Conferences shouldn’t be just about sitting in a room filled with people who do just what you do everyday, listening to the “best in the business” tell you “how they do things at their place”.

This is what we think makes a great conference programme:

• Relevant and current content, giving people insights they can bring back to their intranets, and ideas on how they can solve their current challenges.
• Breadth and depth, from curiosity-driven “sneak peaks” to in-depth insights into leading intranets.
• Good mix of interactivity, that break up the intensive sessions, with relevant and enjoyable opportunities to meet new people and to form useful relationships.
• A sense of community, from feeling welcomed and comfortable when first arriving, to the social activities that build career-long connections.
• Great speakers, whether confident professional speakers or real-world intranet managers with a passion for their work.
• Fun and buzz, such as networking activities with a serious prize (can you say iPad!).
• Local and international speakers, drawing on the best ideas wherever they come from.

What does all this look like in practice? Check out the very well balanced Intranets2012 programme.

“The cloud” is ever-present these days, backed by a huge marketing push from multiple vendors, including Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Apple. Backed by immense data centres located in (often) rural locations, “the cloud” will apparently transform our lives.

While it’s still early days for the cloud, it’s clear that it will ultimately have a big impact on the way we manage our information as consumers. It will also make substantial inroads into the enterprise space.

So with executives and IT alike talking about “the cloud”, what does the intranet team need to know?

1. The cloud means many things

With the cloud still heading up the Gartner hype curve, the marketers have started to apply “the cloud” label to many things, including what used to be called software-as-a-service (SaaS). These days, the cloud encompasses:

• Enterprise mail solutions such as Google’s GMail, with storage spread across countless machines globally.
• Classic software-as-a-service offerings, such as Salesforce and its associated services.
• Hosted-only products, such as Yammer.
• Online data storage and “elastic computing” services, such as Amazon’s S3 and AWS, or Microsoft’s Azure.
• Virtual hosting, providing server space on third-party infrastructure.
• Hybrid offerings, such as Microsoft’s hosted Windows and SharePoint infrastructure.

New products are springing up every day, and the lines between offerings are becoming increasingly blurred. At the heart of all of these solutions is a simple proposition: move software and infrastructure outside the enterprise, to third-party providers who can do a better job.

While intranet teams should know at least a little about all the services listed above, a general sense of the “what and why” is generally enough for business discussions.

2. Some services will definitely move to the cloud

There is great interest in the cloud, particularly from IT teams and CIO’s. There are many benefits on offer:

• better services that are updated more often
• lower “total cost of ownership”
• greater scalability
• more robustness
• greater agility

Most organisations will move at least one or two services to the cloud in the near future. For example, replacing an in-house CRM with Salesforce, or deploying a hosted project management solution. Most of these changes won’t be controversial, and will be the result of routine IT planning.

In some cases, organisations will move most (or all) of their infrastructure into the cloud. While this will be uncommon outside of small organisations for a while, there is some logic to the move.

Either way: expect to see cloud-based solutions popping up in organisations any day now.

3. Intranets will become a hybrid

While some services are a natural fit for the cloud, others will tend to remain in-house, particularly where integration is required with other business systems. Teams should therefore plan for a future where intranets are a mix of in-house and cloud-based solutions, each providing part of the overall solution.

4. Intranets themselves may move into the cloud

With the complexity of some intranet platforms, such as SharePoint, the cloud starts to become very attractive as a foundation for the whole intranet. Office 360, for example, offers a hosted version of SharePoint (plus Exchange, etc) that can be quicker and easier to deploy.

To a large extent, intranet teams need not be too concerned either way. Whether intranet infrastructure is in-house or in the cloud, the same questions remain:

• What functionality will be available?
• How will the intranet be managed?
• What are the limits of customisation and development?
• What technical resources will be available to the intranet team?
• What technical effort will be involved in launching or revamping the intranet?

5. The cloud presents intranet teams with an opportunity

Enterprise solutions have always moved much slower than the consumer world. Smartphones are ubiquitous for consumers, but staff are stuck with old corporate-approved devices. Home PCs run Windows 7 and Internet Explorer 9; offices provide staff with Windows XP and IE 6. Old versions of enterprise solutions abound.

