When a new policy is created, it’s emailed out to all staff, or posted as a news item. But staff are not interested in the travel security policy if they don’t have a trip planned. A new product is launched, but it isn’t of interest to anyone outside that area (even if they end up working there in six months time). Staff don’t have time to read everything now, just in case it will be useful down the track.

Our systems know a huge amount about us, quietly gathered as part of normal working practices. Yet they do nothing with this information.

What if:

• When I join the organisation, all the relevant people are automatically notified, and the key systems updated.
• When I’ve booked a trip interstate, I’m automatically sent details on how to reserve a corporate car.
• When I receive a promotion, I’m pointed to the managers’ area on the intranet.
• When I move into a new business area, I get an update on the recent news items and updates.
• When legislation is updated, I’m notified as I’m working in a relevant area.

This is something that Bob Boiko has been talking about for some time. There are a hundred ways in which our information systems can act proactively, promoting with information or kicking off processes. This can be low-key and non-intrusive (unlike the much hated Clippy!).

Building solutions this way will improve staff productivity, increase adherence to policy, reinforce standard working practices, and delight staff. The information is already in our systems, all we have to do is make use of it.

How else could our information systems be active and proactive?

What follows is an extract of 2 pages from the report, pages 96 for adoption indicators and page 102 for core business indicators. Note that the number (n =) at the bottom left of each chart shows how many participants out of the 283 organizations are using this type of indicator.

Comparing your intranet to others is useful because intranets exist within organisations and are somewhat ‘oblivious’ to what happens outside the company. It is hard to look over the fence. That’s where the value of benchmarking comes in.

As an intranet manager, you need to show the actual value of your investment to prove that you are actually helping the organisation save money / work more efficiently / ‘live’ a strategic agenda / etc.

Content comes in different shapes and context. Some needs ‘locking-down’, other content is ‘open’, while elements develop as it is pushed, modified and enhanced. There is not a ‘one solution’ fits all process flow within each stream, nor within each site area within a community site. Some communities have areas which are controlled by a central team, and no-one else can update/add. They also have areas which are open and require no authorisation or approval to publish and enhance. Other communities are more centrally controlled with some locked-down areas.

I’ve been thinking about the badges that a few social sites are using as incentives to their user communities – specifically foursquare and, more recently, Blip. So many people I talk to are looking for ways to encourage adoption of their enterprise intranets, knowledge bases, and collaborative workspaces. Plugging in a suite of profile badges, easily customized for each organization’s desired behaviors, would be a fun, low-overhead way to achieve that.

I like it!

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Often, one of the big justifications for a CMS is removing the webmaster bottleneck and delegating content entry to the people who have the information. The implicit assumption is that everyone wants to directly maintain their portion of the website but technology is standing in the way. But if you visit a CMS customer a while after implementation you are likely to find that the responsibility of adding content is still concentrated in a relatively small proportion of the employee population.

Deliver a best practice intranet that is intuitive and usable for staff

If the intranet isn’t easy to use, there’s little point in having one! To design (or redesign) an intranet, we need to put staff first, and follow a "user-centred design" approach. This workshop outlines this best practice methodology and provides many examples.

Late last year we launched a brand-new workshop on designing (or redesigning) intranets. This covers key techniques and methodologies in a very practical way, giving intranet teams the knowledge they need to deliver a great site. There is also time set aside within the workshop to do a design review of the screenshots that participants bring along (whether new or old sites).

Kicking off the first workshop of the year, we’ve organised a date for the Intranet Design + Redesign workshop in Sydney on March 25. As for previous workshops, this is an intensive session with just 8 places available.

From the last Sydney workshop:

“I just wanted to say thank you for a brilliant workshop yesterday. I will certainly be recommending your next one to anyone whose path I might cross that I think will benefit from it. I left the workshop invigorated and inspired and have not stopped telling people what a wonderful day I had. I learnt so much and I hope that I can continue the momentum I feel that I gained.”

