Articles Index
The variety of industry verticals that can benefit from reinventing their intranets with social software never ceases to amaze. Take the interesting case of FONA International, a company that designs and manufactures flavors for many of the world's largest food and beverage companies.
Intranets have long promised to help deliver a more networked organization, provide cost efficiencies via improved business systems and processes, enable better internal communication and employee engagement, and more. Idealized by many as "the hub for the business," how many intranets actually meet that vision?
Edelman is the world's largest independent public relations firm, with 3,200 employees in 51 offices worldwide. With Edelman's existing corporate intranet, users often required help from IT to update individual webpages and couldn't personalize their information or intranet pages. Edelman wanted to revamp its intranet, making it easier to use and more engaging for employees.
Social media has opened the floodgates of content, yet one wonders if most of this content is knowledge. While some might be thought silly or even offensive, someof it is interesting, informative, and even inspirational. The immense amount of content flowing through these channels is baffling, and there is no doubt that there is a lot of knowledge created within this realm.
Panasonic sought a better way to supply technical information to its authorized service center (ASC) partners, because it had thousands of documents spread across the business that it needed to draw on at different times. The company selected a solution from Intranet DASHBOARD (iD) to manage and publish documents for its network of 600 ASC partners using one central extranet platform. The iD platform launched in late 2008, giving Panasonic's partners instant access to the technical documents they needed in one easy-to-use location. Partner feedback has been positive, with traffic more than doubling since the iD platform launched.
In a few short years, Alpharetta, Ga.-based Infor has become the third largest provider of business software worldwide, with more than $2 billion in revenue, more than 70,000 customers, and 9,000 employees. Infor offers a full range of enterprise business software including CRM, asset management, enterprise resource planning, and financial management-along with a host of industry-specific tools. Due to its explosive growth, Infor decided to implement a single sales enablement platform companywide to streamline some of its increasingly complex operations and enable the entire company, including staff, sales teams, marketing, presales, and services, through internal, channel, partner, and customer-facing portals. Giving prospects the information they need in a timely fashion is an integral part of Infor's business model.
What can you make with Plasticine? Anything, really, depending on your sculptural talents and your command of fine motor skills, although that “anything” is limited by the inherent properties of Plasticine. That is, you can’t make a real motor out of it, but you can make a model one.
When managing a company's business processes, there's something to be said for seeing "the big picture." As group network manager, my team responds to the needs of five companies, including two international firms and a sales and manufacturing plant in India. While GIS (our corporate IT team) drives IT overall, I'm responsible for group-level IT, including business processes, application integrations, and IT initiatives.
Lourdes Hospital in Paducah, Ky., has a long and storied history as an integral part of the area’s healthcare system. Like so many hospitals across the country, Lourdes struggles to provide a high standard of care for all of its patients while trying to contain costs. And like so many other healthcare providers, Lourdes is finding that increasing efficiency through new technologies may provide a means to achieve this objective.
For the past several years, social networking services Facebook and LinkedIn have catered almost exclusively to the needs of the individual. By helping individuals share photos, links, and statuses; reconnect with friends; and find jobs, both services have built up substantial userbases. From an enterprise perspective, Facebook and LinkedIn have historically been criticized as nothing more than time wasters of the workday. However, recently there has been a marked shift by both services toward trying to provide value to enterprises. Both Facebook and LinkedIn have added or bolstered their networking, community, and collaboration capabilities in ways that will get the attention of some enterprises and yet will continue to fall short of enterprise-class for others.
It is generally accepted that folksonomies are most useful when they take the collective wisdom of a group and use that knowledge to organize and classify information in a way that makes the most sense to that user community. The reasoning goes that a userbase that categorizes and tags content in its own way—regardless of how unorthodox that method may be— knows what works best for itself, and a system should not dictate how an object isclassified for later retrieval. In contrast to highly structured taxonomies, a folksonomy requires less oversight, owing to its decentralized nature, and is ideal for applying descriptive data to a large number of information objects quickly and with minimal effort. Indeed, a folksonomy approach is often the best method for applying structure to an unwieldy, disparate assortment of assets. On the other hand, folksonomies with expansive tag clouds are also known for imprecision and generally lower metadata quality.
As they mature, intranets gain in personalization and collaboration features.This is one observation from the Nielsen Norman Group, based on its assessments of intranets for its 2009 annual design awards (www.nngroup.com/reports/intranet/2009). It certainly applies to McKesson Corp.’s intranet, one of Nielsen Norman’s 10 best. Known as McKNet, the corporate intranet encourages usage by a diverse group of employees and outside contractors.