Part of the problem arises from the complexity of testing, upgrading and deploying new software. There are also security, compatability and up-time challenges.

The growing acceptance of cloud-based solutions offers a way forward. New solutions can be deployed much more quickly, and rolled out to the entire organisations, particularly when they are web-based. Yammer provides a great example of how quickly a cloud-based solution can spread.

This can allow intranet teams to finally get access to technology options they have been requesting for some time. Roll on intranet 2.0!

6. The challenge is to connect the dots

Staff have always had one desire and dream: to have single, seamless environment that provides the tools and information they need to do their job. To date, we haven’t done a very good job at delivering this, with dozens of enterprise systems presenting a cacophony of different interfaces and experiences.

The danger is that the adoption of cloud-based solutions will only make this worse. There is often limited options for tailoring or customising cloud solutions, and single sign-on can be more complex to achieve.

Intranet teams should retain a focus on simplifying what’s delivered to staff, ensuring that the experience for staff is productive and usable.

This means looking at some core aspects, such as:

• Ensuring there is only one staff profile (in a single staff directory), and that all systems integrate with this.
• Achieving seamless single sign-on across all applications, whether in-house or in the the cloud.
• Exploring how new functionality, such as social or collaborative tools, can be integrated into the existing intranet.

While many of these are things for IT to address, the intranet team should be acting as the user advocate, asking key questions during the migration to the cloud.

In short: “the cloud” means many things in practice, but the lining is generally silver. Exploit the opportunities that arise, avoid the potential pitfalls, and deliver an even better intranet for staff.

This includes a Designing intranets that work masterclass in London, on March 6th. This is a great one-day session, covering key design techniques and sharing screenshots from a wide range of organisations. It’s also a unique opportunity to uncover ideas, approaches and best practices to ensure that your intranet project is a success.

This workshop will answer many common questions, including:

• What should go on the intranet home page?
• How to determine the right structure and navigation?
• How important is the look and feel of the intranet?
• What designs can really help staff find what they need?
• What techniques will help to deliver a great intranet?

More information (and register online)

PS. I have a very small number of free days that week, so please do get in touch if you’d like a day of in-house workshops, mentoring or consulting.

Last year we launched a brand new conference for Australia: Intranets2011. The first true intranet conference in the region, it was a huge success. Never before has there been such a buzz about the future of intranets.

This year, Intranets2012 (May 16-18) will be even bigger and better, with another extraordinary mix of local and international speakers.

Registration for Intranets2012 opens today, with a great early-bird rate.

See leading experts such as Martin White (UK), William Amurgis (USA) & James Robertson (Australia) keynoting the event, with a myriad of well respected practitioners taking to the stage throughout the event. We’ve already published a draft conference programme and details on the post-conference workshops.

See you at the conference!

It’s an exciting but challenging time for intranets. While SharePoint is just one of many intranet solutions in the marketplace, it has gained real momentum, spreading throughout the globe.

This has introduced a whole range of new possibilities for intranets, particularly in the collaboration and business productivity space. It has also injected new energy into intranets, something that has been long overdue.

But let’s face it, SharePoint isn’t a simple platform. Many teams are finding themselves lost in the huge spread of functionality, or baffled about how best to tackle the necessary customisation and development. Too many projects are missing the mark, or reinventing the wheel.

While extraordinary SharePoint intranets have been delivered, there have also been failures. SharePoint implementers have rapidly built up their technical expertise, but technology is just one element of a successful intranet.

For over a decade, our role has been to help teams deliver intranets that work. Intranets that help staff do their jobs, deliver concrete business benefits, and are easy to use. We look across many organisations, and uncover what works (and what doesn’t), and communicate this to the industry as a whole.

Continuing this, our job in the SharePoint intranet space is to cut through complexity, providing answers, examples, models and methodologies. As highlighted in our last post, we provide the 10-15% that doubles the success of SharePoint projects.

We’ve not lost sight of the fact that there are valid alternatives to SharePoint, but neither are we going to stand by and see intranet teams struggle needlessly with their SharePoint projects.

