Best Practices in Corporate Intranets

Avenue A / Razorfish has just published a report on Intranet Best Practices. You can obtain it free of charge here. Considering that the intranet is destined to become the privileged place for social exchanges in the business (social intranet or intranet 2.0 as you like…) I was also very surprised to read the sub-title of the report: ‘A User-Driven Web 2.0 perspective’.

A quick overview of the report, which I strongly recommend you download. I’ll come back to some of the points after a thorough reading.
– Emerging aspirations: the evolution of the Internet is leading employees to expect something different from their intranets. They want them to be user-centric, accessible and easy to use, like those they use outside work (web 2.0)

– by letting employees organise their workspace and tools themselves, we are looking at long-term productivity gains thanks to the use of new tools, even if we concede a short-term security risk.

– To meet these expectations and increase productivity, businesses need to understand the benefits of this risk and draw on the best practices of those who have already adopted this approach.

– Intranet maturity framework: assessing an intranet on the basis of the following criteria: management involvement, governance, user needs, user experience, technology used, training put in place, adoption, criteria for measuring return on investment (ROI), etc.

– 1st generation intranets (communication and information sharing): often initiated at departmental level, they lack the support of top management, but their contribution to the business remains undeniable. The collaborative nature of information sharing remains to be encouraged.

– Self-service’ intranets: provide “service” information within a department or business. This often includes personal information about employees (HR, payroll, etc.) and is based on ERP-type systems. Intranets have brought the most benefits to the business. However, they have contributed to making the company faceless and have come up against the difficulty of turning offline into online.

In my opinion, this is the challenge to be met by future social intranets: to give a human dimension to what is merely an aggregate of processes in order to optimise buy-in and turn them into places of collective intelligence and fruitful exchange.

These tools are becoming increasingly important with mobile workers.

– Collaborative intranets: their aim is to encourage collaboration that goes beyond simple communication. They include systems for collaboration, document sharing and project management, usually grouped together in a single interface. They are geared towards knowledge sharing, and are particularly useful in businesses with a high proportion of knowledge workers. They also sometimes enable employees to influence business decisions, based on the principle that management is not always right and that those on the ground have better feedback.

Interesting detail: the metric is not based on a traditional ROI but on the number of publications, comments and exchanges. This takes into account and recognises that collaboration is essential and difficult to measure: at IBM they count suggestions and those that have resulted in an actual project. This also reminds me of the Balanced Scorecard, which highlights the non-financial nature of a number of performance elements. At this level, it seems to me that we still need to evangelise a number of decision-makers who have an overly financial view of things and refuse to consider a result that cannot immediately be evaluated in money terms. Or are Europeans more cautious than their US colleagues, who have a more extensive concept of ROI?

To succeed with this type of intranet, you need real leaders in the business. This type of intranet is experiencing a clear revival of interest with the popularisation of social tools (blogs, wikis) with users who have experience of forms of collaborative tools in their lives outside the business. Collaboration on intranets seems to have a bright future ahead of it, with just one limitation: will employees agree to collaborate on a tool managed by the business when they have equally (or even more) interesting and relevant sources outside the business?

To conclude this subject, I’ll quote in extenso part of the report, which is totally in line with my vision of the matter:

‘Enterprise 2.0 technologies have the potential to make the intranet what the internet already is: an online platform with a constantly evolving structure, built on distributed, autonomous, and largely self-interested hubs. On this platform, authors create content, link it together and index it by keyword, and tags, feeds and search signals allow themes and patterns to emerge from the visible content, keeping the individual above the whole. Business 2.0 technologies are subject to the network effect: the more people invest in publishing, linking and keywording, the more the emerging structure becomes ‘fine-grained’’.

Andrew P. MacAffee, ‘Entreprise 2.0, l’aube de la collaboration emergente’ MIT Sloan Management review, Spring 2006

– Business information portals: these bring together internal and external sources of information. Their high degree of personalisation means that each employee only has access to the tools and information they need. They incorporate search tools and can be used to set up personalised alerts on specific subjects. They concentrate the content of the types of intranet mentioned above. The portal must be designed specifically to meet the needs of the business in order to deliver a significant ROI and avoid budget overruns.

– Dashboards: these target decision-makers and top management in order to provide relevant decision-making elements (indicators). Sharing these top indicators throughout the company.

In my opinion, this second aspect is a challenge because these indicators are so critical. Sharing them helps to convey a vision of the company, its choices and the reasons behind them… but that’s a long way from taking the plunge…

– The consolidated interface workspace: this is the integration of everything we have seen before into a single dynamic interface for employees. Services such as Voice over IP can also be added. It includes mobile components so that everything can be accessed on mobile devices. We have very little experience of these still very rare intranets.

– Development trends

1. From stage to stage, the intranet is gaining in maturity
2. Towards a new concept of ROI: the competitive effectiveness of blogs and wikis in terms of collaboration is clear, but traditional metrics need to be abandoned.
3. The more intranets there are, the better – let them grow and take their rightful place
4. Ajax will give intranets a previously unknown user experience that will make using them a pleasure.
5. Beyond blogs, take advantage of the power of RSS, which gives power to blogs.
6. Wikis will have their place, providing both freedom of expression and certain guarantees of control.
7. Social networking will be very important

– Advice to managers for a successful intranet…

1. keep things simple
2. have the committed support of decision-makers
3. opt for simple governance
4. always validate the progress of the project with users
5. manage change through communication
6. not everything has to be on the intranet: too cumbersome and it becomes unusable
7. simplify channels, with a single flow for each issue

I have so much to say about these last points that they will be the subject of a separate article…

That’s my hot off the press report… see you later with a bit more hindsight…

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