In 2006, KUKA Systems, a global manu- facturer of automated assembly lines, began to use Traction TeamPage, a wiki-based intranet solution for collaboration and sharing from Traction Software, to track and collaborate on software and process improvement in its enterprise applications group based in offices outside of Detroit.
In 2008, for the seventh year in a row, Zurich, Switzerland, was named by Mercer, LLC as the city with the highest standard of living worldwide. Like any city government, Zurich is tasked with getting practical information out to its residents, whether it’s about new water lines, trash collection, or the latest trendy food event. In Zurich’s case, its website was suffering from a bit of an identity crisis. So the powers that be decided it was time to revamp the city’s website—to make it an easier-to-use, more cohesive portal for web authors as well as users.
We create websites to communicate with our key constituents: readers, customers, partners, employees, and colleagues. The experience that we deliver to our site visitors greatly depends on the quality of content that we place there. First and foremost, this content must be fresh, informative, accurate, and relevant. In many cases, it must also be engaging and entertaining. Unfortunately, producing high-quality content can be time-consuming and expensive.
According to Etienne Wenger, one of the leading thinkers in the space, “Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly.” On many intranets, the employee directory or “people finder” is one of the most popular features. This popularity indicates the need that employees have to locate and communicate with others regarding particular topics or areas of practice. In fact, communication with others regarding a specific topic can be much more valuable than the actual content posted on an intranet.
Enterprise portals promise increased productivity, utility, and convenience by gathering scattered content and functionality into a single destination experience. Yet many portals become victims of their own success. Rapid expansion and frequent changes in audience and content lead to problems of poorly integrated or conflicting assets, impaired usability and findability, and inflated management and IT support costs. The cumulative inconvenience of sprawling collections of portlets stuck in a flat information architecture quickly overwhelms the value of the business assets, content, and functionality the portal brings together.
Innovation equals originality plus impact. Innovative ideas are not simply new; they must also deliver concrete benefits, creating something of value or making things easier and quicker.
Wikis are increasingly gaining popularity in the enterprise and are being deployed for many different types of projects, in particular for team collaboration. While doing research at the beginning of 2008, I found that wikis had recently become ubiquitous in many organizations. Join me for a quick review of some of the common myths about wikis coupled with best practices for wikis inside the enterprise.
Say the word “intranet” and many business managers cringe. Bad memories of overtime and over-budget IT projects that never delivered on their promise to increase internal collaboration and know-ledge sharing abound. Why? Because so many homegrown, custom intranets were built with little input from the end user and required technical expertise to continuously update and maintain, business users failed to adopt them. Luckily, the concept of “anytime, anywhere” access to business-critical information lured developers back to the drawing board and fueled the growth of the web-based software—software as a service (SaaS), hosted—market. Today, large and small organizations alike are getting up and running with web-based collaboration solutions in a matter of minutes, with no upfront investment in hardware or software.
Midas, Inc. is one of the world’s largest providers of automotive services, offering brake, exhaust, maintenance, tire, steering, and suspension services at nearly 2,600 franchised, licensed, and company-owned Midas shops in 19 countries—including nearly 1,800 in the U.S. and Canada. At any given time, employees, dealers, and partners need to access a wide range of company information—from warranty data, customer feedback, and sales reports to promotions and shop policies.
Two Ontario organizations have created the Online Activity Planner (OAP), which will offer an interactive collection of activities and lesson plans for coaches, teachers, and recreation providers to use with participants of all ages, though the initial focus is on development of activities and activity plans that can be used with children and youth.
In 2005, Fiat was about to face its fiercest challenge: to overcome the deep economic and image crisis into which it had plunged during the preceding years, to revitalize its brand, and to again establish a leadership position in Italy and all over Europe.
Developing a hierarchical taxonomy (or set of taxonomies) involves a great deal of decision making regarding the kind of categories, the number of categories, the number of levels, the wording of the terms, etc. While taxonomy owners or stakeholders can provide some of the answers, they often leave a number of decisions up to the individual developing the taxonomy (the taxonomist), who “knows best.”
Each year, organizations invest ever-increasing sums in their intranet environments. They do so for good reasons: to drive internal efficiencies, to enable staff to collaborate better, to reduce face-to-face meeting and travel time, to enable remote/home working, or to foster innovation and knowledge sharing. From time to time—particularly when substantial injections of new funds are required—senior leaders posit a question: “So if we put the $2.5 million you want into the intranet, what will the return be?”