We’re here to help. Watch this space for much more to come.

The classic texts of project management outline the importance of initial planning and design activities. While they only consist of 10-30% of the project, they lay the groundwork for everything to come.

This is no different in the world of SharePoint intranets. Quite the contrary: with the breadth of SharePoint, and the effort and cost often required, it’s even more important to start with a clear plan.

Based on our experience across many organisations, this is our rule of thumb:

Spend 10-15% of the budget of SharePoint intranet projects on planning and design.

What does this mean in practice? Let’s explore a range of projects at different scales, with some example activities (these lists are not compreshensive):

Small, mostly out-of-the-box deployment

Total spend: $25k
10-15% on planning & design: $3.5k

The goal is to deploy a simple intranet using out-of-the-box SharePoint capabilities wherever possible, using configuration rather than development or customisation. Software licenses may be minimal, with external developer support around deployment and setup.

Planning and design activities should include:

• determine an overall scope (what will the intranet do?)
• confirm what SharePoint functionality will be most useful and successful
• learn lessons from past intranet projects

Medium-sized corporate intranet

Total spend: $150k
10-15% on planning & design: $20k

A typical intranet project, deploying SharePoint as the platform for a redesigned corporate intranet. Core SharePoint features are supplemented with development to deliver key capabilities. Typically involves a mix of publishing and collaboration.

Planning and design activities should include:

• uncover and confirming staff needs
• determine an overall intranet strategy and scope
• develop a concrete project plan (beyond just technical aspects)
• select key SharePoint functionality required
• target customisation and development activities
• apply best-practice techniques to determine navigation and design
• establish simple but effective governance and ongoing management

Strategic intranet project

Total spend: $500k
10-15% on planning & design: $75k

Larger intranet projects, either deploying SharePoint in big organisations, or aiming to go beyond a “standard” intranet. Significant amounts of customisation and development will be used to meet specific business needs, and to provide a strong foundation for future growth. Significant use of all aspects of SharePoint, including integration with other systems.

Planning and design activities should include:

• create a common vision amongst all stakeholders
• determine an overall intranet strategy and scope
• create a roadmap for short- and long-term activities
• establish pilots for leading-edge features
• conduct a full user-centred design process for the intranet
• establish the best project team
• build in-house intranet expertise and knowledge
• execute a change management and adoption plan
• establish robust governance
• draw on global intranet best practices

10-15% of planning doubles the business benefits

While getting the technical deployment of SharePoint right is obviously crucial, the best implementation in the world is worth nothing if it misses the mark when it comes to business and staff needs.

To often, implementation starts before the most basic of questions are answered (such as: what will the intranet actually do?). Without an overall vision, plan and scope, it becomes very difficult to make the hundreds of practical decisions that are involved in deploying a SharePoint intranet.

For this reason, this is our experience:

The 10-15% spent on design and planning doubles the business benefits delivered by a SharePoint intranet project.

Time and time again, we’ve seen a small amount of up-front planning and design work have a huge impact on SharePoint intranet projects. The project progresses faster, with less stress and uncertainty, delivering a result that works well for staff and the business.

We do the 10-15%

Step Two have been the leading experts in the intranet space for over a decade. Our role is to know what works (and what doesn’t), and to provide practical methodologies for intranet teams to follow.

In a SharePoint project, we don’t deploy or write code (there are plenty of people who do). Our role is to work with or alongside the geeks, providing the 10-15% of planning and design activities that ensures project success.

We draw on our unique experience, insight into intranet projects across hundreds of organisations, and a clear understanding of the SharePoint platform. Bringing this together, we provide the techniques, answers, examples and screenshots that maximise the value of SharePoint investments.

We can also provide ongoing support, to keep things on track, and to see the project through to a successful conclusion.

Want to know more? Get in touch

When you want to create a new site in your SharePoint intranet, this is the page you’re presented with. It’s pretty daunting for an inexperienced site administrator or content owner:

Should I create a team site or a document workplace?
Would a social meeting workplace be more relevant than a decision meeting workspace?
Maybe I need a blog?
Perhaps just start with a blank site and build from there?

