Yesterday I was honoured to give a presentation at the monthly meeting of intranet managers organised by NetJMC. These were some of the world’s largest organisations, across a range of industries. There was a lively discussion around my topic: delivering a mobile enterprise.

The key talking points:

• The latest generation of mobile devices have changed the wider world, but what about within our organisations?
• Start by recognising there are four different mobile scenarios.
• Don’t deliver a “mobile version” of your intranet.
• Instead, focus on the six things that staff want on mobile devices.
• Mobile devices are personal devices.
• Starting developing a mobile enterprise strategy.
• In the meantime, start small, and start delivering solutions (like the ones shown in the presentation).

Despite their enthusiasm, I say:

Don’t rely on vendors to meet your mobile enterprise needs.

Let’s go back in time to when the web became popular. Enterprise apps all started delivering web front ends for use by staff. What did we end up with? A separate ESS portal from the HR vendor, a web login to the ERP system, a separate interface for the online timesheet, and a standalone staff directory.

Multiple logins, completely different interfaces, a clutter of links to badly named systems on the intranet, and confusion for staff. We’ve since spent years trying to untangle all this, to create a simpler user experience and to achieve the holy grail of single sign-on.

Now we could rely again on the vendors to deliver required enterprise mobile functionality, but we’d end up with:

• Oracle app to connect to BI information.
• Salesforce mobile interface for CRM.
• SAP app for HR functionality.
• SharePoint mobile app for reading content and collaborating.
• Confluence app for wikis.
• Yammer app for social functionality.
• … and the list goes on.

Not exactly the nirvana we were hoping for! Instead, we’ll replicate the same desktop mess and confusion on mobile devices. Only this time the difference between enterprise functionality and consumer apps will be even starker, as they’ll sit side-by-side on the one device. Simple, effective and usable.

We know what we want: a simple mobile interface that connects staff to the six things they need, recognising that mobile devices are personal devices. This is our chance to cut through the complexity of the past, and to start from a clean sheet of paper.

For example: an Australian university has delivered a mobile front-end for students. One of the buttons is “exam results”. Not “Login to e-learning system” or “my exam results”, just “exam results”. Sitting alongside the buttons for the bus timetable and student news, this provides the mobile user with their current results, drawn from the LRM behind the scenes.

Do we need the vendors? Yes. We should expect them to provide good integration options, including web services and tailored interfaces. We should demand that they make it easy for us to draw out the information and functionality we need to deliver the mobile solution that staff require.

But let’s not kid ourselves: letting vendors drive our solutions is no more sensible this time around than the previous times…

UX Myths collects the most frequent user experience design misconceptions and explains why they don’t hold true. And you don’t have to take our word for it, we’ll show you lots of researches and articles from design and usability gurus.

A strategy is a set of coordinated, orchestrated, planned actions, or tactics, which will take you along a journey to reach a desired future state, over an established period of time. Design objectives are conditions or outcomes that a project must meet, often of tactical nature. User experience (UX) strategy shouldn’t therefore be confused with design objectives. This article is about how to plan and coordinate actions to organisationally achieve good UX.

Up to this point, the central focus of intranets has been content. How to write it, how to publish it, how to maintain it and keep it up to date. This matches the intranet’s role as a publishing platform, and an internal website.

Intranets in 2015 will put people at the centre, supported by content, tools and collaboration. This is something that Alex Manchester on our team has been talking about for a while now, and it’s a rich vision.

Putting people at the centre means many things:

• Delivering solutions that work remarkably well for staff, following best-practice user-centred design and user experience principles.
• Being respectful of staff and their needs {hat tip to William Amurgis}.
• Giving staff control over their own working environment, in many small (and large) ways.
• Connecting people with people within organisations, in addition to capturing explicit content.
• Building an understanding of staff knowledge, skills, expertise and needs; and then using this rich information throughout the intranet.
• Embedding social and collaborative tools in the heart of the intranet, and weaving them throughout working practices.
• Adapting tools to fit human needs, rather than the other way around.
• Delivering an enterprise experience that makes staff productive and satisfied.

We deliver this vision not just because we care about staff, but also because productive staff mean successful organisations.

Many intranets have implemented some of these principles, none have done them all. Many people are passionate about these types of principles, but some have become evangelists about a single aspect rather than human-centred realists.

Faruk Avdi, an Australian web channel manager, has a good view on this. He talks about staff being on a spectrum: from staff with limited IT skills, through to technophiles. Intranets need to work out-of-the-box for those with limited computer skills, and then gracefully allow more experienced staff to take control at their own pace.

This is a mature and nuanced view, and a good example of how to put people at the centre of our intranets.

Our internal information systems have been faceless, oblivious to staff needs and working practices. In the future, these tools will be turned on their heads, with technology designed to support staff in a rich and responsive ways.

How else can we put people at the centre of our intranets and information systems?

To start: I was interviewed by Gerry Gaffney for the User Experience Podcast. 29 minutes in length, we cover a range of intranet strategy and management topics, and where information architects can add value. To quote:

Yeah, it’s interesting, talking with intranet teams to say: Where are you spending your time? And after a little bit of chatting it becomes apparent that, say, 80% or 90% of time is spent maintaining the current site. And the lack of time is the single biggest point of pain for intranet teams the world over.

What we would say, and maybe it’s easy for us to say, is that only 30% of time should be spent maintaining the current site. 30% of the time should then be spent on relationships. So that’s relationships with end users but particularly with stakeholders and managers. And what we’ve observed is the most successful intranet teams are people people. They’re great at building relationships, maybe ahead of everything else.

There are lots of complicated ways to work numbers, particularly when dealing with the subjective data that invariably lies at the heart of any discussion of user experience. But rather than putting together confusing formulae to present our research, we work directly with our clients to quantify empirical observations in a very simple model.

In my view the EIS must consider all instances of information and knowledge transfer that take place within an organisation. This does not mean that it is possible to actually manage all transactions. For instance the tacit knowledge inside people’s heads can be added to by training and can be influenced by organisational culture but the only manager of this type of knowledge is the person in whose head the knowledge resides. However it is possible, for instance, to consider the amount of tacit knowledge that people might need in order to do their jobs effectively. If it is too little then you are not allowing staff any control over their working environment and they will have little job satisfaction; if it is too much then the organisation may be badly affected as crucial knowledge will leave when the person does.

If you’ve made it this far, you deserve a reward. That’s a lot of words about a lot of deliverables. And, that’s the problem. It’s hard to find the best trees when we can’t see the forest. So, we often fall back on old habits. We churn out wireframes when a story may be worth its weight in gold. Some great deliverables stay hidden in plain sight. That’s why we created this treasure map for our wall (and yours).

At some point in your career, you’ll be called upon to sell UX to someone in your organization. You’ve probably already done it. Perhaps you’ll need to justify what you do in an organization or industry that’s just beginning to adopt UX methods or sell UX to secure your position within an organization or get future projects. So, what do you need to know to help you sell UX? What challenges might you face?