The introduction of a new software system into an existing company (and its culture) is always a challenge. All new software is at risk of being under-used, improperly used, or simply not accepted. An intranet faces additional challenges because, to a certain extent, it alters the flow of how people work and communicate.
Forrester Research reports that 71% of American companies currently support web-based email to help address this challenge. Many organizations have also invested in web-based solutions for their sales force and field services applications. As employees become accustomed to accessing email remotely via a web browser, there will be an increase in demand to have the same services available via mobile devices.
The highly visible activities that take place aboard each NASA space shuttle mission are supported by complex behind-the-scenes efforts that ensure a safe and productive mission. Like most organizations, NASA’s operations require it to capture, categorize, organize, and provide access to a wide range of information assets used by many people in many locations.
YouTube has enjoyed a rarely seen level of mass acceptance and adoption around the globe and across many subject areas. What is it about this approach to communications that has caused its amazing reception, and how can that be applied to training and learning?
Implementing a useful web analytics initiative need not require an abundance of resources. The effort does require planning, project management, and a credible assessment of analytics goals to accomplish. Let's review some key best practices to ensure a successful intranet analytics program.
In the summer of 2004, Loyola Marymount University (www.lmu.edu), where I?serve as VP?for information technology, debuted its university portal. Although enterprise information portals had been around for years, we took a cautious approach to deploying what became known as ManeGate. Our initial portal effort was motivated in part by students looking for better ways to engage with one another electronically. The administration, on the other hand, saw the portal first and foremost as a vehicle for im- proving communication among campus constituencies—a way to simplify access to university systems.
Facets are most often used for objects, while taxonomies are used for topics or subjects found in documents. As we shall see, this difference is changing, but it explains why facets have been mostly associated with ecommerce sites rather than within the enterprise where finding documents is the dominant interaction.
The intranet offers a unique opportunity to share content. However, you must empower users to participate by providing employees the tools to create, capture, and converse within a sensible governance framework.
Like any Fortune 500 company, Ingersoll Rand understands the importance of bringing newly hired employees into the fold the right way—with a clear understanding of who the company is, what it does, and of course, what is expected of every new employee. Providing this information is not nearly as easy as it sounds—as the leading diversified industrial company, best known for its construction and mining machinery, can attest.
Looking at the way business is conducted today—websites, email, online document management—it’s hard to imagine how we ever managed before the internet. I find it strange that, with so many tools at our disposal, so many companies still rely on paper in the form of memos, handbooks, phone directories, and so on to manage internal communications. Even companies trying to make the digital switch by using an intranet often default to traditional inter-office communication methods. ecause we work with many clients integrating their intranets into a content-management system for the first time, we get to see many companies as they go through the process of evaluating what works and what doesn’t on their intranets. Here are some of the tips I’ve gleaned from watching that process.
Sharing information across an enterprise is difficult, much more difficult than one would expect in these latter days of the Information Age. Part of the problem is terminology. It seems every corner of the enterprise has its own language or dialect. Even though two people work for the same company, they often use different terms for the same concept and something is always lost in translation. The other part of the problem is technology. The number of the components comprising our intranets has exploded.
In organizations with successful intranets, the intranet champion is a C-level executive—a senior executive that reports directly to the CEO. This could be the CIO, CFO, COO, or perhaps the SVP for communications or human resources. There are organizations with decent intranets that have little support from the executive floor, but they’re not likely to have great ones. Without support from upstairs, an intranet’s potential value will be hobbled.
Gathering marketing intelligence is a critical process for any company, particularly those launching a new product or service, looking to enter a new market sector, or seeking to merge with or acquire other companies. These major decisions can involve millions or even billions of dollars, and as a matter of course, companies need to be as informed as possible to execute plans that could result in tremendous success or financial disaster.
In November 2005, at an intranet standards workshop at the KMWorld & Intranets Conference, I asked which participants were building intranets in Microsoft SharePoint. Out of 26 participants, nearly half raised their hands. The fact was, whether or not SharePoint was the best portal product out there—and most agreed it had significant limitations—it was the default choice for many. And while I was a veteran designer of several portals and content management systems, I had to admit that I hadn’t spent much time with SharePoint. I decided that, given the response from the audience, it was time to educate myself.
Every company wants to create great products that meet and exceed customers’ needs. Employees have a wealth of ideas to help develop and improve product offerings and fuel an organization’s success. But many companies find it a challenge to capture that information and harness it effectively to drive the process of customer-focused product innovation. A company-wide intranet or portal can provide a centralized hub for information gathering and collaboration, but there are overriding considerations that organizations should consider when developing such a tool.