This dialog box gives few clues and little guidance. While nothing is ever set in stone, picking the wrong initial choice will reduce the chances of successful adoption and use.

While this kind of complexity is common across many products, not just SharePoint, it generally leads to patchy and inconsistent intranets that are cluttered with under-used sites.

There are three strategies that can be taken:

1. governance
2. site creation workflows
3. training and support

1. Governance

As discussed in Collaboration Roadmap written by Michael Sampson, it’s important to be clear about who has the rights to actually create a new site on your SharePoint intranet. Will every user be able to create a new site, or will this be restricted to a handful of central administrators?

While there is no one right answer, what’s needed in all cases is good governance. This provide a set of basic guidelines and processes that cover:

• creating new sites
• maintaining and ultimately closing sites
• what functionality can be used
• the rights and authorities granted to site owners

The smaller the number of staff able to create sites, the less training and support is required. (Although the result may be a bottleneck that generates widespread frustration.)

2. Site creation workflows

Another approach is to put some structure around creating new sites. This can include a tailored workflow and approval process that guides users step-by-step through the necessary decisions.

Screenshot courtesy of Coca-Cola.

For example, Coca-Cola in the US has created a “Teamsite Wizard”. This asks a number of key questions, with supporting help content. This makes it easier for staff to create a team site, while ensuring that important information is collected about each site.

Screenshots courtesy of Standard Chartered.

Standard Chartered in the UK goes a step further, creating a fully-fledged process that actively guides staff towards the right choices. Governance is covered off early in the process, and then the user is helped to choose the right template. Key details are then collected for the new site, before going into an approval workflow.

These types of approaches help to put structure around site creation, and are particularly appropriate in larger SharePoint intranet deployments where there is inherently less control around creating new areas.

3. Training and support

SharePoint is a new tool for most, and users will be unfamiliar with what it can do, and how to do it. One of the most obvious ways of addressing this knowledge gap is through training and support.

The work done by Transfield Services, showcased in the Governance and support for SharePoint teamsites report, provides a great example.

Extensive training materials are provided online, written in plain language, and supported by short training videos. Following the learning curve of new administrators, information is provided in bite-size chunks, with links to more in-depth materials where required.

While there is a growing body of excellent third-party training materials and books, Transfield chose to create custom documentation to match the specific functionality they’d turned on (and avoiding the features they turned off). This led to a highly successful deployment, with excellent levels of adoption and use.

Consider all three options

The options presented are not either-or. As the size and scale of a SharePoint intranet increases, it becomes vital to establish all three elements. Even when the IT team pre-creates a set of tailored template choices, users can still struggle to choose the right option.

Look for best practices established by other organisations, and set aside resources to make your SharePoint deployment successful, beyond just turning on the technology and hoping for the best.

What have you seen work?
What have you done on your SharePoint intranet?

“If we gave you a team site, would it be useful to you?”

We’ve said before that the breadth of SharePoint is both its strength and weakness. Intranet and project teams now have a powerful new tool to help the organisation work better, but what features to deploy?

The classic technology-centric approach is to talk to stakeholders in each business area, asking questions such as:

• What additional capabilities do you want on the intranet?
• Which of the following features would be useful to you?
• If you had (feature), how could you make use of it?
• What can we do with the new version of SharePoint?

These questions don’t work. Both our books, What every intranet team should know and Designing intranets, make the point “whatever you do, don’t ask staff what they want”. When tackling a new SharePoint intranet, it leads to numerous problems:

• Staff, unfamiliar with SharePoint’s capabilities, are unsure what they need.
• Stakeholders, enthusiastic about future possibilities, ask for features they won’t end up using.
• Excessive functionality and complexity impacts on adoption and use.
• Limited project resources are spent on “bells and whistles”, rather than key aspects.
• The new intranet misses the mark, and a great opportunity is lost.

