While there has been quite a lot said about mobile enterprises, and how to deliver them, this has often fallen into the trap of ‘hand waving’ discussions that cover the topic at a very high level.

The reality is that there are many different aspects to enterprise mobility, which need to be delivered and supported in distinct ways.

To help with planning and delivery, it’s helpful to distinguish four types of enterprise mobility:

1. mobile connectivity
2. mobile productivity
3. fieldforce automation
4. desktop replacement

Each of these requires different technology solutions, design approaches, and management models.

[May article, read the full article]

At a basic level, intranets based on SharePoint are just like every other intranet. The same questions of design, structure, management and governance arise, regardless of the technology used to publish the site.

As discussed in the earlier article Promoting the intranet as a service, the intranet should be considered a service, underpinned by a technology product.

SharePoint does, however, introduce some new questions into the intranet planning process. The greatest strength of SharePoint is its breadth of functionality, from content publishing and collaboration, to CRM and application development.

It is this wide range of capabilities that can be so daunting for many teams. Without a clear plan, the results can become a little bit of everything, but no one clear and compelling success.

This article outlines a best-practice methodology for planning SharePoint-based intranet projects. Drawing on the Intranet Roadmap™, it provides a step-by-step approach that every team can take.

The result is confidence from the outset that the project will deliver clear benefits, and an approach that brings together business needs and technology considerations.

Intranet projects on SharePoint need a clear direction

Challenges and opportunities

Intranet projects are not easy at the best of times. Often replacing sprawling legacy sites, they have to meet the needs of a diverse audience with a limited budget and constrained resources.

SharePoint intranets are just like any other technology platform in this respect. Independent of the underlying product, the new intranet needs to be usable for staff, valuable for the business, and easy for the intranet team to maintain.

SharePoint does introduce, however, some particular issues of its own, both positive and negative.

[April article, read the full article]

Despite their enthusiasm, I say:

Don’t rely on vendors to meet your mobile enterprise needs.

Let’s go back in time to when the web became popular. Enterprise apps all started delivering web front ends for use by staff. What did we end up with? A separate ESS portal from the HR vendor, a web login to the ERP system, a separate interface for the online timesheet, and a standalone staff directory.

Multiple logins, completely different interfaces, a clutter of links to badly named systems on the intranet, and confusion for staff. We’ve since spent years trying to untangle all this, to create a simpler user experience and to achieve the holy grail of single sign-on.

Now we could rely again on the vendors to deliver required enterprise mobile functionality, but we’d end up with:

• Oracle app to connect to BI information.
• Salesforce mobile interface for CRM.
• SAP app for HR functionality.
• SharePoint mobile app for reading content and collaborating.
• Confluence app for wikis.
• Yammer app for social functionality.
• … and the list goes on.

Not exactly the nirvana we were hoping for! Instead, we’ll replicate the same desktop mess and confusion on mobile devices. Only this time the difference between enterprise functionality and consumer apps will be even starker, as they’ll sit side-by-side on the one device. Simple, effective and usable.

We know what we want: a simple mobile interface that connects staff to the six things they need, recognising that mobile devices are personal devices. This is our chance to cut through the complexity of the past, and to start from a clean sheet of paper.

For example: an Australian university has delivered a mobile front-end for students. One of the buttons is “exam results”. Not “Login to e-learning system” or “my exam results”, just “exam results”. Sitting alongside the buttons for the bus timetable and student news, this provides the mobile user with their current results, drawn from the LRM behind the scenes.

Do we need the vendors? Yes. We should expect them to provide good integration options, including web services and tailored interfaces. We should demand that they make it easy for us to draw out the information and functionality we need to deliver the mobile solution that staff require.

But let’s not kid ourselves: letting vendors drive our solutions is no more sensible this time around than the previous times…

The client in question has a pretty typical intranet: well-structured and content-rich. Future visions might be expected to include further upgrades to the staff directory, more collaboration tools, two-way communications and more online forms.

One word came up time and time again, however: mobile. From senior management down to the intranet team, everyone described a world in which staff could access enterprise information wherever they were.