[Full workshop details]

It’s an impressive list. When all laid out on Morris, the intranet, there is a list of over 300 major products, sold around the world. Stuck in the airport lounge waiting for her delayed flight, Sarah has time to browse through the product details in advance of her meetings later in the day.

From what she’s heard, it was a big project to bring together all the product information together in the one spot, but the payoff has been obvious. Opening up the section for one product, Sarah can see everything from original research and product development through to packaging and current sales figures. Real-time sales figures feed into this, and while sales are moving briskly in Western Europe, there’s a red flag against Brazil, where sales haven’t hit targets for the last 2 months.

Reading through the comments added by staff against the figures, it seems that their major rival has just cut their prices, eroding their market share. Several suggestions have been offered, including one from a front-line sales person that repackaging into smaller units might help to reach their target market better.

Sarah can also see the flow of customer comments as they come in. These are gathered by the call centre and tagged against the product, immediately appearing here and on the homepages of the product managers. The regular scan of social media spaces also feeds into this list. For more expensive products, follow-up customer satisfaction surveys are conducted, and then folded into the collection of consumer information.

For one product, it’s immediately clear that there’s a problem with customer satisfaction, with comments suggesting a gap between the marketing messages and product reality. There’s also a high rate of calls into the call centre, so the installation instructions aren’t working well. Sarah notes down both these points to raise at this afternoon’s meeting with the product and support teams. She could also dip into the team’s working areas, but that’s too much detail for an airport lounge.

There’s also a lot happening in the innovation area. Having been given access last week, Sarah dips into the list of R&D projects currently underway. One of them relates to the use of new materials technology to deliver radically new versions of products, including some in Sarah’s area. The project space is a hive of activity, with team members contributing ideas and test results, and working towards a major milestone.

The project has also spun off a number of related ideas, which sit in the innovation space. Some of these have been picked up by staff, often in ad-hoc groups from across the globe. These will be pursued in the “10% time” that the product teams have. There are also several projects that have been outsourced to external innovation brokers, with individuals and organisations competing for the cash rewards to deliver solutions.

What time was the next flight again? Sarah goes back to Morris to check on the details. Glancing over the summary, she’s still got enough time for the connecting flight, even with the delay. Booking the trip was surprisingly easy. As is common, there’s an arrangement with a third-party booking service, but this time the system was brought straight into the intranet. Much easier, and no need for yet another password.

Morris also knew what hotels she is allowed to stay in, based on her pay grade, and listed the matching options in the city she’s travelling to. Staff who have recently transferred there have also filled in a lot of details about the surrounding area, including the best restaurants (if you’re into Thai food!), nearby laundromats, and how to get about on public transport. Flipping between these details, Sarah picked a hotel that was a little bit further out, but had a nearby jogging track, and was still in 15 mins of the office on public transport.

Being her first trip, Morris also reminded her that she needed to organise travel insurance. Clicking on the link in the email, a pre-filled form awaited her, requiring her to only fill out a few extra details before submitting. Several days later, an email arrived with confirmation of her details.

The travel insurance details were also added automatically to her ‘corporate passport’, which brings together all her key details in a single location. This includes key phone numbers, her contact people in HR and IT, pay details, trip information, upcoming holidays, and more. Very handy when travelling, and just as useful when working in the office.

Right, enough browsing the intranet! Time to close the laptop and dash for the flight.

Principles demonstrated:

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

What are your thoughts on this future scenario?

I’m starting with a keynote presentation on “Intranets in 2015″ at IntraTeam Event 2010 in Denmark (March 2-4), and wrapping up with a keynote on the Intranet Innovation Award winners at Congres Intranet 2010 in The Netherlands (March 16).

In between, I’ll be in Switzerland, the UK and France. This involves a mix of in-house workshops and consulting, presenting to community groups (more details to come), and catching up with fellow intranet experts.