Working out what to deliver

There are five fundamental approaches for determining the functionality of a new SharePoint intranet:

1. Understand staff needs. Conducting effective intranet needs analysis quickly builds up a picture of staff requirements and points of pain, and where the intranet can help. In just a week or two, the intranet or project team will know where to focus efforts.
2. Understand patterns of work. The biggest benefit of new technology is enabling new ways of working, which is hard to get shape around. Use scenarios, case studies, stories and examples to uncover how SharePoint can enable new behaviours and activities.
3. Get everyone on the same page. “SharePoint” means different things to different people, and all stakeholders must meet in the middle with a shared understanding, definitions and priorities.
4. Learn what works. Thousands of organisations have implemented SharePoint intranets, so there is no need to reinvent the wheel. Learn what it likely to work for you (and what isn’t), and use this insight to guide decision.
5. Start simple. Deliver an intranet that is simple, usable and easy to navigate. Add new SharePoint functionality as the organisation becomes familiar with what’s possible, never adding more than what’s really needed.

There is always time to work out what to deliver before implementation starts. Even a few days or weeks spent uncovering business and staff needs will save months of deployment work, ensuring that the new intranet hits the mark.

Most of all, don’t fall into the trap of starting with SharePoint features, and working back to the project scope. Even with the best will the world, it’s easy to get caught up in technology discussions and decisions, losing sight of the overall objectives and outcomes.

(Need help with all this? As our client list shows, we’ve consulted to hundreds of organisations on their intranets, and most of our current clients are deploying SharePoint.)

In a globe-spanning manufacturing business, these differences are very obvious: individual countries sell different products; the sales division operates very differently from product development; and field engineers are not office-based designers.

Yet even a hundred-person government agency has important distinctions: each area of the organisation conducts different activities; policy officers are distinct from admin staff; project teams are working on different initiatives.

In all these cases, there is a mix of global information, common information that is shared across all staff, and local information, specific to groups or individuals.

Historically, intranets have tended to focus on global information needs, with the majority of resources devoted to HR, finance, IT, policies and forms.

Unfortunately, while this information is corporately important, it’s not what staff need daily. Nor is it the information that drives the core business of the organisation.

In contrast, local information tends to be tied directly to operational needs and service delivery. While it’s only relevant to a subset of the organisation (by definition), it can have the greatest impact on what the organisation does.

This challenges all intranet teams to find a way of delivering a site that meets both global and local needs.

[December article by James Robertson, read the full article]

Large or small, organisations are made of people who have interests and personalities beyond their work activities. Recognising this, the intranet doesn’t have to be serious all the time. Including some fun can send a message that this organisation is a great place to work.

Generally we speak about five key purposes for an intranet: content, communication, collaboration, activity and culture. Intranets play a valuable role in reinforcing the existing culture of an organisation, or alternatively in supporting cultural change. The fun element can subtly contribute to improving culture.

Having a sense of humour at Vancity

Vancity is the largest credit union in Canada and its entry in 2011 Intranet Innovation Awards was commended. For this organisation, employee engagement is a key driver within the business and is measured annually. One of the fun elements on its intranet is the ‘Find-o-meter’ that asks staff to rate their search results in a cheeky, casual way. The options were deliberately written and resonated well with staff:

[December article by Catherine Grenfell, read the full article]

With a focus on the “digital workplace”, the report has a usefully broad view of the internal environment within organisations. As Jane explains:

NetStrategy/JMC and a number of other organizations use the term “digital workplace” to convey the sense of an eco-system of enterprise platforms and services that enable people to work, collaborate, communicate, develop services and products, and better serve customers.

The focus of this report is primarily the internal digital workplace as it is used by the workforce, although today internal and external digital channels are partially converging in areas such as customer service, team and community workspaces, and social networking.

Drawing on 456 participating organisations, the report is packed with gems and insights, such as:

The social dimension of the digital workplace is expanding as more organizations are experi- menting with social tools.The percentage of organizations that have some form of social me- dia somewhere in their organizations increased by 10 percentage points from 2010 to 2011.

However, the percentage of organizations that assessed the social deployment as “enterprise- wide” did not increase.This is true for the leadership class as well as for the other organiza- tions.