Many organizations recognize the need to build standards around metadata management. These efforts range from formal data architecture boards and standards committees to less formal guidelines for tagging intranet or web content. The difficulty in getting traction on these projects depends on the extent of the effort and the impact on entrenched work practices. Most employees are not affected by “enterprise architecture standards.”
I was flying the other day (actually, many of the other days lately), and I got to thinking about air traffic control. Hundreds, maybe thousands of planes are in the air, all requiring the right information at the right time to safely reach the intended destination. We should all be so lucky as pilots: real-time information, relevant and specific, all delivered when it is needed most. If companies could get the right knowledge about their businesses to the right people at the right time, we could know when we’re running out of gas, or when we’re going to be outrun by a faster plane. It is inevitable that we will reach our audience, and software will help us get there.
The planning model you choose for your intranet, extranet, or portal project can determine your success in getting initial funding, keeping the project on track, increasing user productivity, and giving the organization an acceptable return on its investment. In this article we compare time/cost surveys with three other planning models that, under the right circumstances, provide a more comprehensive, accurate, and agile roadmap for intranet success.
Enterprise Portal software is often purchased to “unify” disparate intranets into a single interface. Indeed, portals are typically sold on the basis of providing a unified dashboard or information access point into diverse enterprises. But what does that interface look like, and how well does it work?
Email is the beloved and bane of corporate life in the digital era. It enhances real-time internal and external communication, but its simplicity and low learning curve make it the natural place for all employees to dump and distribute every kind of material. Email attachments become unregulated publishing systems; collaborations become confusing round-robin message loops with countless revised versions of the same documents; while critical communications with partners and clients are dispersed across multiple employee inboxes with no hope of tracking back important message and document exchanges.
For all these reasons and more, Austin-based information security and remote access provider Permeo sought an intranet solution that could help discipline internal and external communications as well as centralize document storage and distribution for sales and marketing departments. Rather than build its own, which the company estimates could have taken more than two years, it opted for a hosted content-storage solution from Minnesota-based iCentera that turns documents and communication exchanges into custom portals for both employees and partners.
Tagging, or social bookmarking, emerged in the internet this past year through popular sites like del.icio.us and Flickr. It allows people to put metadata (labels) on content, primarily internet links in the case of del.icio.us and photos at Flickr. Tagging is the “offspring” of keywords, but with some new twists. Anyone can tag anything any way they want; there is no agreed-upon or imposed taxonomy. In addition, multiple tags to the same object allow bookmarks to belong to more than one category, bypassing a limitation of the traditional hierarchically organized category systems.
There are other differences between tagging and conventional classification. Readers—not just writers and librarians—get to tag. The new tagging systems are web-based, so they can become accessible to all, and for these two reasons tagging becomes social. This social quality also allows taxonomies to be built from the ground up by users, rather than be determined by designated experts.
Intranets have evolved. Cumbersome and expensive technology has been replaced by software that allows almost anyone to build an intranet quickly and more cost efficiently than ever before. The challenge of making an intranet successful is no longer its technology platform, but rather maintaining the relevancy of information and inspiring employees to use it.
Imagine you’re a high school senior wanting to pursue a medical career, but you live in a rural community in north-central British Columbia. Your school doesn’t have the human or financial resources to offer the preparatory classes you need to get into college, and the nearest school teaching them is hundreds of miles away. The 6,000-plus students of Nechako Lakes School District No. 91 (SD91, www.sd91.bc.ca/sd91)—a roughly 27,000-square-mile area encompassing 21 schools and eight communities with populations ranging from several hundred to several thousand residents—know challenges like these all too well.
Nonprofit organizations like the United Methodist Church can put information technology to work to improve financial control and internal business processes and protect against potential abuse. IT-based solutions can help ease the management of program funds by automatically documenting donation flow and providing secure levels of access as well as providing a trail for conducting internal or even external audits.
What if your knowledge workers could easily tag important documents so they could be retrieved precisely using today’s search engines, but without the thousands of irrelevant documents that are returned in a typical search? And what if your extranet partners could use the same technique to retrieve pages relevant to their needs? Perhaps you’ve tried metatags and taxonomies with limited success, but there’s a way to go deeper, to provide utterly accurate search results. The secret is “tagging” your “memes.”
