1. Setting overall business objectives for the Intranet:
Any organization looking to improve the value of their Intranet requires a set of goals that align with the business goals of the organization it supports. Therefore it is important to define the current issues and focus of the executive management team as these will affect which options will be successful as the implementation progresses.
For example, a client at a pharmaceutical company was attempting to consolidate the Intranets that had grown up in the various divisions. When she first contacted us, she had developed a presentation documenting how much money the overall company would save by consolidating the various Intranets. However, the executive she reported to was not responsive nor was the executive committee.
The culture of the company was decentralized, and as such, did not have the desire or processes to support a centralized solution. Each division executive was responsible for his own division's profit and loss. The top company acted like a holding company, and considered their profit and loss as strictly the sum of the P & Ls of the divisions.
Six months later, the executive view had completely changed. The CEO, Board of Directors and Executive Management Committee were launching a Single Company campaign. This time she went in with a story on how the consolidated Intranet could become the physical manifestation of the Single Company and help change the culture. The CEO became not only a supporter, but also a vocal champion of the project.
Many organizations have a few objectives that are the current focus of the executive team. Sometimes they are officially published. Even if they are published, it is important to talk to one or two executives to verify that these remain the current focus. Some management objectives to look for:
- Control or reduce costs
- Increase revenue
- Increase employee satisfaction and retention
- Reduce process times
- Improve internal communication
- Improve or encourage collaboration
- Change or reinforce the culture.
Once you have identified those business objectives currently important to the executive management team, they should suggest the kinds of destinations (functionality) to focus on, and how to build executive support.
If this is a top down rather than a grass-roots project, this is the stage where you want to identify an executive sponsor to champion your Intranet initiative. Lack of an executive champion is the number one reason organization-wide projects fail.
2. Developing a governance structure for the Intranet:
Even when an Intranet is packaged as a single entity, it still involves a fair amount of decentralized support and control. The first organizational entity that should be created is an Intranet Council, consisting of a representative from each of the key organizations responsible for Intranet destinations or content.
During my first meeting with the client in the example above, after determining that, currently, there was not a viable leverage point to move forward with a centralized case, I recommended that she invite key Intranet stakeholders from each of the divisions to form an Intranet Council. The corporate culture may not have supported centralized control, but even distributed governance structures allow sharing, consensus building and voluntary commitment to common interests.
Without an official executive mandate, she was able to successfully get the other divisions to participate in the Intranet Council. They had even reached a high level of consensus on the need for policies, centralized navigation standards, and foundation functionality that they all should share (like a common search engine). When the executive management team announced the Single Company program, she already had built strong backing and support that allowed her to move forward quickly and overcome the few pockets of political resistance that still remained.
In Chapter 3 of my 1996 online book, Intranet organization, I suggested that each of the Intranet Council representatives should be the Publisher for their organization. The Publishers commit their organization to providing specific content and services to the rest of the organization. They are responsible for defining, monitoring and enforcing the policies and standards that apply to content that is part of the formal Intranet. I’ll define the formal and informal Intranet in a following paragraph. One Publisher responsibility is to identify who signs off on the content that is created and sponsored by their organization, a role I called Editor.
The Editors are the people who actually check for compliance to the policies and verify the accuracy and commitments made by Content Creators then approve publication to the formal Intranet. The Content Creators are the individuals who create the digital content for the Intranet. Note that the Content Creators may be programmers creating online processes, and their Editors may be Project Managers. The titles are less important than the roles.
A destination (discussed in more detail in the next section) generally is the responsibility of one organization, and therefore each destination should be aligned with the Publisher of that organization. The person or group in that organization who is responsible for the content or function is the owner of that destination, and also the most likely candidate to fill the Editor role. Unless the functionality is completely new, there will be someone who already is responsible for this functionality in the organization. Rather than set up a parallel Intranet owner, the person who already owns the functionality should be identified and trained to be responsible for the Intranet channel.
An Intranet is a tool for self-service and sharing. The sharing part suggests that everyone in the organization is a potential Content Creator. Indeed, some of the most successful uses of Intranets have been to support communication and sharing among members of project teams and working groups. These often are rather ad hoc, and the content in these cases is not formal, but working content.