This was more than just a mobile stylesheet for the whole intranet. Instead, the desire was to deliver key content (and often tools) that staff need on their mobile phones or iPads.

A key manager described the needs of a key audience, highlighting how often they were away from their desks, and how much time was spent in meetings. They outlined a vision where their mobile devices, based on GPS information, would deliver contextual information and tools based on whether they are at their desks, in the meeting rooms, or at airports.

Powerful stuff. It was also fascinating to see how quickly the consumer experience of modern phones was driving enterprise thinking, much faster than previous technology shifts.

Of course, this is a huge challenge for intranet teams, IT teams, and technology vendors. We’re going to need some quick movement to meet staff expectations!

As discussed in the article Elements of a mobile enterprise strategy, there are many issues and questions to answer when considering the corporate use of mobile devices.

While this list can be daunting, the good news is that organisations are finding that simple approaches are often the best. These can be summed up in the question: what six things do staff want on their mobile devices?

Access the whole intranet?

One starting point for enterprise mobile functionality would be to provide a ‘mobile version’ of the intranet. Stripping out headers, footers and complex navigation, this provides a mobile-friendly way of accessing the entire site.

But is this what staff want or need? The reality is that there are few situations where staff want to browse all 10,000 intranet pages on a screen several inches across.

There will also be many elements of the intranet that are difficult to quickly adapt for mobile access. Online applications will often be the biggest challenge, limiting the interactive functionality that can be delivered to mobile devices.

[December one-pager, read the full article]

While currently lagging somewhat behind the consumer world, enterprise solutions will not be exempt from these seismic changes. All organisations should therefore have a clear mobile enterprise strategy, outlining their business needs, and how they will be met.

This is, at present, uncharted territory. This briefing will outline a number of questions that can help guide the creation of a concrete and pragmatic mobile enterprise strategy.

Who and what

• What are the common tasks that will be done on mobile devices?
• What is the key information needed by staff when mobile?
• Which enterprise systems need to be mobile-enabled?
• One-way or two-way flow of information?
• What overall user experience will be provided for staff on mobile devices?
• What mobile capabilities should be provided for all staff?
• Which groups of staff have distinct or more intensive needs?

[October one-pager, read the full article]

The problem is, not only do these simplistic approaches not work, they often make the situation worse. A few examples:

1. Let’s limit email inboxes to only 20meg

The problem: staff use their email programs as long-term storage mechanisms, clogging up servers with an immense amount of old email. The simplistic solution: limit email inboxes to a small size (say 20meg), and then delete any excess on a regular basis.

We’ve seen an organisation do this. The result was that staff saved all their old messages into Outlook “saved mail” (PST) files. When an audit was done of server space, it was discovered that 12 out of 20TB was being used by these files. They can’t be indexed, searched, or virus-checked. Chances are, they will never be opened again by the staff who saved them.

So the inboxes are beautifully small, but the overall space used is larger, and information management is worse.

2. Blow up shared network folders

The problem: there are an immense number of files stored on corporate file servers, across thousands of folders in hundreds of shared drives. The files are poorly named, hard to find, and often duplicated. The simplistic solution: install SharePoint (Lotus Notes, etc), turn off network folders, and force everyone to store their files online instead.

Faced by the prospect of files shares being turned off, staff invariably copy everything they’ve got directly into SharePoint document collections (etc). Files aren’t reviewed, documents aren’t renamed, and little old content is removed. Instead, a one-to-one copy of files simply replicates the same problems in a new space.

The result? A new technology, but the same content and information management problems. And in the process, search is broken, because every search term now returns hundreds of irrelevant files and duplicates.

3. Let’s fully centralised, or fully decentralise

The problem: intranet content is very inconsistent in its quality, currency, relevance and structure. This generates a huge amount of staff (and stakeholder) dissatisfaction. The simplistic solution: fully centralise intranet publishing, so all content is created by a central team with professional skills. Alternatively: fully decentralise, so all content is owned by the business, with no involvement from the central team (if one is left).

