This article is from the September 2003 issue of Update.
Creating and deploying an intranet is a challenge that most companies, small or large, have attempted —with varying levels of success. Now, many companies are having to upgrade their intranets to address changes in legislation, declining use, content overload, and support for a growing mobile workforce.
What should a company expect from its intranet? Evidence from employee surveys by Melcrum Publishing1 indicates that 90 per cent of staff want better communication from their intranet. Excellent communications and feelings of empowerment were two of the main reasons employees cited when choosing the 10 best companies to work for.2 However, the survey by Melcrum showed that 50 per cent of employees think their intranet fails in the key area of communication. Is it the right information badly communicated or is it well-communicated but irrelevant data? Unfortunately, few opportunities exist to demonstrate best practice, to find out ways of improving existing intranets or to review intranets of other companies, because of the issues of confidentiality.
Taking the first steps
The first and most important step in creating a more effective intranet is to develop an intranet strategy. Very few companies have a clear set of business objectives for the intranet, and end up with vague statements such as ‘increase intranet usage and promote employee knowledge sharing’. It is often difficult to assess whether targets have been met, and the intranet loses a major opportunity to demonstrate its strategic importance to the organisation.
One method of developing a strategy for the intranet is one I used with Martin White3and another colleague, Howard McQueen, on a project for a large financial institution. We divided the areas to be considered into governance (the organisational roles and responsibilities related to the intranet and the rules and guidelines), information content and technical infrastructure. Companies often focus on one of these areas — technology — to the exclusion of the other two.
In order to have an effective governance structure, you need:
- a high-level team with a senior-level intranet sponsor, to set the strategic objectives, market the benefits of the intranet, and monitor adherence to business requirements;
- a management team responsible for the day-to-day operations;
- a user/development team which can suggest ways to enhance the intranet.
Without visible commitment from senior managers the intranet will not be regarded as a corporate application and will not have adequate financial or staff resources allocated to it. This inevitably affects the quality of information and input into the intranet.
The senior-level sponsor ideally should form part of the intranet strategy team and have control over any relevant budgets such as marketing and development. They should be senior enough to decide what information is communicated and be prepared to allocate resources to this. The heads of the user and management groups should also be members of the strategy group. This helps to provide some balance between the requirements of the users, the resources allocated to managing the intranet and the overall business requirements for information access. The number of people in these teams will depend on the size of the organisation.
There need to be guidelines for deciding what content to keep and what to throw away, and when it can be disposed of. Senior management need to set objectives to reflect the information requirements of the organisation, and then make sure these are adhered to by the employees.
Bill Gates commented early this year: ‘The goal is to come up with software to make information workers more productive: helping them manage their schedules, prioritise their events, understand the business processes they participate in, and keep their information secure. And we are nowhere near that yet...4
Legislation
There is a clear gap between what users want and what is currently available on intranets. There are two pieces of recent legislation which affect what information is available on intranets. One is the 2002 Employment Act, which came into force on 6 April 2003, outlining statutory rights for flexible working, affecting 3.7 million UK employees with children under six years old. According to the Office of National Statistics, currently seven per cent of the UK workforce work from home. This figure is expected to rise to 25 per cent by 2020.
The other is directive 2002/14/EC, which organisations in the UK will have to implement by March 2005. This gives employees the right to be informed about employment prospects and informed and consulted about decisions that are likely to lead to substantial changes in work organisation.
Companies will have to provide equal communications and opportunities for all staff, whether they are working from home or in the office, implying a greater dependence on intranets and their communication potential.
An important point is that many organisations expect employees to contribute to the intranet on a part-time basis as well as conduct their main roles.
It is important to acknowledge employees’ contributions to the intranet by writing specific objectives into job descriptions so that this area will be covered in each employee’s performance evaluations.
A ‘quick win’ for ensuring information content is aligned to business objectives is to provide access to external information such as business and market information, travel schedules, research sites and specialised databases.
Information audit
A useful starting point is to carry out an information audit to determine what information is used and how often it is accessed. The results will be a key factor in determining the information architecture. There are technology tools to assist in developing the classification of content and building taxonomies to support browse and search functions. An intranet should be built on a blend of taxonomic (lists) hyperlinking and search navigation.
In theory, using an intranet should be as easy as using a library or the internet. The information it contains should be clearly categorised, easy to navigate, up to date and consistent. The search function should be intuitive. Often the reverse is true: the information is hard to find, slow to download, and it is not obvious whether it is up to date and correct. The end result is employees lose trust in the intranet as a primary source of information.