If you dismiss podcasting as over-hyped, hip tech of the week, too niche or geeky for your buttoned-down stick-to-business intranet, then pop in a set of earbuds and listen up! These downloadable audio shows for playback on remote devices (or any desktop media player, for that matter) are little more than a year old, but key corporations already rave about their effectiveness for internal communications.
Each time an intranet manager establishes the annual budget for an upcoming financial year, he or she wonders if it is missing something important. The budgeting process forces the manager to think more deliberately about the enterprise intranet—where it is, where it needs to go, how many enhancements can be done in the next fiscal year, and by whom. Historically this has been a relatively simple exercise size as intranets haven’t needed to mature quickly, with companies only embarking on significant user experience or technology upgrades after much deliberation and planning.
By launching a portal independent of its corporate site, Dermik has chosen to educate consumers and healthcare providers through supplying content rather than by force-feeding sales messages compressed into 30-second TV spots. Interestingly, Dermik did not build its Skin Health Solutions portal with original content. Rather, the site is comprised of links to more than 300 other sites (including competitors’) to offer the very best of skincare content, all reviewed by an independent, professional advisory board. Dermik wants Skin Health Solutions to be the first place both doctors and patients go for information on dermatological conditions.
Experience has shown that the challenge in realizing the best return from any system that derives value from human input—sales automation, customer relationship management, collaborative workspace, knowledge management best practice sharing systems, or an intranet that combines several of these components—is to maximize usage. In the past decade, numerous collaborative systems have been implemented at enormous expense within companies and then used rarely. As a result, there is also a general skepticism about new software solutions. In the highly competitive global business environment, many workers feel pressured by an increasing focus on productivity and little time to engage in activities with other than immediate benefits. How can these barriers to system usage be overcome?
Informative is a marketing software company with offices in countries spread across the globe. Tom is a strategy consultant for the firm based in California, and Ken is a salesman working in the London office. Normally they don’t work together because they are in different departments halfway around the world. But Informative has a secret weapon—its intranet is a wiki. Wiki technology enables the rapid response participation of employees from disparate business groups and high-quality intranet content. While many intranets are operated through the established Web site model—where changes are funneled through content and technology people—wikis allow for a horizontal approach that can result in much greater participation and usage.
I wonder how different the Web would be if all Internet users were required to attend one-hour training sessions on Web site surfing before firing up their browsers for the first time. Would Web sites be designed differently? Would they be more complex, functionality rich, and design immersive? Would usage be higher? In contrast, in the intranet domain we can require our users to read guides, view Web-based seminars, or even attend instructor-led training sessions (ILT) before they are given access to the company intranets. Training has become more important as intranets evolve to include new content, collaboration, and office productivity applications.
Staff directories (also known as phone directories, corporate phone books, or internal white pages) are generally the most used element of a corporate intranet. They are also one of the few tools that staff use every day, and as such, they have a considerable impact upon the efficiency of staff throughout the organization. The role of the staff directory is to provide an online source of staff contact details that is quick, easy, accurate, and complete. As the size of the organization grows, and the rate of change in the business increases, so does the importance of the staff directory. There can be no communication within an organization without the ability to first find the staff person to contact.
When developing intranets, companies often make significant investments in armies of consultants, whiz-bang technology, industrial-strength hardware, and cutting-edge visual design. Despite these efforts, a large percentage of intranet projects fail to meet expectations, or produce lackluster results. Often, these failures are due to the oversight of a fundamental premise: know your users and plan everything with them in mind. You are probably thinking, “Of course it’s about the user.” But this mantra is not always self-evident, nor is it easy to maintain. Many directives are quickly derailed by extraneous business goals, stakeholders who confuse themselves with users, inarticulate users, and personal agendas overriding best practices.
The issue of corporate taxonomies—systems for naming and organizing things that share similar characteristics into groups—first appeared on Montague Institute members’ radar back in 1999. At that time, we convened a roundtable to explore a collaborative development effort in which different companies, possibly in the same industry, would share the costs of creating taxonomies everyone could use. As it turned out, a cooperative joint venture for corporate taxonomies was neither feasible nor necessary. In the first place, companies can license taxonomies from many sources, including publishers, professional associations, and software vendors. In the second place, corporate information and the taxonomies used to organize it are viewed by most companies as key intellectual assets to be used for competitive advantage. But the idea of collaborative taxonomy development is not dead.