The difficulty is this: fully centralised is always a bottleneck; fully decentralised is always anarchy. Neither extreme will deliver a successful intranet, and a mix of strategies will be required, including both centralised and decentralised where appropriate.

4. Three clicks rule

The problem: staff can’t find information on the intranet. The simplistic solution: staff “don’t like to click”, so ensure that all pages are no more than three clicks away from the homepage.

The reality is that this simply doesn’t work, not just because you can’t fit an entire intranet into a structure three levels deep. The underlying assumption is also false: staff are perfectly happy to click as long as they are confident they’re heading in the right direction.

Beware excessive simplicity

I could share a dozen other examples of simplistic approaches, and why they don’t work. The only valid simple rule is this: “The simpler the principle, the more likely it is to be wrong” (hmm, I may be breaking my own principle there).

We should always strive to elegance and simplicity where we can find it, but not to the extent that simplistic approaches actually make the problem worse. At the end of the day, it’s our job as professionals to find strategies that work in our complex organisations, and to constantly adapt these to match changing circumstances.

What are the simplistic rules you’ve seen, and what problems did they cause?

Lagging somewhat behind, enterprises delivering services to staff will also be hugely changed by these new devices. Based on previous technology adoption patterns, we believe there will be four stages of enterprise mobile adoption:

1. Access
2. Delivery
3. Targeting
4. Optimisation

1. Access

The starting step is the most basic one: make sure that staff can access enterprise services while using devices not physically located within the office environment. In many organisations, the natural starting points are field workers and mobile sales staff, who use laptops to access the intranet and business systems.

From there, enterprise-focused devices such as the Blackberry are an obvious next step. Mobile adoption only really starts to happen, however, when staff using a range of mobile devices such as iPhone and Android can access enterprise systems. First and foremost, this is a question of enterprise infrastructure and corporate security policies.

2. Delivery

Once these devices can be used to access enterprise platforms, what will staff be provided with? Even on modern mobile phones, it quickly becomes apparent that simply providing the same intranet and business systems will not suffice. Only staff desperate for information will make use of the pinch-zoom method of navigating a site optimised for 1024×768 screens.

The easiest way to close this gap is to provide mobile-aware page designs and CSS. Stripping out headers, footers, graphics and intensive navigation, the intranet can easily be made more useful on mobile devices. Making the same changes, however, to enterprise systems such as ERP solutions, is much harder.

3. Targeting

Even when the design of the intranet and business systems is tailored to match mobile devices, only half the job is done. When out in the field, staff don’t need to access all 50,000 pages of the intranet, or all 500 functions of the ERP system.

More mature mobile solutions therefore target the specific needs of mobile audiences. This might include:

• cut-down navigation options on the intranet
• key tasks surfaced to the top of sites
• true mobile versions of the staff directory
• tailored functionality within enterprise applications

These are the first truly “mobile” solutions, designed to be used from a variety of devices, quickly and easily.

4. Optimisation

Looking at the ever-changing array of “apps” available on mobile devices, it becomes clear that these are not just smaller versions of desktop tools. Phones now contain built-in GPSs, compasses, and accelerometers. Mobile apps routinely interact with the gestures of their users, and their location in the physical world.

These principles can be applied in many ways to enterprise applications:

• applications that are country and location aware, such as providing policies and tools tailored to the local working environment
• integration between enterprise systems and the mobile devices, such as staff directories that take advantage of the devices’ own built-in address books
• new ways of getting information into (and out of) enterprise systems, such as seamless integration between a phone’s camera and the safety incident reporting tool
• augmented reality tools that draw on corporate asset management databases
• true enterprise “apps” that provide rich interfaces that equal or surpass desktop equivalents

We are on a journey

The current proliferation of devices makes it hard for enterprises to quickly deliver solutions. Few organisations provide a standard phone to all staff, exposing enterprise projects to the full complexity of the mobile market. Legacy applications and security considerations also slow the delivery of mobile functionality.

Most of all, the ultra-rapid evolution of mobile devices and applications means the goalposts keep changing. What is experimental one day becomes standard practice the following day, with new territory constantly being explored.

