I wrote two different blog articles today, and one seemingly contradicts the other. But only seemingly because the intranet, in many respects, is much like the Internet -- but it is dramatically different.

The content spawned revolution

Web content is revolutionizing business. Web content is revolutionizing life. Web content is revolutionizing the World.

Skeptical? Not sold? Need proof? Here are some numbers…

• People click on web links 100-billion times per day
• Five of the top 10 most visited websites are user-generated content sites that did not exist a couple of years ago
• There are well in excess of 100-million accounts on MySpace – and growing at a rate of nearly 250,000 per day
• 1 out of 8 couples married last year in the U.S. met online

     Read The content spawned revolution (Content Matters)

If you build it, they will not come...

A reprise my two most recent posts on intranet usage and increasing intranet traffic. In short, Great intranets inspire use, but also are supported by marketing. To build an intranet is not enough to inspire employee use. Like most things in business, the intranet has to be marketed so those employees that are not keeners and propeller-heads will come and visit.

     Read If you build it, they will not come... (Intranet Insider)

Employees aren’t dumb; they’re not going to use the intranet if it offers little value. However, many, many intranets deliver value, but don't get the employee traffic expected. In fact, quite often, if you build it, they will not come.

One of the reasons why even the best intranets need to be marketed to employees is that computer-based workers are often exceptionally busy and do not have time to explore and surf the intranet. Field workers, sales staff and manufacturing employees have even less time. They need to be educated as to what the intranet offers and why it is of value to both them as individual workers and also to the organization as a whole. Employees need to be ‘sold’.

Here are 5 tips for driving traffic and marketing the intranet:

1-     Default home page – make the intranet home page the unalterable default home page for every employee browser. A very small minority of employees will complain during the first week after the change, but those complaints will disappear quickly if the home page is updated frequently.

2-     E-newsletter – send out a weekly or twice weekly e-newsletter to employee mailboxes with news highlights and links to the full content on the intranet.

3-     CEO involvement – publish reqular Q&A stories with the CEO, and/or webcasts, and/or a hosted online chat.

4-     Contests – nothing sells like a prize. Reward usage and readers with prizes by hosting online contests or quizzes (polls).

5-     Sticky tools – think beyond news, forms and policies to ‘sticky’ tools that aren’t critical to the business, but will be popular with employees including cafeteria menus, online classifieds, weather forecasts, employee discounts, etc.

It goes without saying that if the intranet does not provide valuable content and tools in a user-friendly context that employees won’t use the intranet regardless of your marketing and promotion. However, even great intranets need to be marketed so that when you build it, they will come.

Ericsson Group Function is the colossal infrastructure unit of the cellular telecommunications giant Ericsson with 100 million subscribers on 100 networks. With some 25,000 employees, mostly engineers, Ericsson Group is a large, challenging environment of passionate and intellectually driven knowledge workers.

Like most large companies, Ericsson Group’s intranet evolved in a scattered, free-for-all approach with many groups developing their own intranet site their own way, with their own technology, and without any enterprise standards or collaboration with other groups and entities. Ericsson’s biggest intranet challenge was rationalizing a fragmented content, style and platforms set-up across the organization.

In fact, the free-for-all intranet created a grossly bloated network of 4,000 intranet sites representing more than 4-million pages.

Ericsson Group intranet portal

Ericsson’s intranet goals focused on developing a centralized platform and standards, and finding scales of economy and cohesion across the enterprise. In 2003, Ericsson Group took the first steps towards a single intranet and platform by rationalizing (shutting-down) many intranet sites and standardizing content development, design and navigation. Instead of 4,000 sites and 4+ million pages, the new intranet is limited now to just 80-thousand pages.The rationalization and standardization program led to triple-digit ROI and savings in the millions of dollars.

Despite a successful rationalizing, like many other successful companies that have blazed such a trail with their intranet, additional problems persisted on the Ericsson intranet:

• End users continued to complain about the difficulty finding information
• IT complained that the infrastructure was too complex, expensive and difficult to maintain
• The business maintained that more processes needed to be ‘webified’ with more support for sales, and greater cost savings
• Publishers complained that publishing through the CMS (Interwoven) was too complex and time-consuming

In order to address these challenges Ericsson moved to an integrated web philosophy and a centralized portal platform. “Through this integrated, single portal platform, web customers, partners and employees get access to specific content and functionality based on their profile,” says Mats Renee, Director of Marketing Communications and head of the intranet for Ericsson Group Function.

