“My sites”: do they work?
Categorised under: Enterprise 2.0, Intranets
“My sites” is a concept coming very much into vogue at present, driven by the adoption of SharePoint and a range of other intranet and enterprise 2.0 platforms. The idea is to give each person within the organisation a place to publish their identity, share their links and collect together their personal resources.
At their best, they provide a mix of private and public information, and act as the central point that connects together a range of personalisation and web 2.0 functionality. (Michael Sampson provides a very clear outline of what you should publish to a “my site”.)
This is clearly the kind of direction we want to go, but does it work today?
What is the purpose?
As ever, the question is: “what’s in it for me?” Is there a reason for most (ideally all) staff to update their “my sites”, and to actively use these features? If the motivations don’t exist, then “my sites” will fail, just like expertise directories did before them.
There are specific circumstances in which “my sites” will work. If you are a professional services firm, particularly in the technology industry, your odds might be quite good. This is certainly where many of the early success stories have come from, in some cases promoted by the firms’ own salesforce.
In many professional services firms, for example, staff need to “pitch” internally for jobs. Hoping to get on the highest-profile jobs, there is a strong reason to polish your CV and to promote it internally as widely as possible. This is a “what’s in it for me” factor directly tied to career progression.
Normal organisations
In other, more normal organisations, these motivations are not in place. What is the reason for a staff person in a bank or government agency to use the “my site” functionality?
Anecdotally, only 5-10% of staff make use of personalisation features in portals and intranets. Our survey, while not showing such a clear figure, did not show widespread success.
The type of personalisation provided by portals is much simpler than most “my sites”, and requires a much smaller investment of time. While not directly comparable, it does question the likely uptake of this functionality in typical organisations.
While there is success in external platforms, such as Facebook and LinkedIn, it is naive to transfer this unchanged to an enterprise setting. What motivates users in a public setting does not automatically apply within our organisations.
The “my site” functionality is also not simple, and too-often not usable. It is also not a natural concept for many working in today’s organisations. These are all barriers that must be overcome.
Failure to be avoided
I would therefore argue that “my site” functionality implemented today is likely to fail in most organisations. While it may succeed in the future due to cultural or generational changes, this will not change the outcome in the short-term. More importantly, if it fails now, it may not get a second chance when the conditions are more favourable.
At the very least, don’t stake projects or strategies on the use of “my sites”, as this is a very risky option. As I’ve argued in an earlier post, perhaps this is aiming too high, and simpler tailoring may be more effective.
Comments?
Tags: Enterprise 2.0, Intranets, my sites, personalisation, portals
James Robertson is the Managing Director of 
6 Comments:
I agree with you if the premise of a “my site” is to be a place that the users “customise/personalise” – it’s unlikely to happen (5-10% do and therefore 90-95% don’t is the figure I use as well).
However if it’s “merely” the “homepage” of an “intranet” (warning, maximum use of speechmarks breeched) that (cleverly) is used to bring more relevant information based on that person (role, project they’re in, org structure etc etc) then it will be a start.
What I suggest to orgs is that they don’t push the concept of each and eveyone having a “my site” but that it is actually just an “intranet” homepage that (cleverly) knows something about you and adjust accordingly.
Those that discover they can custmise/personalise (the 5-10%) then feel they’ve discovered something extra and are happy as Larry.
(this is based on Sharepoint, a subtly different argument occurs on products that use iGoogle/Netvibes as their inspiration)
What I squash asap is, “We’ll have our own internal Facebook” … no, they won’t.
Hi James,
I certainly agree with you on the failure rate, especially the habit is not ingrained within the organisation. I felt that thoroughly when i was revamping a government corporate intranet. That was why I’ve put in a collaborative blog instead that targets a specific area of social interest like Sports. In this setting, staff find peer support when they see each other posting. This may be a change management process that takes time before individual feels comfortable about posting to the ‘world’. ‘My sites’ will come much later.
This is all very encouraging! It’s great to see that we’re moving beyond naive attempts to create “internal Facebook” solutions, to a range of practical approaches that try different ways of achieving the same underlying goals…
James you’re right on the money with this. The mysite concept is destined for failure within the majority of organisations at this stage of technology (and organisation/user) maturity.
Some organisations DO NOT need or this type of functionality. They just don’t.
These concepts need pragmatisim not vision at the moment.
It continues to be pushed by those with a wow factor or let’s change the world outlook but often without actually adressing a clear user or business need.
That’s not to say the concept can’t work or won’t be everpresent in a few years time. And yes some organisations have had fantastic results with it but as we all know different organisations and have very divergent ideas and needs.
As other commentators have noted starting off small with some sort of homepage/link/content personalisation and focused collaboration functionality is a good move as it introduces the concepts that many users are coming across outside of work but focuses them on specific (and often measurable) outcomes.
I often find it’s a “shopping list” item that SharePoint Stakeholders ask for. The problem is they don’t know the answer to “Why do you want My Sites?” . So you set about explaining everything it can do and some scenarios in the concept of their business. I always go back to highlighting that just because Facebook works in “consumer land” doesn’t mean it’ll work in the Enterprise.
I also recommend taking the “slowly , slowly, catchy monkey” approach. Start small, stat by letting Users store their notes in there, keeping their profile up to date having access to information relevant to them. You have to make it “sticky’; something they wart to come back to.
I understand your concern and agree that personal sites that have to be kept up to date in “normal enterprises” regularly don’t work. But in mysite you can also ‘automatically’ bundle the documents you are contributing to in other sites. That’s nice. Furthermore you could ‘automatically’ feed HR information to your mysite and replace the regular Yellow Pages. Then you have HR info and the stuff you’re working on in one place.
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