub-par the intranet is:

• Half of all users find the Search function on their company intranet ineffective.
• 80% believe navigation and search need improvement.
• 2 out of 3 company intranets fail to provide an accessible or text only version.
• 1 in 3 users find it difficult to access the right information on their company intranet.
• Accessing staff and personal contact details like phone directories represents the most common recurring activity.
• 70% describe their intranet as 'A communication and information resource'.
• Almost half say they don't actually use the company intranet to support their daily work.
• Over 50% say they have remote access to intranet from home or mobile device.

Before you argue and try to convince me that this is only a research report and findings from Ireland only (that is correct), I’ll tell you the findings would almost be identical in North America and most other European countries too. Some in fact would be worse.

 

Tom Skinner, Managing Director of pTools Software, is kinder in his assessment but you can read between the lines: “Although the trend is towards more sophisticated development, getting the basics right is essential for intranet end-users and that the research showed a healthy level of intranet development but also a recognition of the need for improvement.”

 

Here’s another telling quote from the report which I could not say better myself: “The ICS 2007 research confirms that getting the simple things right delivers the most powerful results for end-users and getting them wrong causes the most frustration and dissatisfaction.”

 

View the entire ICS 2007 Intranet Research Report (undertaken by Amarach Consulting and sponsored by pTools Software for CSI).

 

Read last year’s results and my analysis: Slack employees fail to take advantage of the intranet.

 

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Canon Australia has an extensive portal-based intranet, known as iCON, for a number of years. As detailed in a very thorough case study from Australia’s Step Two Designs “the intranet continued to grow and expand, eventually being given the mandate to deliver to a diverse range of audiences, including both internal and external users (effectively creating an extranet).

 

 

Canon Australia intranet portal (wireframe)

 

“This widening of the audience prompted a re-evaluation of the intranet, with the goal of ensuring that the site is effective in meeting the needs of current and future users (see Intranet redesign for Canon Australia).”

 

In mid-2006, Canon sought the assistance of Step Two Designs to begin the process of evaluating and redesigning iCON.

 

The redesign project consisted of two phases: needs analysis and redesign. The analysis included:

 

·         interviews with a variety of staff

·         stakeholders ‘alignment’ workshop

·         analysis of usage data

·         heuristic inspection of the current site

·         task analysis

 

Key issues identified in the analysis and driving the redesign included those that are common to many enterprise intranets:

 

·         Inconsistent employee use

·         Frontline staff lack key information

·         Information is difficult to find

·         Organizational silos block information sharing

 

“Once the site structure had been finalized and tested, page layouts (or ‘wireframes’)

were prepared for key pages, including the home page, key navigation pages, content pages, and other special pages (such as search results),” writes Step Two’s Patrick Kennedy, a user experience specialist.

 

“Wireframes aim to convey the content and functionality of a site, without applying the full visual design. Whilst some aspects will change as the visual design is developed (and implemented) the finished site should reflect the wireframes at its core because they are based on usability principles, and more importantly, the needs analysis that was conducted.”

 

Departing from the ‘traditional’ home page intranet design Canon is rolling out a personalized home page.

 

This is a very well done case study from Step Two which you can read in full: Intranet redesign for Canon Australia

 

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“There is no evidence that online networking sites are producing anything of real economic value,” said Theresa Wise, global director at Accenture’s digital media practice at a Broadband World Forum session in Paris.

 

“Big brands do not always lend themselves to social networking websites, as Web 2.0 users aren’t always receptive to them,” she added. “There is no evidence that these sites are monetizeable.”

 

Well, I take issue with Ms. Wise. Her guesswork may be applicable to some, perhaps even most corporations, but definitely not all.

 

Read my complete article “Little financial value in Web 2.0” (Content Matters)

 

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