The new Ericsson portal (powered by IBM’s Websphere) is a personalized intranet based on employee profile, role, business unit and location. Other benefits include:

• The portal encourages re-use of content where input fields (tags) are based on the editor’s profile
• Content can be published once and re-used in multiple areas (powered by Interwoven Teamsite)
• The organizational structure is no longer ‘hard-coded’ in the portal, which eliminates the need for painful content migration efforts
• Users can find needed content more quickly with access to selected content and tools based on the user’s profile
• Role-based content access also increases security

Instead of organizing the intranet by the company structure the intranet is now grouped intuitively for employees by eight major categories:

• Workplace
• Products & Services
• Sales & Marketing
• News & Events
• Projects
• Support
• Unit Info
• Employee Info

The portal is owned by Ericsson Group Communications, but the governance is decentralized and split according to area:

• Channel strategy and design
• Web platform and technology
• Category management

Marketing communications owns the design and strategy, and IT owns the technology. The content however is decentralized so that while Marketing Communications owns the content strategy and standards, each group and content author owns their own content while using the centralized platform to manage the content.

To launch pages on the intranet, all content owners and authors have to adhere to strict standards that are outlined in some detail on a governance site called WebCOM. WebCOM details all the necessary information for creating and managing pages including technical, security, editorial and design standards for Ericsson. Everything a content owner/publisher needs to know about the web is detailed on WebCOM including:

• Launching a website
• Maintaining a website
• Shutting down a website
• Rules and directives
• Guidelines
• A-Z Glossary
• FAQ
• Training
• News
• Help (Support)

The intranet has a balanced scorecard that tracks its performance on several levels including ROI, brand and user satisfaction. User satisfaction is measured at least once per year and averages a 3.5 out of 5 (70%).

While developing a successful intranet has taken years and mountains of effort, Mats share some of the key lessons from the evolving experience of:

• Focus on the low hanging fruit
• Rationalize and consolidate where possible to streamline the platform and organization
• Take an incremental, pilot implementation approach rather than big bang implementations
• A significant amount of money can often be saved by stopping all initiatives that are not in line with strategy and roadmap (e.g. through Governance support process)
• Align budgets/projects with all stakeholders involved in executing the roadmap(s)
• Balance revenue generating and cost saving initiatives based on ROI analysis

A key to Ericsson’s intranet success is the support and involvement of senior management. “As in any change management program you need senior management support,” adds Mats. “And from the migration point of view, we did not get up to speed until we have a commitment from them.”

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ON A PERSONAL NOTE: Congratulations to the Vancouver Canucks and their fans on a an extraordinary tough first series victory (I've had to show remarkable restraint for a 30+ year fan and take all my Canuck thoughts, fanaticism and angst to a seperate blog, Canucks blog).

I haven't had the time to wipe this horrific Windows Vista from my computer. I tried to uninstall a program and after taking 5 minutes to figure out where Windows now hides that option, Windows wouldn't let me uninstall a simple program. After trying a second time it froze my computer and I had to re-boot. 20 minutes wasted and I still can't uninstall a program. This has to be one of the worst pieces of software I've ever owned. I am going to make time next week to uninstall this crap. Eventually I will switch to Apple. I'm tired of being manipulated by MS.

Also I cannot stand IE 7.0. Why is it that you can't right click and copy text anymore? Brutal.

“How many visits a day/month should we get to our intranet?” It’s a common question I hear often (but for some reason I haven’t explicitly written about until now).

There is no rule of thumb because every organization is different and usage depends on a number of things including:

• Corporate culture (value of communications)
• Employee access (% with direct access to intranet)
• Web competency (ability and comfort level using the intranet by employees)
• Intranet value (is the intranet any good? Does it inspire use?)

If however the organization has a healthy culture and places a high value on communications where employees want to the use the intranet (and have access) because the intranet is of value then a large majority of your employees should be accessing it every week.

Here are some examples by some leading companies with great intranets:

• Nordea: 70-80% of the employees visit the portal every day
• HP:  95% of employees use the intranet on a monthly basis
• British Airways: 94% of all employees access the intranet every month
• IBM: 80% of all employees access the intranet daily
• DaimlerChrysler: 70% of all users in Germany — including 120,000 blue-collar workers — log in at least once per month
• Microsoft: 60% employees visit MSW once a day or more, and an additional 25% use MSW at least a few times per week 

If traffic or usage of your corporate intranet or portal is less than the examples above (factoring in access and competency) then your intranet is likely underperforming. In other words, the intranet isn’t very good and is not living up to the potential.

Usage and employee traffic will only be as good as the intranet and (the access to it) with mitigating factors for culture and competency.

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The cart isn’t just put before the horse in most organizations, the cart is thrown ahead and the horse is thrown to the fire.

Far too many people ask me to recommend a good content management system or portal or search engine. These same people are way over their heads. It’s the equivalent of me asking you, “what’s a good medicine to take?”

“I don’t know,” you might ask. “What ails you? Do you have any allergies? Are you taking any other medications? Any complications I should know about?”

And that’s the problem with most of your crappy intranets – you refuse to ask the right questions to find out specifically what is wrong, and what needs to be solved. Instead you jump right to the medication. Of course, this doesn’t apply to all of you, but it does apply to most.