The initial reaction of most readers, upon seeing these two ideas—complexity theory and intranets—conjoined, might be described as befuddlement, promptly followed by the question, “What does this have to do with my job and my intranet?” Well, I’ll argue here that some very interesting implications result in both theory and practice when you consider them together. Complexity theory is an interdisciplinary method that can be applied to a wide variety of subjects, including math, artificial intelligence, economics, ecology, and so on. The Santa Fe Institute is one focal point for a lot of new research. In addition, there is a growing field of complexity theory and social research with David Byrne, senior lecturer in social policy at the University of Durham, as a leader.
Since the early 1990s, many large corporations have used homegrown intranets, often built by IT departments, to serve as central online information hubs. While these enterprise hubs effectively function as knowledge management bases, additional ad hoc intranet functionality is becoming a strategic initiative now. However, in large part, the corporate hub approach does not suit the needs of modern project teams or task forces whose members would benefit from some of an intranet's functionality, but for who, in essence, require a virtual shared desktop. The fact is that this sort of focused team dynamic doesn't work well within the context of an organization-wide intranet. Today, the on-demand, hosted intranet model offers a viable alternative by fulfilling the time-sensitive needs of project teams.
Web site designers and information architects take special care to design good navigational structures with hierarchies and site maps to aid users in navigating sites or intranets. However, because intranet users are repeat visitors, they are likely to be less interested in navigation and more interested in searching. The difference? Navigating means getting to know one’s way around a site, becoming familiar with the content in general, and knowing approximately where to find what. Searching involves trying to go directly to some specific piece of information. Once intranet users have garnered a basic lay of the land, they are much more likely to be searching for specific information than to be navigating about casually. Thus, a good search tool is essential for an intranet’s usefulness.
IBM has launched an array of new open standards-based software and technologies that are designed to give organizations the choice and flexibility to build the "front end" of their collaborative solutions on a variety of client devices, from PCs to mobile devices. In addition to new software enhancements, IBM is also introducing new Workplace development tools, enhanced business partner programs, and a new hosted solution that allows customers to leverage IBM collaborative software on demand.
Editorial/Features
Posted 28 Jan 2005
Consolidation continues to impact many industries as competitors jockey for market position, an inside track to a more desirable product offering, and other business imperatives. Whenever organizations evaluate significant operational consolidation—be it the merger of two multinational conglomerates or the relatively simple combination of departments within the same business—careful human resource planning must be a priority. Sstudies of businesses that have gone through a merger and acquisition (M&A) experience reveal that the extent of human resources integration planning involved can be among the most pivotal factors influencing the long-term success of a consolidation effort.
Over the last several years, many large organizations have developed intranets and portals to serve the role of a centralized information access point, often backed-up by a searchable content repository. More recently, accompanying the development of business process management and collaboration software, intranets and portals have found other ways to meet employee’s needs. Yet for all of these technological solutions, sometimes the answer to a given problem lies not in a database, but inside the head of a human being. The question is, how do you find that person, especially inside a large organization, where employees may be spread out over a large campus or even across the world? The answer may come from a growing niche market known as Expert Locator software. These software packages and, to a lesser degree, people-finder technologies, help employees in large companies find one another, often saving time, effort, and employee hours and even cutting the cost of getting a product to market.
Since their appearance in the late 1990s, intranets have offered a way to deal with a variety of business issues—in practically every industry and business type. On the back-end, they help address issues of application sprawl by providing a centralized framework. On the front-end, along with content management, intranets provide a single interface to employees through which they can access multiple systems. The goal of providing access to enterprise-wide content has always existed but this dream has not quite been realized—at least in part because employees still struggle to locate information stored in structured and unstructured content repositories. "Findability" has been sacrificed because of the very limited search capabilities provided out-of-the-box by intranet and CMS solutions, and, in some cases, even those provided by search vendors. The key here is out-of-the-box, because findability is an issue of more than just ready-made technology.
Toby Banks, a worldwide portal and workplace sales specialist for IBM, works out of his home, but routinely travels to places like Texas, Cambridge, New York, and New Hampshire. To stay abreast of developments within IBM and the wider world of technology and business, Banks—like thousands of other mobile IBM employees—hits IBM’s On Demand Workplace portal several times a day. IBM’s On Demand portal enables Banks as well as other IBM employees and executives to access new information, participate in forums, and keep up to date on important developments in the industry. IBM salespeople use a separate educational portal: Sales Compass. And IBM is notalone. Intranets and portals are growing in popularity for elearning.
Taming intranet chaos state involves more than just implementing corporate design guidelines; it requires a fundamental change in organizational behaviors and expectations. By integrating the intranet into one functioning whole, a firm signals its seriousness and commitment to a unified brand effort. It makes these seemingly abstract ideas real and meaningful.