Formal content, then, is the officially sanctioned and commissioned content of the enterprise. It is reviewed for accuracy, currency, confidentiality, liability and commitment. This is the information with which the formal management infrastructure is most concerned. By contrast, informal content is not officially sanctioned, may still be a work in progress, may have errors, and cannot be depended on to accurately describe positions or commitments the organization is willing to honour. It is ongoing discussion.
The governance structure should allow for (and even encourage) informal content. Issues that need to be addressed by the Intranet Council regarding informal content are:
- How will employees distinguish formal content from informal content?
- Are there minimal standards that informal content must follow?
- Should the search engine index informal content?
A class of tools, called social software, has developed to support the informal structures and processes on Intranets. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of these tools, other than their success, is that they tend to be simple, low tech and low cost. This aligns with a trend I have noticed over the past 9 years working with Intranets. The more high-tech, integrated, and wizard-like the tools used to publish to the Intranet, the less use the Intranet gets. The informal Intranet needs tools that remain basic, simple and flexible.
3. Identifying the key destinations, their owners, objectives and metrics:
Think of a destination as the fulfilment of an employee objective for a given Intranet session. Since Intranets are about self-service, one technique for identifying the major destinations is to ask the question: Self-service what? Self-service education? Self-service benefits management? Self-service meeting room reservations? Self-service publishing?
Identifying the key destinations as a self-service function helps remind us that the Intranet is a tool, not an end in itself. Intranets are successful only when the employees are able to successfully serve themselves, regardless of which destination they came to access this time.
Step one discussed the importance of setting overall business goals for the Intranet and identifying key destinations that support these goals. This is the beginning point for prioritising destinations. Look for those existing or planned destinations that have the greatest potential impact on meeting the business goals. These are the key destinations, and the ones to focus on when selling the Intranet.
Some destinations are important to the health of the organization, but may not map to the current "hot buttons" of the executive management team. This does not mean they should be ignored. Their goals and contribution need to be defined so their value to the organization can be measured.
The business value for the destination comes from the difference between the current method of meeting the objective versus the delivery of the destination content or functionality through the Intranet or change in the Intranet. This involves two steps: identifying how to measure success meeting the objective, and comparing the costs and results of the possible ways to get those results.
The following three questions can help identify appropriate metrics:
- What is the business objective?
- What will change if we meet the objective?
- What will success (the change) actually look like?
Focus on the business change you expect to see, not the technical or process change. If you can describe what the change or success you are after will look like (before and after), then it should be easy to figure out what needs to be measured to document success. Just remember that you need to actually take the measurements before (called a baseline measurement) in order to document the change.
If you are building a business case, the second part of this involves comparing tools or approaches. This involves answering two questions:
- How do we meet the objective now, or how would we meet it without the Intranet?
- What is the difference in cost, time, and results with the different methods?
Note that answering the second question can be complex and involve a number of variables. For example, costs often involve not only purchase or building of software, but implementation, conversion and ongoing maintenance. There also may be differences in training costs for the people.
The process of setting business objectives for the key destinations should not be viewed as a one-time exercise, but a continuous improvement process. As objectives are met, new objectives should be set. And, the overall business objectives should be monitored regularly. As pointed out in the example above, even the key executive issues can change over a six-month period.
4. Setting standards that optimise the success of all destinations:
The success of the Intranet is often more a function of the ability of employees to find the destination they need each time they set out than it is the destinations themselves.
Organizations often spend significant time and resources developing Intranet destinations. But Intranet destinations are not the Intranet. This same content or functionality could be made available to employees other ways. An Intranet often makes delivery of the content or functionality faster, easier and less expensive than other methods, and potentially does the same for finding it.
However, unlike a magazine without a table of contents, employees cannot "flip through the pages" of an Intranet and find unlisted destinations. If destinations are not obvious links, they don't exist, no matter how much effort and resources were spent creating them. And, when destinations are not found their potential value is not realized by the organization.
