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Articles by Jane McConnell
From user-centered design to user satisfaction surveys, most organizations now practice some form of user involvement in the intranet. Clearly the old top-down, organizationally structured intranet is a dying species. "It's about time!" you might say. However, in some cases the pendulum has swung too far the other way.
Intranets come in many shapes and colors. Like chameleons, they adapt to their environments. The most advanced intranets today are online workplaces, blending into work environments so successfully that they may even lose their own identity.
An operational intranet is one that provides the place to go to find what you need to do your job. It is an essential tool for staff and management. If the site goes down, people are disrupted in their work within an hour or less. My firm’s “Global Intranet Trends for 2009” report identifies three stages of intranet maturity, with Stage 3 representing organizations where the intranet has become highly operational and is the “way of working.” Large international enterprises (from 15,000 to more than 50,000 employees) represent more than 60% of the enterprises in Stage 3 in the 2008 data. A striking, often overlooked aspect of their intranets is that they offer more ways of connecting people to people.
I once ran a workshop for corporate intranet managers who asked me to describe the ideal homepage for their new enterprise portal. I sketched an empty box on the whiteboard, drew a line from top to bottom separating the box into two parts, one with 10% of the space and the other 90%. I told them that all they had to worry about was the little box. Local news, content, and business applications would fill the big box. My answer shocked them into several moments of stunned silence.
Global intranet managers often suffer from a lack of image, especially in the eyes of senior management. Much of the work these teams do is strategic, yet it is not perceived as such by decision-makers, resulting in insufficient visibility, resources, and budgets.
Global intranet landscapes are usually made up of intranets and portals offering services and information to a variety of users. Sooner or later, a global intranet manager will be confronted with the issue of how to bring balance to this rich mosaic of content. Balance, in this case, meaning that users can find similar amounts of content for similar subjects in logical places.
The role of divisional and regional intranets can be both ambiguous and misleading. They are neither global nor local. Global intranet managers may feel they reproduce global content, thereby keeping users from the authoritative global site; local managers may feel they are unnecessary because they can best provide their local users with what they need. Thus, the divisional and regional intranet mangers are caught in the middle, running intranets with little guidance, other than their managers saying “we need to have an intranet.” The hard truth is that the majority of these intranets should not exist.
I conducted a study entitled “Intranet Strategies Today and Tomorrow” during summer 2006 with large, complex, and global organizations. Approximately 90 intranet managers answered questions about strategy, decision-making, budgeting, governance, ROI, measurement, Web 2.0 technologies, home page, content strategies, and language strategies.
An intranet audit in a large, international organization is a complex affair. It is easy to produce misleading numbers, create accidental bias, and ignore cultural differences—at the intranet’s peril.
Trusting the intranet means you go to it when you need information, you know where to find it, and you know it is reliable and up-to-date. It’s hard for any organization to achieve this level of collective trust, but the diversity and vastness of an international organization makes it a real challenge. Trust usually grows from knowing people, but in an international organization, you’ll never know everyone you work with. You need to trust the intranet itself, not the individual content providers: this collective trust can be built through an Information Architecture (IA) strategy based on user logic and double ownership.
Language strategies are moving targets, evolving with enterprise strategies as well as business and operational changes. To develop and maintain an effective one, you need to start by asking the right questions. Once you know what you’d like to achieve, see how technology can help you, how much it will cost, and what organizational changes are needed. Over the years, I’ve developed some “reality checkpoints” that may prove helpful to you when analyzing language needs.
In developed countries, everyone has the right to public services such as transportation, communication, and education. When the intranet serves as a utility for the way a company works it becomes as essential as water and electricity; it becomes a public service. Likewise, in an international company, all employees should have equal access to intranet services. In reality you often find populations living above the digital poverty line and others below it—pockets of wealth alongside pockets of poverty.
Describing content as “global” or “local” is common practice in many international companies. In fact, it is an illusion that rarely corresponds with reality and can lead to a waste of time and money. Capital G Global is a theoretical concept that has little meaning for managers and employees in the trenches. Better to distinguish “common” versus “specific”: Distinguish pertinent content for all employees from content that needs to be personalized for identified populations. The distinction depends on company strategy, organization, and culture and will even vary within a company and from subject to subject.
The reality today is that most multinational company intranets are actually multiple sites, which overlap and compete for the user’s attention. When thousands of PCs are turned on everyday around the globe, up comes the home page of the intranet…but which home page is it? It could be one of dozens of different home pages, depending on where you work in the company or what you do. In my work with international companies, I have repeatedly come across two truisms: The farther you are from the center, the more the intranet becomes your lifeline to the rest of the company; and, the farther you are from the center, the less the intranet meets your needs.
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