As intranets grow to support mobile workers, video-conferencing and e-learning initiatives, the original technical specifications for design and search may prove to be inadequate. Large files or those with video/audio content will be too slow and cumbersome for many using dial-up or ISDN lines. Another important factor is to decide whether the intranet is a stand-alone application or managed as one of many web-enabled applications in a firm.
Often the intranet is designed to reflect the organisational structure and therefore it is difficult for employees in another department or company to find information easily. As the organisation changes, it becomes cumbersome to maintain the previous data and structures, and they can quickly become irrelevant. The survey by Melcrum Publishing also indicated that managing the content on the intranet was the biggest problem area (74 per cent of respondents). The industry for content management applications is growing, and there are many vendors in the market.
Most companies are not prepared for the length of time and amount of staff resources required to design and implement content management systems (CMSs). Because of the complex nature of implementing a CMS to fit in with all the key applications within an organisation, it is very important to allocate appropriate planning time and resources. We will not go into details about the different systems here, but Martin White’s article provides some good tips on implementing a CMS.
The other crucial ingredient of a successful intranet is keeping on communicating with the users through a development team. At a recent conference for senior IT managers and directors, one partner of an accountancy and consulting firm remarked: ‘I have given up using our intranet, as it is so hard to find anything, and the information is not up to date. It is faster to call someone.’
Many technology-focused organisations have often made a ‘build it and they will come’ assumption with IT applications. This is a common pitfall with intranets, which need to be constantly revised and expanded to ensure they remain up to date and relevant. The changes then need to be promoted to users to help them see how the intranet can be valuable in their daily work.
Promoting the intranet at every opportunity is essential. Conducting regular usability tests and employee surveys is a must, to keep two-way communication channels open. The results from the usability tests as well as general employee surveys provide useful material to highlight success stories for the intranet. A strong brand identity is helpful. With a brand name users are encouraged to remember ‘I found it on x-net’.
Importance of acting on feedback
Obtaining feedback on the intranet’s usability is important at all stages of development and deployment. Often these tests are given a low priority, rushed, or they are not carried out consistently to provide measurable and useful results. And often the resulting changes are implemented too long after the test has been conducted. Companies must be prepared to implement the changes that are indicated by these tests — provided that they adhere to the business objectives for the intranet.
A useful resource is Jakob Nielsen’s site,5 as it provides guidelines and lessons learned from reviews and tests of intranets as well as internet sites.
There have been many suggestions of how to assess an intranet’s effectiveness. Relying on a page view analysis can be very misleading and does not usually provide meaningful metrics to help assess the impact on the bottom line. Once the business objectives are clearly laid out in the strategy, it will be easier to set targets against these objectives.
Regular employee surveys with specific questions that address the impact on the business are a good way to obtain qualitative information.
Conclusion
An example of a company that is already implementing an effective employee portal is IBM. It encourages employees to work remotely, while supporting them with a personalised information portal, streaming audio and video web casts from the CEO and providing round-the-clock access to external information. It plans to maintain ‘drop-in centres’ instead of expensive, central office locations.
Martin Smith, of IBM’s Enterprise Solutions, outlined its five key interfaces:
- employee to life, with access to shopping, finance, and leisure;
- employee to work, with role-related applications and metrics;
- employee to employee, with collaborative applications, SMS, expert locators, e-meetings;
- employee to company with a Yellow Pages, virtual help desk, e-procurement, e-learning, e-HR and corporate messaging;
- employee to external, providing help with collaborative commerce, transactions and e-meetings.
In order to come up with the strategy and structure for ‘w3’ (its brand name), IBM conducted a ‘Global Pulse’ survey to highlight the problems to be addressed. In 1997, the intranet was the least trusted or useful source of information for the employees. In 1999/2000, it had risen to second behind co-workers, and in 2001, w3 was the top source of information.
IBM took the time to develop a strategy and a good management structure, and provided the functionality that users wanted. In four years it revolutionised the way the intranet was perceived. Now it is planning to package and sell that functionality to other companies. It is a powerful example of what can be achieved with the right focus on strategy, management and users.
References
1 Survey of intranets in large companies in the UK, North America and Europe. Melcrum Publishing Ltd (www.melcrum.com).
2 ‘The Ten Best Companies to Work for.’ Fortune, Europe edition, 20 January 2003.
3 Martin White of Intranet Focus has written ‘Creating an Effective Intranet’ (www.intranetfocus.com).
4 Fortune, 20 January 2003.
5 www.useit.com
Kiki Laxton is a consultant at Ki2Nets Intranet Solutions (kiki@ki2nets.com; www.ki2nets.com).