While researching for this article, I got to revisit a lot of old articles and studies from the early days of intranet development, in part because that is when most of the articles that dealt with culture and intranets were written. I also interviewed a number of people working in various positions in the intranet world, and Intranets.com surveyed its customer base to help me understand the corporate culture challenges facing intranets today.
Considering the range of inputs, there was a remarkable unanimity around the most important difficulties in getting acceptance of intranets within organizations. There was also agreement about the most successful strategies in solving those difficulties. However, the early articles revealed a very interesting dimension to the intranets and culture interaction that continues to be a real problem.
Today, a series of myths surround intranets, myths that initially arose during the Internet boom days and have somehow survived. As a result, many intranet projects—whether they are new intranets or retreads of failed intranets—are still overly complex and potentially fated to remain both costly and ineffectual.
Ventures marketing research project on multi-channel communications illustrated this and made me question the belief that most firms are committed to implementing an enterprise information portal. My hesitation didn’t arise because portals are bad, simply a fad, or not beneficial to most companies. I’ve just found that enterprise information portal implementation is simply too large of a project or investment for the vast majority of companies. Perhaps what most businesses really need is a somewhat scaled down technology that can deliver the benefits of a portal, without extensive and complicated development and without a huge cost: portals for mortals, in other words.
ost people quietly going about their business creating intranets and/or extranets aren’t in it for the glory. They don’t expect to win awards or gain international recognition for their work. The very nature of intranets makes outside scrutiny—much less praise—unlikely. In spite of this, Alacra, Inc. recently sponsored an award for the best intranet or extranet project, given during the Online Information show held in London in December 2003. The award went to the London Business Support Network (LBSN) Knowledge Centre (www.knowledgecentres.com/lbsn), which beat out the BBC Research Gateway, MG Rover’s Dealer extranet, and the BT Group Legal Knowledge Team’s Library Online Project. Andrew Rumfitt, head of Online Services, Business Link for London, received the award at a gala banquet in London, with the awards presentation hosted by noted British TV News at Ten personality John Suchet.
In June 2002, Forrester Research reported that about 50% of enterprise content management implementations completed during the previous five years were unprofitable. The report went on to suggest that 50% might actually have been a conservative estimate if decommissioned deployments were also factored in. According to Forrester’s market overview, improved usability emerged as the most important unmet need in the content management space. These conclusions are telling (and consistent) with our experiences as we work with companies to create and implement content management solutions.
In assessment of training needs should be a key component of any intranet project that introduces new functionality or other improvements to employees. While usability professionals have pointed to a reduced need for training as one benefit of proper user testing, training should not viewed as simply a Band-Aid for poor interface design. Even if proper testing eliminates interface problems, there are several reasons for viewing training as an important part of any intranet change.
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.
HarperCollins’ intranet consists of 70 dynamic and 10 static Web sites, which can be accessed by employees from their seven U.S. locations and Toronto, Canada. The dynamic sites are used for vacation scheduling, sending jobs to the copy center, providing sales information, accessing corporate services, and email. Static sites include the HarperCollins home page, “HarperSource,” where employees access publishing industry-specific information including external content provided by the Corporate Librarian Group, and “HR Online,” which offers information on a wide variety of human resources-related initiatives. Most of the sites draw from an SQL server data warehouse based on ASP, although the company has begun a migration to Cold Fusion.
The effort to keep resources up to date, particularly in a personalized environment, is pretty intense and frequently just doesn’t happen. So, spending some extra time at the beginning of your portal deployment to consider re-use of content and applications should be a priority. If you identify the opportunities for re-use up front you’re going to save a lot of time and effort.
Many corporate intranets are actually made up of content directly authored or otherwise provided by representatives of each department of the corporation. In fact, some intranets are simply a collection of such departmental sites. While managing a corporate intranet is a considerable challenge, managing a departmental intranet site poses its own challenges and pitfalls.
There are three elements of an intranet strategy: an information/content strategy, a technology strategy, and a governance strategy. It is in the development of a governance strategy that most organizations fail to take account of organization issues, especially organization culture. Governance is more than “management,” although a management structure is required.
and revised.
When Microsoft’s Knowledge Network Group (KNG) conducted a user needs assessment as part of product planning for a new library Web site, we discovered our users were hungry for authoritative, organized internal information in combination with third-party content. Previously, we had focused on external, publicly available content, but data gathered in surveys, focus groups, and in one-on-one research indicated that Microsoft’s employees needed seamlessly integrated internal and external business information. Today, the Library portal delivers integrated content on topic pages and through search. Soon we will also integrate content directly into the user’s workspace.