Only the largest and most tech-savvy organisations will be able to afford to create their own mobile-focused solutions. This creates a marketplace opportunity, and our prediction is that the coming 1-2 years will see a proliferation of third-party and commercial solutions that will act as a middleman, or provide out-of-the-box functionality.

Regardless of the approach taken, this is an exciting time for enterprise tools, and one that may usher in as great a change as the move away from the typewriter.

What stage is your organisation at?

Some common applications allow staff to:

• process pay and leave submissions
• log support calls with IT help desk
• order uniforms.

Other more complex applications may:

• calculate superannuation termination payouts
• stock levels of exhaust pipes in the factory in Brazil.

Applications can be:

• fully integrated
• stand-alone
• provide front ends to back end databases.

While applications are sometimes developed by intranet teams, they are more often developed by other IT teams or external software vendors. Intranet teams may have little influence on how these applications are built.

[September 2010 article by Catherine Grenfell, read the full article]

Multiple repositories can come in many different forms, be they hundreds of SharePoint sites, a handful of massive ECM systems, or a combination of shared drives and Outlook folders. But they all represent the same basic problem. “I have the information I need, it’s somewhere, but I can’t access it or find it easily, let alone leverage its full value.”

In this project, we were able to actually bring both sides around the same table (figuratively and literally), and facilitated the conversation so that each began to understand the others’ frustrations and hopes. Both sides learned a great deal, and though peace was not brought to this particularly fractious environment, they took some great steps toward avoiding all-out war.

An important question has been raised by more than a few people:

So is this still the intranet? Or should we be calling it something different?

An excellent question, and one that I’ll be exploring throughout 2010. There are some that would like to dump the “intranet” name, as it’s associated with the “old” vision of intranets as a publishing platform, a dumping group for documents, and a place for the CEO to post his thoughts.

This narrow vision of the intranet must certainly die. In the process, intranet teams need to go from being custodians of an internal website, to facilitators for business improvements. In many ways, the word “intranet” has too much baggage, and is an anchor for much-needed changes.

Jane McConnell is probably the leader of the movement for a new name, and her preferred choice is the web workplace. She’s written some excellent posts about this, and has articulated some valuable principles that have shaped my thinking. Nonetheless, I’m not convinced.

It’s hard to come up with a new name, and to get it adopted. This is fundamentally a social thing, and it smacks of marketing when driven by a few individuals (not that this is Jane’s intention!). “Web workplace” also doesn’t resonate with me, as it still traps us online, rather than moving towards ubiquitous access.

Where do I stand? I think that intranets still have a role to play in our future organisations, and this is how it could fit together:

“Intranet”

We will still need a web-based “intranet” in the future. This will play a more important role in organisations, mixing old and new thinking:

• corporate homepage and first point of entry
• findability layer, helping staff get to required information and tools
• home for corporate information (yes, we’ll still need this!)
• seamless environment for web-based systems and processes
• business tool used daily by operational staff
• web-based environment for collaboration and social interaction
• vehicle for corporate culture

This is not a million miles away from where intranets are at currently, but there are important differences:

• intranets are just one part of broader environments within organisations (see below)
• focus shifts from publishing information to delivering business value and streamlining processes
• collaboration capabilities get progressively folded in, rather than being separate
• intranets get smarter, sharper, more proactive, and more valuable

As an industry, it is our responsibility to change the perception of the word “intranet”, and to create a forward-looking and constructive vision for our intranets.

(Organisations then benefit from hiding the word intranet entirely, instead giving the intranet a name. That way staff are using “Morris”, oblivious of the debate raging in the intranet community over the appropriate nomenclature.)

“Information systems”

As the future scenarios have shown, Sarah is interacting with much more than just a web-based intranet “site”. Information is available at the point of need, and seamlessly accessible across multiple systems and platforms.

This requires us to be smarter and more coordinated in how we manage our “information systems”. I’m being deliberately generic here, to get away from being caught up in discussions about “document management” vs “enterprise content management”, “business process automation”, “web content management” etc, etc.

