So who is responsible for publishing, reviewing, updating and removing content? “You!” is the answer to any publisher in BT. There is NO central publishing team to do this on behalf of anyone.

This organisation was previously structured by market units (roughly equivalent to countries) and business units, but with the size of customers growing, a decision was made to shift to a regional model. This immediately raised some important questions about the intranet.

On the current intranet, there is a global site, market unit sites, individual country sites and business unit sites. What should role should these now play?

With the creation of regions, there is a natural assumption that regional intranets will be required, but what should go on them? The default approach was to replicate the existing market unit sites to create the regional sites, but it quickly became clear that this didn’t make sense.

What should staff have as their homepage? How will global and local news be distributed?

What is needed is a clear and concrete sense of the overall intranet model. This defines the shape of the intranet, and the role of individual sites and sections. This could be very simple from a technology standpoint, or make extensive use of personalisation and segmentation.

This is something that we’ve written about before, and Jane McConnell has also covered it extensively.

The intranet model is not easy to work out, and we’ve seen many intranet teams avoid the challenge. Instead, overly simplistic models are put in place that work poorly for both the organisation and staff.

It’s not just global multinationals that have this challenge. We’re starting work with an Australian government agency formed by the merger of previous departments, and they need to work this out. We’ve also been engaged by the Australian arm of a global company, and this is their central challenge to resolve.

We’re now including several days in our intranet projects specifically to work out the intranet model. As these projects unfold, we’ll share our insights and solutions.

What approaches have you taken to delivering intranets in the scenario outlined above?

Social; The big buzzword at the moment with social business, social media and obviously also social intranets. Jane McConnell recently stated that 2010 will not be the year of the social intranet based on a survey by Toby Ward. Whether this is happening or not in your enterprise, ’social’ is a key trend that business managers need to understand.

As expected, this turned out to be a wonderful conference, with Jane McConnell’s keynote a real highlight, along with many other interesting sessions. As always, plenty of great conversations in the corridors, including with Mark Morrell from BT.

My goal of my “Intranets in 2015″ keynote was to show what the future might look like, if we move intranets beyond their current role. I used the two stories blogged earlier, and added rich visuals and examples. I’m pleased to say that the storytelling approach seemed to connect with the audience, and many insightful questions were asked.

I’ll blog more about the examples I showed shortly, but I did want to share some of the ideas contributed by audience members, going beyond the scenarios I’ve already outlined:

• Martin White suggested that there was no need to wait for Sarah’s first day to connect up with her. What about making contact before that point, and helping her to get up to speed before she even arrives?

  I then had a conversation with a Danish company who is doing exactly that, with the functionality planned to go live mid-year. I look forward to seeing this in the 2011 Intranet Innovation Awards.

• Martin also highlighted the additional value of providing intranet access on mobile devices: location-aware services. The intranet should know what country someone is in automatically as well as the nearest office. Information could then be automatically tailored to match, a perfect example of acting proactively.
• It was suggested that the intranet should piggyback on public social networks. For example, If allowed by Sarah, the intranet could identify her Facebook friends who work within the same organisation, and use that to suggest connections on the enterprise social network. (Privacy would need to be carefully managed.)

This week I’ll be spending a whole day with some of the leading companies in Switzerland working through the future sceanrios, so I look forward to further insights. Please do continue to contribute to these conversations, and together we can uncover where intranets should be heading.

I’ve spent a lot of time in organisations with staff who do the actual work, particularly in front-line and operational areas. I’ve interviewed countless staff, including nurses, accountants, call centre operators, consultants, engineers, sales people, researchers, council planners and many more.

This type of needs analysis allows you to deeply understand how staff work, their needs and points of pain, their successes and failures. It builds an incredibly rich view of how organisations actually work, and the way that services are delivered.

It generates a real sense of who the “users” really are, and shows the impact that we can have when we do great intranet work. It puts a face to the projects that we do, beyond the abstract, conceptual and strategic.

Most importantly, it highlights the huge gap that exists between the needs of staff, and what corporate solutions deliver. Time and time again I’ve seen staff struggle to do their jobs because they don’t have the tools or information they need. They can’t find what they want, and are baffled and confused by the IT systems.

We have to close this gap.

Organisations can’t function efficiently if staff are struggling in this way. We also have an obligation to help staff do their jobs.

This doesn’t need to be hard. There are often simple changes that can be made to dramatically assist operational staff. By designing and delivering usable solutions, much of the pain can be removed.

So I see our role as an advocate for staff, bridging the divide and helping intranet teams deliver solutions that delight and amaze.

This is the source of my passion for intranets, and what I return to when looking for answers to intranet challenges. This passion underpins everything that we do at Step Two, and is why we continue to spend more time with staff than any other activity.

What drives your passion for intranets?