I do have two days free in London. At this point, I have Monday March 8 and Thursday March 11 free. Drop me a line if you’d like me to run an in-house session, such as a half-day workshop for intranet stakeholders and the rest of the day planning with the intranet team. I can also run public workshops, or give presentations. I’d also be happy to fly across to nearby countries, if it’s practical.

Be quick: I’m going to lock down this trip in the next week or so, and I’ll allocate the time to the first comers…

Most were created using FrontPage, every one was different, and all were ugly. Not an easy situation to comprehend, let alone fix!

As part of the work, we talked with some of the existing publishers, and they told us an interesting story:

“I was given the job of creating the intranet site for our newly formed business unit. I had no idea of how to do this, and couldn’t find anyone to tell me. Eventually I found the right person in IT who gave me the ability to create a new site.

“Looking around, it seemed that the policy was to make every site look different. So I took an existing site, copied that, and changed the colours. I then published my new site.”

In the absence of training, support or intranet knowledge, is it any surprise that the intranet became such a zoo? The publishers weren’t stupid, crazy or even “expressing their creative urges”. They were simply copying what they thought was the “right way”, based on what they could see on the existing intranet.

Last week I worked with another organisation, who were also struggling with their intranet. This is what some of the content owners said in a workshop:

“Our business unit has its own intranet site, like everyone else. The goal of this is to provide our staff with all the information that they need to do their job.”

“To do this, we took all the HR policies and forms, and made a local copy of them. When then adapted them to fit our specific needs. We’ve got copies of everything else our staff need, along with links to other resources. This is what everyone does.”

This is the same story. The “way things are done” on the intranet says that every business unit should have their own mini-intranet, a self-contained island of content to meet every need of local staff. When a new business unit is created, they follow the pattern set by all the other business units. Needless to say, the results aren’t pretty.

This is what I call the weight of the existing intranet. Current practices define the standards that drive all new content. Old bad practices become standard practices for new work. How can we expect content owners to do better when all they have to follow are the current intranet sections and sites?

It’s not easy to break this cycle, particularly when the organisation has low staff turnover. Perhaps the only way is to create an “exemplar”, a site or section that shows what a great intranet looks like. At least then authors, publishers and content owners have something to judge their current sites against, and something to head towards when making improvements.

What do you think?

The content owners may have many questions: Where does our content go in the new structure? What content do we actually have? Should we delete some of it? Will time be allowed for content quality and improvement work? Will there be a freeze period when we won’t be able to work on the current intranet?

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?

We often talk about using the intranet to save time, and to streamline common business tasks. This is all about taking a cumbersome existing process, and replacing it with an online version that works spectacularly well. The online performance evaluation system implemented by Prophet is a perfect example of this.

This 5 minute video interview with Jase Wells from Prophet shares details on their award-winning solution. Lots of great stuff for intranet teams and IT groups alike.

The video covers:

• How was the process done previously?
• Why build an online system?
• How was it designed?
• What were the 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.

These are all intended to be out-of-the-box intranet solutions for medium-sized organisations, and they provide rich social functionality. This includes:

• team spaces
• wikis
• blogs
• social updates (eg Facebook/Twitter)
• rich personal profiles
• home-page “latest updates” displays

These solutions are clean and polished. There’s plenty of activity when you first log on, and a real sense that “something’s happening”. So far, so good.

Call me old-fashioned, but they do seem to be missing some very basic intranet capabilities. For example:

• Where do I find HR information, such as the leave policy?
• What about the leave form?
• Can I fill out forms online?
• Is there any “corporate” information at all, or is everything organised by teams?
• Where are the links to my key tools?
• From a corporate perspective, how do I manage what’s displayed on the homepage?

It seems to me that the pendulum has swung too far the other way with some of these tools. I agree completely with those who criticise “typical” intranets as being flat, boring and lacking any recognition of the human element.

That being said, abandoning all corporate information, tools, forms and processes seems like foolishness. Sure, it’s not exciting, but can we really replace these with nothing but team-level social interaction?

Am I missing something here?