Instead, we can say:

“To deliver a staff directory with all the information we need, we’ll need to integrate some of our information systems.”

“Better information systems would allow us to slash the lead-time in product development by 50%”

In practice, this means working with many different tools, systems and platforms. Despite the hopes of some vendors, we’re not going to replace every legacy system with “one tool to rule them all”. Instead, we need to work with point solutions and system specialists to deliver the end-to-end processes we desire and need.

How do we focus our work on the underlying information systems? By targeting the needs and activities of staff:

“Enterprise experience”

The broader industry talks about “user experience”. How users interact with systems, systems’ ease of use (usability), the step-by-step process to complete a task. This has driven remarkable improvements in the usability of websites and intranets.

Within organisations, we should start to talk about the “enterprise experience”. What experience do we want to provide to staff in their working lives? What systems should they be using, and how? How do they interact with the information and tools they need to do their jobs?

This provides a useful focus on:

• delivering solutions that work remarkably well for staff
• creating end-to-end solutions that streamline processes, despite the profusion of behind-the-scenes technologies
• moving steadily towards a seamless environment for staff
• producing delight and joy for staff
• making a real impact on how organisations work, and delivering commensurate business benefits

In short

We’re talking about delivering intranets that bring tools, information and processes together. By steadily improving our information systems, we can provide staff with the tools they need to do their jobs, where and when they need them. The end goal is to deliver an enterprise experience that delights staff and drives business success.

Does this work for you? Or should we using something different?

It struck me again how big a challenge recordkeepers have within organisations. To be successful and useful, staff must save all the relevant documents into the system.

If only 20% of documents are archived, the system is a failure. If 50% are saved, the system is a failure. (Who would look in an “authoritative archive” when 1 in 2 documents are likely to be missing?) If 80% are saved, the system gets a bare pass (that’s still 1 in 5 documents missing from the collection.)

This makes adoption imperative, and highlights how hard it is to demonstrate success in the early (and later!) stages of rolling out the recordkeeping system.

For me, this means I’d prefer to have 100% of just five types of documents, rather than 20% of everything. At least then I could say to staff “For these five things, look in the recordkeeping system because they’re all there. For everything else, we’re getting to that.” This is a very different approach to training every staff member, hoping for the best, and only getting 20% of what’s needed.

What do you think? Worth trying?

Another year, another job. After 18 months in the last job, and a few months looking for work, Sarah is starting into her new role. The firm seems sounder than the last one, and its consumer products are red hot right at the moment.

Starting a new job is never easy. Having had six jobs in ten years, Sarah is getting pretty skilled at getting up to speed, but still dreads the months of learning the ropes before that out-of-your-depth feeling ebbs away.

At least the security guard knew who she was when she fronted up at 8:30 in the morning, and there was even a pass waiting for her. “Go right up to level six, and Peter will be waiting for you.” After the usual “welcome to the business, it’s great to have you here” speech, Sarah settles into her working area.

More minor miracles: Peter was able to give her login details to her PC, and it seems that the phone system already has her listed. A padded box with a mobile phone is perched on one corner of her desk, in amongst a small pile of other useful stuff. (It seems that after Peter signed off her employment, the internal information systems quietly spread the word to IT, HR and Finance, and everything was lined up before she even arrived.)

Her email inbox has a message from Morris, the intranet. Hmm, “welcome to the business Sarah!”, it seems even the intranet is friendly. Firing up “Morris”, Sarah spends a little time familiarising herself with the system she’s expecting to spend a fair bit of time in.

Part of Morris displays the standard corporate links and tools, but the right-hand half of the page seems to be just for her. There’s a prominent box linking her to an induction package, including a few get-up-to-speed videos, some recorded by other staff members.

Included in her online to-do list are a number of induction items, and she expects these will keep popping up over the next few months. Clicking on one of the tasks, she goes into her staff profile, and fills in a few easy details. The rest can wait for a quiet time over the coming week.

Noting that she’s involved in sales and customer service activities, Morris has suggested a few office groups she might want to join. Not today — too much too quickly — but Sarah does click the checkboxes so she can keep an eye on what’s being talked about, before she works out which groups to join.