Answering the question of how to make an Intranet experience successful and satisfying for employees would take volumes, and is beyond the scope of this short Knowledge Byte. However, a few points from this field of research do need to be made, because they are behind the need for important standards that make an Intranet useable.
A lot of research has been done on how people orient and navigate in physical space, and how those principles relate to orientation and navigation in conceptual spaces. Aside from recognizing that applying physical metaphors literally in conceptual space does not work, applying physical metaphors conceptually does work.
As a minimum Intranets need to provide appropriate landmarks, conventions, and signposts that are consistent across the entire formal Intranet. This requires standards that all the organizations need to adopt in order to maintain the employees' ability to orient and navigate the Intranet. Without this basic consistency, employees get frustrated, lost, and even anxious when using the Intranet.
People do not like to lose their confidence or feel stupid, and they avoid situations that create these feelings. One of the reasons so many Intranets are under utilized is because so many organizations do not set or enforce standards that provide these basic orientation and navigation capabilities.
Getting specific, the Intranet Council needs to agree on a common global navigation scheme. This means a set of links that have the same category link names, in the same place, following the same conventions, with the same look and feel on every page of the formal Intranet.
Having done many workshops with clients to help them develop web site standards, the hardest part is agreeing on the category link names to be included in the global navigation. This also is one of the most rewarding conclusions when successful, because it clarifies and documents a set of underlying assumptions that usually remain unspoken and, as such, cause problems in nearly every aspect of an Intranet and its management.
The following are a few from a long list of additional principles and practices that are critical for orientation and navigation:
- Page titles: location, font style and size, color
- Method of displaying sub-site or local navigation
- Link presentation: look and color
A large number of other principles and practices exist that help navigation and success. They should be considered as guidelines, if not mandatory standards.
These standards can be used and refined in an ongoing improvement process shown in Figure 1 below. The cycle begins with an enterprise perspective shown on the lower left side as Monitoring Compliance. The first time this monitoring is really collecting the baseline data on how the current status deviates from good design principles. This is followed by the “Refinement” phase where the initial principles and practices are modified and prioritised to match the Intranet and culture. The result is the initial version of Documented Standards. Once the initial status is documented, the cycle can continue indefinitely to manage and improve the effectiveness of the Intranet.
The Owner aspects of this cycle are applied to each destination and focused on managing the success of the business outcome for each. Creating formal scenarios based on key employee and business objectives provides a tool for identifying issues that may not be covered by adhering to principles alone. The scenarios can be applied in two ways. During the design and development phase, experts can use them to “play act” how different designs might affect employees. This is called a Heuristic approach. When the design is built as a prototype or before it is ready to go live, employees who will use the destination can be recruited and asked to complete the scenario in an experimental test. When the site is live, the business and other objectives need to be measured to track success and refine the model.
Figure 1: Improving Overall Intranet Effectiveness
Intranet Councils also may want to set standards for foundation services and technical standards that help all the organizations be more efficient through sharing. This is an area that crosses over from functionality to technology issues, and so, should involve technical experts in the discussion.
5. Developing an Adoption Strategy and Plan:
There is now ample evidence that just building an Intranet will not insure that employees will come. Getting people involved in the Intranet requires both marketing and training at all levels. Those responsible for the formal Intranet need to know not only how to use the tools that will support them, they need to learn their responsibilities and receive help in setting up their processes.
The destinations need to be marketed to those they are intended to serve, and programs may need to be devised to attract them initially. They also may require training. One of the most effective ways to get employees involved with the Intranet is to get them to use it not just as consumers of content, but as content creators as well. This is where the informal Intranet can be useful. Making this happen requires not only providing the capabilities and tools, but also creating a program that markets the benefits and offers training on how to set up and manage informal projects on the Intranet.
The Intranet Council should discuss the adoption strategies, plans and progress and share ideas and best practices. The Intranet Council itself should consider setting up an informal Intranet destination to share information and ideas and to discuss issues between meetings. For key destinations, the business objectives should be accompanied by a formal adoption plan with formally documented adoption goals. Metrics should be collected regularly on the potential and actual levels of use and adoption and compared to the goals in the plan.