Forty percent of leadership class organizations are not satisfied with their search configuration and results. Dissatisfaction is higher for the other organizations and is over 50 percent .

In 2011, only seven percent of organizations considered mobile a high priority and made significant investments in mobile services for the workforce.

It looks like mobile solutions for the internal workforce will ramp up in the next year, as over 30 percent consider it to be impor tant and have made “some investment”.

These are just a handful of the invaluable findings in the 158 report, with graphs and key figures highlighting points throughout.

This is a must-have report for all intranet teams planing their future. Survey participants will already be receiving their complementary copy, and for the rest, it can be purchased from the Digital Workplace Trends site.

Consider the case of a medium-sized heavy industry organisation, where much of the workforce are electrical and mechanical trades-people supporting ‘control room’ operational staff. The organisation is unique and unable to buy ready-made technical system solutions so must design and build most of these in-house.

The strength

This situation gives rise to a very strong technical engineering team capable of designing bespoke systems from scratch. For example, measurements and sensor information from across the organisation’s plant are used to provide raw data to operational staff regarding stockpile levels, efficiencies, throughput and plant failures. In essence these systems are windows into the entire operational landscape of the organisation.

A portion of the intranet is used as the delivery system for making these accessible to the staff who need them.

[November article by Stephen Byrne, read the full article]

In 2011 there were over 50 entries, resulting in:

• One platinum award winner: Framestore (UK)
• Nine gold award winners: Queensland University of Technology (Australia), UK Parliament (UK), Lafarge (France), Alcatel-Lucent (France), Lundbeck (Denmark), Malmö Stad (Sweden), ScottsMiracle-Gro (USA), Arup (UK), CRS Australia (Australia)
• Four commended entries: RPC (UK), Vancity (Canada), RSPCA Australia (Australia), CSIRO (Australia)

These excellent entries suggest a number of key themes, six of which are explored in this article.

14 case studies, 200 screen shots

The full annual Intranet Innovations 2011 report features detailed case studies of all 14 winning and commended entries, around 200 intranet screen shots of the sites in question and articles from the judges. It’s available to purchase directly from the Step Two Designs website. At $89 we believe it represents great value.

Here are the six themes we found.

[November article by Steve Bynghall, read the full article]

The 2011 Intranet Innovation Awards uncovered many remarkable ideas and solutions, not least of them being three mobile solutions, from the private, public and educational sectors.

To share these case studies as widely as possible, we’ve published a brand-new Award winning mobile intranets report. This provides three real-world case studies:

• UK Parliament delivering key functionality to MPs, who are rarely in their offices.
• Queensland University of Technology providing staff and students with a mobile portal of remarkably simplicity.
• Lafarge, a global corporation, supporting the yearly senior management retreat with a mobile site.

In addition to the three compelling examples, the report provides further insight from the team at Step Two Designs:

• key themes from the winning case studies
• what staff want on their mobiles
• four types of enterprise mobility
• elements of a mobile intranet strategy

If you are planning to deliver mobile enterprise functionality, this report will give you invaluable ideas and examples to help shape your plans and designs.

Read more about the report

To whet your appetites, we’ve announced our three keynote speakers for Intranets2012. Martin is one of the true worldwide intranet gurus, William is a remarkably successful intranet manager with two awards under his belt, and James is our local intranet expert.

William Amurgis (USA) is the director of internal communications at American Electric Power (AEP), a large electric utility serving 5.3 million customers in the United States. His group manages the corporate intranet, AEP Now, which received an Intranet Innovation Award in 2009 and a Nielsen Norman Group award in 2007.

Martin White (UK) is the author of the Intranet Management Handbook and three other books. Over the last twelve years most of his work has been developing long-term intranet and information strategies for companies in the UK, Europe and North America.

James Robertson (Australia) is the author of Designing intranets: creating sites that work, the first textbook for intranet teams, along with What every intranet team should know. James is a passionate speaker who presents a clear vision of the future of intranets.

Last days for the call for papers

Would you also like to be up on the stage at Intranets2012? If so, our call for papers closes on December 1. All are encouraged to submit, across a wide range of intranet-related topics.