Last week in London I had the pleasure of presenting at the Interactions 2011 conference. This was the second of my presentations, a 20-minute exploration of the eternal question: user-driven personalisation or targeting/tailoring?

Key points:

• Not all staff needs are the same, and this must be addressed in some way by intranets.
• The overall requirement is to meet both global (common) and local (specific) needs.
• User-driven personalisation treats staff like adults, and allows them to configure their own intranet experience.
• A great idea, but the hurdle to get over: only 5-10% of staff will personalise (as discussed in Designing intranets).
• This hurdle can be overcome if personalisation is essential for work (such as at Framestore).
• The alternative is tailoring/targeting/customising based on what is known about staff.
• There are many ways of doing this, as shown in the sampling of screenshots in the presentation.
• Tailoring is typically done in one of three ways (see Segmenting staff information needs).
• It works, but requires work.
• Do something to better meet staff needs, and start simple.
• And in response to a question: yes, you do have to get Active Directory right first (see Clean up your LDAP or Active Directory).

It is easy to get excited by this functionality. But then you think of the difficulty your average organization has with even the basic aspects of content production and you wonder if they ready for these tools. How can you do an A/B test if getting someone to write option “A” is a struggle and option “B” would be a miracle? Of course, not all companies suffer from these issues. The more sophisticated publishers and eCommerce companies have been doing these advanced site management activities even when the technology stood in their way, much less facilitated them. But your average marketing site is still in the dark ages when it comes to managing content.

Just as can be seen with iGoogle, the intranet Start page features several tabs containing widgets (or ‘gadgets’, to use the iGoogle term). The tabs are pre-populated with a general set of useful widgets. The user may reposition or remove widgets, or select new ones.

One Swiss firm is implementing “my links” as part of their intranet. So far, so usual. What is unusual is that they are seamlessly linking it into the bookmarks that users are save in their browsers. At a stroke, they’ve eliminated the confusion between the two, and have delivered a solution that gets the best of both worlds.

They are also thinking of tracking what is being bookmarked, and adjusting navigation and search accordingly. Sounds like an idea worth exploring.

I love these little ideas, particularly when they can have such a big impact.

WebNext will allow each employee to tailor their own site, relevant to them – but this is a big step away from the local portals and customizable homepages of old. The program is being referred to as Project 90/10, because the company wants everyone’s website to be 90% populated by the things the employee cares about and uses every day on the web, 10% by the things the organization is pushing down to them – and it’s being built with that specific usage ratio in mind.

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?

This diagram captures some of my evolving thinking on intranets, information management and enterprise 2.0. It outlines three scenarios:

Scenario A

This is the “now” scenario, typical of most intranets and information management strategies.

Information is mostly published at the corporate level, delivered to “all staff”. The closer you get to any one staff member, the less the information is targeted to their their needs. All staff are basically considered the same, and there is no personalisation or tailoring.

Scenario B

This is the “ideal” state, as outlined in the web 2.0 and enterprise 2.0 world view.

The individual is at the centre of all things, and information is specifically delivered to meet their specific needs. This may be via customisation, tailoring, or self-driven social networks. This recognises that organisations are made of up individuals, who need to be effective and engaged.

There is, however, a huge change from scenario A to scenario B. While portals and other technologies have offered personalisation functionality, this has often failed to be used. “My page” and other personal homepages are commonly left empty. Adoption of “enterprise 2.0″ and “social” tools is still in its early stages.

Scenario C

Perhaps this is the middle ground we can work towards in the short term.

While information is still published at the corporate level, there is tailoring of information at business unit level. Call centre staff have relevant information delivered to them, distinct from that delivered to sales staff, engineers, or admin staff.

This is relatively easy for intranet and information management teams to handle. There may be anything from a few to many dozen business groups to target, but this is much easier than trying to address the needs of thousands of individual staff.

Putting it all together

This is just some early thinking, but what I’m looking for is a way of bridging the gap between the corporate on one side, and the individual on the other. This is the middle ground that we need to play in for the immediate future.

So, does it make sense? Do the diagrams help?

(Don’t forget that there is now commenting on this blog!)