However, before a social intranet can be successful, work must be done to enrich and develop a much more fundamental aspect of the intranet — the staff directory. This article explores the potential of the staff directory, the impact social networks on the Web are having on intranet design, the rise of ‘social search’, and examples of these concepts in play in businesses already.

The killer app

Typically, the staff (or corporate) directory is already one of the most vital and well-used utilities on an intranet. Finding out who to contact and how to contact them supersedes nearly every other intranet-based process or task that employees conduct on a day-to-day basis.

Typically, the staff directory is a highly popular intranet tool

With the increasingly powerful capabilities of modern intranet platforms, the staff directory is rapidly becoming not only the most-used utility on an intranet, but actually the very heart of the system. It’s the database and tool that all other features and functions are being tied to. Whether it’s core functionality such as business intelligence, data reporting and record keeping, or more social features such as collaborative project areas, blogging and more, the person or people using these systems, spaces and tools is becoming the focus.

The Tube

No example illustrates this better than IDEO’s much-publicised and stunning entry in the 2009 Intranet Innovation Awards.

[August KM Column by Alex Manchester, read the full article]

A new feature of the revamped staff directory, this is designed to enable better communication, dialogue and expertise sharing between employees.

A networked organisation

One of DSTA’s strategies is to sustain and increase its multi-disciplinary expertise in defence science and technology. This includes building up new capabilities and encouraging staff to take ownership of their learning and competency development.

As part of an organisational transformation, an Organisation Capability Directorate (OCD) was set up in 2006. The OCD consists of eight competency communities (CCs), which are grouped by technical disciplines and competencies. Every staff member belongs to a CC, which is the ‘home base’ for competency development and career management.

Staff will be assigned to projects that are undertaken by operating units across DSTA, according to job and competency needs.

To enable staff to connect easily to the community they belong to, the KM team worked with the respective CC heads and CC knowledge managers to develop and nurture each CC as a vibrant community, where information and knowledge is shared and exchanged spontaneously and continuously through online and face-to-face interactions.

To build on the communities, a key strategic initiative was to revamp the DSTA staff directory and give users a profile-style page.

[March KM Column written by Kok Chuan Ng, read the full article]

However, talk to any intranet team and you will hear about how difficult it can be in practice to achieve this.

The reality is finding staff in organisations is difficult and in most organisations the staff directory has grown to be business critical.

This article outlines the main arguments for and against photos in staff directories and some tips on how to succeed.

Reasons for including photos

• Useful when matching names to faces, for an upcoming meeting, phone call or email conversation.
• Help new staff to get up to speed on ‘who’s who’ in the organisation, as well as familiarising them with key staff they are likely to interact with regularly.

[CMb 2009-19 written by Catherine Grenfell, read the full article]

Today one of the people I follow on Twitter asked the following question.

@ChristySeason Asking all #intranet tweeps: Does your company publish employees’ titles on your employee directory/look up/phone book?

(It’s a short post, but screenshots are always valuable.)

This means going beyond just a name, phone number and email address. Staff directories should provide a photo, job title, organisational unit, reporting structure, plus much more.

The challenge is that no single system will hold all these details, forcing staff directories to pull information from a number of sources.

Typical sources include:

• HR/payroll system
• IT/security
• user contributed and updated information

Drawing this information together will require integration, a more difficult task when legacy systems are still in place.

In some cases it may be possible to have ‘real-time’ integration between these systems, although scheduled updates are more common. Often, data is synchronised between the systems on a nightly (or weekly) basis. For a staff directory, this is often sufficient.

[CM Briefing 2009-06, read the full article]

Many of their wish-list features centered around the concept of user-generated content for enterprise directories. This is a definitely a serious gap in most intranets today. Few organizations have optimized employee directories and made them a key piece in enterprise collaboration.

The majority of organizations offer very little in flexibility and user-generated content in the directory. The numbers below are percentages of the full survey population who responded “yes, in most or all parts of our enterprise” to the following statements

Include all staff

One of the common limitations of staff directories is that they only include staff who are managed in HR systems, or assigned a ‘payroll number’.

Staff who don’t have a phone number (such as field workers) are sometimes also excluded from the staff directory. This often means that only permanent staff located within offices are included in the staff directory.

In many organisations, however, there is a wide range of other staff who may be working with the organisation on a long-term basis, but are not employed as full-time staff. These include:

• contractors
• consultants from vendors
• field workers without an assigned desk
• staff employed by subsidiary or affiliated organisations

In the increasingly fluid nature of most businesses, these limitations can mean that as many as half of people considered ‘staff’ are not included in the directory. This greatly reduces the effectiveness of the staff directory, and destroys trust in the accuracy and completeness of the information.

[CM Briefing 2008-18, read the full article]

This is not easy, and a mix of approaches will be needed. In general, there are three ways of keeping staff directories up to date:

• centralised updates
• self-service updating
• integration with other systems

Centralised updates

One common approach to maintaining staff directory details is to allocate the responsibility to a central staff person or team. In this approach, staff send changes to the central team, who update the staff directory accordingly.

(CM Briefing 2008-16, read the full article)

One of the key conclusions from examining successful staff directory implementations is the importance of providing extensive cross-linking within the directory.

These cross-links allow staff directory users to find the information they need, even when the first search doesn’t uncover the right contact.

Linking within the staff directory

The key concept is this: never leave the user with a ‘dead end’. Instead, links should always be provided to further information, related details, or other potentially useful features. This allows users to explore the staff directory, making it much easier for them to find required information.

The screenshot shows an example of this type of cross-linking. In this case, links are made from the staff profile page to details on the organisational units that the staff member belongs to.

[CM Briefing 2008-13, read the full article]