At the risk of oversimplifying a complex system, a successful intranet has 3 big ingredients:

1. People - The right people
2. Process - Well defined processes
3. Technology - The most appropriate technology

If you have not defined the people (roles and responsibilities, ownership and requirements) and process (governance and publishing, standards and policies) then forget about the technology. The technology will only confuse, distract and undermine your efforts – because you probably picked the wrong solution (more likely, you were SOLD the wrong solution).

Moving beyond the 'big 3', here’s the more detailed model of success that we use at Prescient, the Nexus of Intranet Success (recently refined):

PEOPLE

The single greatest and most important thing that you can do as an intranet manager is to secure the active support of an executive champion. Not just any old VP, but someone on the executive management team – the President or someone who reports directly to the President and has political clout and financial influence.

Many organizations have intranets that are mid-management or grass-root initiatives, and some enjoy a certain level of success. However, the potential of your intranet will never be fully realized without an executive champion.

The number one challenge facing corporate intranets today is not technology, nor tight budgets, but rather internal politics, specifically, the politics of competing priorities and management agendas. The second biggest hurdle is a financial one. To win these challenges you need senior management in your corner.

Before the project (build or re-design) can gain executive support, it must be presented and marketed to demonstrate how   it can help the organization achieve its goals and objectives. The intranet must demonstrate measurable value insofar as it relates to company profits, earnings and revenue.

Outside of an executive champion, you still need to identify the roles and responsibilities of other key managers and stakeholders involved with the intranet

An intranet manager also needs to engage employees to involve them in the site design and structure and to promote an ongoing two-way (symmetrical) dialogue. The intranet cannot be solely a push communications vehicle.

If this seems complex or daunting then by all means hire a consultant to help you. It doesn’t have to be me or Prescient Digital Media, there are others that know what they’re doing (see How to hire an intranet consultant).

People are not only at the heart of a successful intranet, they’re the most integral part of every layer, process and tool – including the supporting technology. A successful intranet begins with the right people with well defined roles and responsibilities, and guided and supported by well defined processes and the most appropriate technology.

Here’s some additional & related reading:

Infant intranets need executive loving

Leading an intranet redesign

Top 5 killer intranet mistakes

According to a new Gartner report on portals, “Portals Are the Swiss Army Knives of Enterprise Software,” more than 50% of portal deployments (70% probability) are first generation portals with technology and features developed in the late 90s (no personalization, and little or no application integration).

The report outlines five generations of portals to date with a sixth generation to come in the near future. In short, the report says that while portal technology has advanced considerably in the last 7 or 8 years, most organizations are not taking advantage of the advanced technology.

No surprise there. But client organizations and companies are not to blame. Portal products are highly complex and extremely difficult to use with all sorts of problems. Most companies that implement these technologies use hard core technies and pay little or no attention to processes and people issues required behind the scenes to make a portal work. Not to mention the usability problems.

Gartner cautions, “Enterprises that have never deployed portals should focus on the features that will focus on their business requirements, not just on the most recent-capabilities mentioned in vendor marketing materials.”

If the portal companies would better instruct buyers on the requisite planning steps required prior to implementing a portal solution, and made their solutions more user-friendly, then more customers would deploy advanced portal technology – including personalization. But this of course completely ignores the fact that the vast majority of employees don’t care to have personalization and wouldn’t use it. Trust me, I see and hear it all the time in countless surveys and focus groups from average employees from banks to energy corporations to government, and all sorts of industries in between. Management thinks that personalization is neat, employees don’t give a dam.

It’s not surprising then that only a small minority of medium to large organizations have deployed and enterprise portal solution. The portal solutions have a long way to go in their evolution before more companies buy their solutions and adopt their technologies.

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Nordea is one of the largest banks in Northern Europe with 10 million customers (of which 4.6 million are also e-customers), 1,100 bank branches and 29,000 employees. Essentially, Nordea is the complex integration of four different banks – four different cultures in four principal countries with four different and distinct languages.

Back in 2000, the intranet was every group for themselves. In 2002, Nordea implemented a common design across the enterprise intranet. By 2005, Nordea had a single source portal for all employees. Today the intranet features:

• 150,000 pages
• 600 individual publishers
• content in 6 languages (English, Danish, Swedish, Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish-Finnish)

Nordea Intranet Portal home page featuring news and subscriptions

organized by type, country, organization and business unit.

The Nordea portal is a success. 70-80% of the employees visit the portal every day. Not surprisingly, the most frequently used areas are the telephone directory and local news.

One of the reasons behind the portal’s success is the active involvement and support from senior management. “Senior management has been very actively involved during all stages of the development and implementation,” says Nordea Head of Online Group Communications, Kim Grue. “They all use the Intranet heavily supported by their own Communication Partner and their Management Support functions.”