She’s already been signed up to her local project group, and browses through the profiles and activities of the team members. Seems like there’s a fair bit happening, with a big report delivered last week. Better add that to my favourites.

Sarah’s also been recommended a “buddy” in a similar role, and she reads through their profile. Looks good, let’s have lunch. Now to unpack the mobile.

Having come to her via the IT folks, there’s already a link in her mobile browser to the intranet. It seems there’s no escaping Morris. Firing the site up, a simplified view is presented, focusing on key tools such as the to-do list and corporate staff directory.

There’s also some instructions on how to download a few mobile apps that talk to the company’s systems. One provides a richer version of the staff directory, including full access to the groups, messages and discussions. It seems this is a third-party tool configured for the firm, as it also includes an external feed of customer comments on the social networking sites.

A second application is a lightweight version of the frontline customer service tools. A few staff have also created some informal mobile tools, stitched together from open-source frameworks, but these can wait for another day.

Dragging her focus away from her shiny new toy, Sarah notices that her email application now lists her outstanding tasks, sans those she has already completed. There’s also a small sidebar, which scrolls messages from across the organisation, including from the groups she’s watching.

It’s also interesting to see a selection of customer comments, collated by the call centre or posted to various social sites. “Oh oh, seems like there’s a problem with a product in one of the Eastern European markets”. Actually, I can help with this one, thinks Sarah, there’s a contact I picked up in my last job who might be useful. She posts a response to an internal question, and quickly receives a positive reply. Not bad, maybe I can be useful on the first day.

By the end of the first day, Sarah has connected up to several new colleagues, has approved a few admin requests, and is lined up to attend tomorrow’s team meeting. She’s also had a few people drop by her desk to introduce themselves, and it seems that Morris has been spreading the word that she’s the new kid on the block.

Behind all this, Sarah’s dimly aware that there’s a dozen systems she’s just made use of, but hidden behind the friendly face of Morris, it all seems rather easy.

Principles demonstrated:

• Act proactively, not just reactively
• Provide universal access
• Deliver end-to-end business processes
• Put people at the centre
• Deliver a seamless user experience
• Cross boundaries

So, what have I missed? How else could Sarah be helped to get up to speed in her new job?

A few of the comments on my initial post made this very clear:

Complete mobile access: From your (really) smart phone you can i) find any needed piece of information through enterprise search; ii) find and email, IM, text, call, video chat with any colleague; 3) edit wiki pages and post news stories; 4) complete activities, such as travel advance requests.

Ephraim Freed

Data, documents, applications, personal contacts, web sites, processes, web based forms, latest news updates – all will be delivered within a relevant context from the Workplace Web.

Andrew Wright

Perhaps the iphone/blackberry generation will be working in micro, tweet sized short bursts of activity taking place small via custom apps.

Dan Leonard

Universal access means unlocking the silos of corporate information, and delivering needed tools and answers to all the platforms and systems being used by staff.

This involves connecting information systems to our familiar tools: email, Word and Excel. It means bring enterprise information into the specialist operational systems that many staff use. It also requires enterprise functionality to be provided on hand-held devices, embedded systems and other field platforms.

We can, however, discount two extremes:

• The concept of an intranet goes away. There will always be a need for an “intranet”, a central web-based point of access that connects information and systems. The world is moving towards the web, not away from it, and this is no different within organisations.
• Everything on the web. There have always been an enthusiastic minority who want to dump the desktop entirely, moving everything into the web. This worked poorly, and in 2015, staff will still have desktop tools, most likely running on Windows.

This vision used to be very difficult, almost impossible, to deliver. Much has changed. Point-to-point integration via web services (and the like) has become mainstream. Mobile devices have much richer capabilities. Enterprise systems are becoming more open to being tailored and connected.

The necessary integration doesn’t need to be perfect. The “good enough” principles that underpin the web are sufficient to allow staff to look up phone numbers on their mobile device, or get access to policies within call centre systems.

The goal is clear: staff have the information and tools they need, when and where they need them.

Your thoughts?