Finally getting a stakeholder session with our HR guys and owners of ‘people’ related content on our intranet. Negotiations over the process and protocols have been as torturous as organising the Nixon/Frost debates, but I felt this was essential before we begin any part of the process. All is now agreed. Echoing James Robertson’s theme of putting ‘people at the centre’ our aim (if we get our way) is to avoid the hierarchy titles used by HR and focus on a ‘tab’ called ‘People.’ Part of my thinking behind this is the ability for us to incorporate other ‘people’ related content into this area, that is not owned by HR, providing a richer, broader experience for the user.

The figures in this year’s report clearly show that senior managers in many large organizations are using blogs to improve communication flow, to break through some of the barriers and silos. However, there is still a lot some of them need to learn about blogging!

In BT anyone can start a blog or create a wiki article internally about their views and opinions and can contribute to other blogs or wiki articles if they wish to. To get started all you need to do is email the administrator and sign up to the terms of use – nothing slanderous; illegal; breaks BT’s policies – that are basic common sense rules. We treat people as adults in BT and they have responded by behaving responsibly.

At some time or other every intranet manager has to do a presention. All those stakeholders and vested parties demand it. If like me, you’re one of life’s introverts, you dread these moments, even perhaps avoiding them. In fact I wouldn’t be suprised if the number one reason some intranets do not have a senior stakeholder is due to the fear, and hence avoidance of having to present to said stakeholder.

Up to this point, the central focus of intranets has been content. How to write it, how to publish it, how to maintain it and keep it up to date. This matches the intranet’s role as a publishing platform, and an internal website.

Intranets in 2015 will put people at the centre, supported by content, tools and collaboration. This is something that Alex Manchester on our team has been talking about for a while now, and it’s a rich vision.

Putting people at the centre means many things:

• Delivering solutions that work remarkably well for staff, following best-practice user-centred design and user experience principles.
• Being respectful of staff and their needs {hat tip to William Amurgis}.
• Giving staff control over their own working environment, in many small (and large) ways.
• Connecting people with people within organisations, in addition to capturing explicit content.
• Building an understanding of staff knowledge, skills, expertise and needs; and then using this rich information throughout the intranet.
• Embedding social and collaborative tools in the heart of the intranet, and weaving them throughout working practices.
• Adapting tools to fit human needs, rather than the other way around.
• Delivering an enterprise experience that makes staff productive and satisfied.

We deliver this vision not just because we care about staff, but also because productive staff mean successful organisations.

Many intranets have implemented some of these principles, none have done them all. Many people are passionate about these types of principles, but some have become evangelists about a single aspect rather than human-centred realists.

Faruk Avdi, an Australian web channel manager, has a good view on this. He talks about staff being on a spectrum: from staff with limited IT skills, through to technophiles. Intranets need to work out-of-the-box for those with limited computer skills, and then gracefully allow more experienced staff to take control at their own pace.

This is a mature and nuanced view, and a good example of how to put people at the centre of our intranets.

Our internal information systems have been faceless, oblivious to staff needs and working practices. In the future, these tools will be turned on their heads, with technology designed to support staff in a rich and responsive ways.

How else can we put people at the centre of our intranets and information systems?

So how can you replace your old, inefficient intranet with a snazzy, new version and get employees to embrace the change? Scottrade knows; the online brokerage firm last year replaced its intranet, “The Insider,” after seven years, and not one of its 2,500 employees complained.

(Scottrade were also Gold Winners in the 2008 Intranet Innovation Awards, for their remarkable competitor wiki.)

Intranets and corporate culture should go hand in hand. If your intranet is not reflecting the culture in your organization and the site is boring or dry, consider how good old fashioned brand marketing can change attitudes towards technology. Apple does a great job in providing catchy and friendly names attached to their technology that helps to engage. Combine a catchy name with a clever tag line on your intranet, build a strong brand design, and you can do a lot to attract employees and reflect your culture.

Selective attention is a widely recognised behaviour on the web backed up by reams of usability evidence. Selective attention is what web users quickly develop from browsing around web pages – it basically means that they learn to ignore adverts and content that looks like adverts.

Sabre Holdings is one of the largest travel services businesses in the world, quietly connecting travel agents with airlines, as well as running major sites such as Travelocity.

Sabre Town, their enterprise social space, provides a range of key functionality that supports staff work. This includes a question-and-answer system that turns traditional knowledge management approaches on its head, resolves daily staff needs, as well as saving in excess of $500,000.

The 7 minute video covers:

• What is Sabre Town?
• What questions are being answered on Sabre Town?
• How is this different from traditional approaches?
• What were the business benefits?
• Advice for other organisations?

As always, full details and screenshots are available in Intranet Innovations 2009, the annual report that showcases the present and future of intranets globally.

Style guides are a great way to ensure user experience consistency when developing an application and a way to communicate user experience standards across an organization. They can be application specific, platform specific, and may encompass enterprise-wide standards. A style guide can help make the development of user interfaces more efficient and help ensure good user interface design practices.