The Intranet portal is owned by Group Identity and Communications. Ownership includes the whole infrastructure and management of user rights and roles. Group Identity and Communications also owns the News channels. The different business areas owns their own content including area specific applications. Of course all groups have to comply with the policies and guidelines established by Group Identity and Communications.

The portal has a powerful technology backbone that includes:

l       Portal: BEA (with single sign-on)

l       Search engine: Autonomy

l       Content publisher: A custom built web-based Java-publisher

l       IT platform (information container): Lotus Notes

l       Statistics: ClientStep (Instadia/Omniture)

The intranet is a personalized portal so information is organized and presented to personal preferences, but also by relevant country, business unit, and organization.

My analysis: one of the most user-friendly and simple to use personalize portal implementations I’ve seen. It looks simple to use and it strikes a nice balance between too much white space and too much clutter. I particularly like the simple-as-pie information architecture centered on five intuitive sections: The Group, News, Organization, Customer, and Employee.

Open source products are hot. They’re the ‘cat’s meow’ of the development community. And more and more companies are adopting open source products – particularly CMS and portal products (see The growing popularity of open source intranets).

However, even with the high adoption rate and many fans, open source does have its obvious cons. Plone is one of the most popular and hottest platforms. It’s simple to implement and to manage content ‘out-of-the-box’, but while the default deployment is simple, it is also simplistic. To implement a custom design and more robust templates requires a lot of customization for which an experience developer is highly recommended.

Highly customized deployments such as Boston.com have required a lot of custom work. Even less complex sites such as the Prescient Digital Media website (www.PrescientDigital.com) required considerable customization.  Simple content updates on default templates are very simple and requires almost no training for even the oldest of luddites. However, once you venture outside the default templates and develop your own, publishing can be a little more tricky.

Prescient’s Will O’Neill writes about the pros and cons of Plone in To Plone or not to Plone:

“While the Plone development community is booming, much of it is also in its infancy; many of the products, while usable, are technically classified by their creators as being in the beta or even alpha stages – bug reports are common and encouraged. It is likely that many of the developers don’t possess the commercial imperative to refine and finish their products that a company making a commercial CMS offering would, so it’s a dice throw as to whether or not the add-on you require will have a stable release in the timeframe that you need it. You may end up having to compromise with a similar module, hire a Python developer to develop a custom solution, or forego the functionality altogether if security or stability concerns outweigh its value.”

Read more in To Plone or not to Plone.

ADDITIONAL READING:

Open source intranets

The growing popularity of open source intranets

The open source revolution

ON A PERSONAL NOTE:

A Happy Easter to all! I hope everyone had a fine long-weekend. I read my 6-year-old some children’s versions of the story of Easter (the crucifixion, rebirth, etc.) – she was absolutely fascinated. My one-year-old however is still sick… lots of tests, etc. Still a mystery. Nothing serious expected, but it’s been 3-month’s of a lot of laundry and long nights…. and I’m pretty darn tired already!

Today is also a special day in Northern France where some 10,000+ commemorated the 90-year anniversary of the battle at Vimy Ridge. While special in France, in it is an exceptional historical footnote for Canada and for the First World War (The Great War). In short, it was the epicenter for the trench warfare that stalemated the first years of the war. About 200,000 troops died trying to take Vimy Ridge until the Canadian Corps capture the hill in an epic three day battle that saw the Canadians capture the hill – the first significant allied victory of the war and a turning point that led to the big allied push and counterattack that “would ultimately lead to victory over Germany by November 1918.”

The site today and its monument is nothing short of awesome – literally. It is 10 stories tall and looks over the northern plains of France. It is surrounded by a landscape of pot-marked artillery craters. To this day much of the hill is a fenced off danger zone as the ground is rife with unexploded artillery. The site, given to Canada by France, also featured the real trenches of the time. In one place, the trenches are only 25 meters apart separated by a massive artillery creator – close enough that the Germans and Canadians could talk to each other.

I had a chance to visit Vimy and it is truly an awesome place to visit. A must see in Northern France.

A final footnote and a true story: when the Germans rolled through France in WWII, a vengeful Hitler ordered most of the WWI memorials to be smashed (we all know his hatred for the outcome of WWI) as he also ordered the destruction of Paris (but thanks to the irreverent German Commander of Paris, Dietrich von Choltitz the city was saved despite Hitler’s raving demands. A fascinating story in itself and the subject of an excellent book called Is Paris Burning?). However, Hitler took a liking to the Vimy Ridge memorial and he orchestrated a press visit there where he had his picture taken. The visit triggered a propaganda campaign whereby the British falsely accused Hitler of destroying the 10-storey monument. Hitler fought back by releasing the photos and used it as an opportunity to lay additional claims of falsifying propaganda against the British.

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