For the purpose of this article, a learning tool is any available resource that can potentially contribute to the ongoing learning and development of an individual or team in a corporate environment. This broad definition includes items like e-books (electronic books). An e-book is a learning resource that can become even more valuable when integrated with other learning tools that are presented in context with the topic of the e-book. This article explores examples from SunLibrary to show the added employee value of having those additional learning tools.
Search engines can help find relevant documents, but a new breed of technology goes beyond simple document retrieval. These text-mining tools make it possible to discover new knowledge in the form of trends, anomalies, relationships, and patterns that span multiple documents and large document collections. By extending the way text databases can be explored, text mining can add valuable content analysis and decision support tools to existing intranets.
Blogs have spread like wildfire on the Internet. Blog postings range from the trivial and vain to the witty, informative, and insightful. A blog, for those of you who have not taken a look at one yet, is a Web page of short entries arranged in reverse chronological order. Some blogs are the efforts of one individual while others are produced by a team of authors. The success of blogging as a new publishing form lies in the ease with which a new Web site can be produced “automatically.” Intranet blogs certainly can support KM. Blogs allow individuals or groups to easily encode content, store it, and transmit it via Web pages, Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds, or daily or weekly e-mail digests.
The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) is a not-for-profit division of The Johns Hopkins University. The library has developed and maintains numerous Web sites on the laboratory’s internal network. These sites include the internal home page, a research portal, and specialized topical resource sites.
An interview between the editors of Intranet Professonal and Eric Hards, who serves as Senior Web Designer, Lockheed Martin Systems Integration. Hards also serves as Web Program Manager for Lockheed Martin in Owego, New York. For the past 6 years, Hards has been working with Web design, information architecture, usability, and Web technology for Lockheed Martin’s Internet and intranet. He is an award-winning designer, considered an industry expert for intranet design and usability.
An interview between the editors of Intranet Professional and Mary Lee Kennedy. Kennedy is accountable for connecting employees with the people and information they require to do their jobs successfully. Her primary focus is on the intranet and content tools for the end user's desktop.
An interview betweein the editors of Intranet Profssional and Peter Morville, President of Semantic Studios. Semantic Studios is an information architecture and user experience consulting firm. Morville is also co-author of the best-selling book Information Architecture for the World Wide Web and co-founder of the Asilomar Institute for Information Architecture. He lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He can be reached at morville@semanticstudios.com.
An interview between the editors of Intranet Professional and Elizabeth Kellison, who has been involved in online content management for the past 6 years, first with Los Angeles-based University Access, where she helped create online undergraduate and graduate business courses and also launched a Web-based journal, @cademyonline. Most recently she worked with Isoph, a company specializing in online collaboration and learning opportunities for the nonprofit sector.
Communities of practice can play a vital role in any organization, but their greatest value comes when they are leveraged for the strategic capabilities they can generate. A planned approach to community development that includes a technology infrastructure to support collaboration and learning is key to creating the value proposition for the organization, the community members, and the practice at large.
Recently Intranet Professional asked Jakob Nielsen, of the Nielsen Norman Group, about critical issues all Web designers need to consider when tasked with meeting user requirements on an intranet.
In today's world, intranet professionals face many challenges in incorporating an abundance of information, both external and internal, into the daily work flow of their constituents. One of the greatest hurdles is enabling a user to easily discover, locate, and access contextually relevant information, especially if that information is provided from a variety of sources. The Digital Object Identifier (DOI), long used by the science, technology, and medical (STM) journal publishing industry for citation-based linking, now is being rapidly adopted by other content companies. The DOI affords a relatively simple, cost-effective yet powerful tool for contextually linking materials within and across intranets.
This article will focus on infrastructure—software products to manage and deliver e-learning. The fragmentation of the e-learning market provided a challenge in writing this article. It is hard to define product categories, because there are large areas of overlapping functionality among products and a lack of agreed-upon definitions. This article will focus on the technology categories designed specifically for e-learning: courseware authoring tools, LMSs, and learning content management systems (LMCSs); provide an overview of each category; identify leading products by category; and suggest some of the features/capabilities to consider when making selection decisions for e-learning technologies.
It is simple. Information professionals are in the business of creating environments, like intranets, for the effective transfer of information to the appropriate users so they can create personal knowledge. This is the process of "informing" and that is what information pros do, and do well. The process of knowledge creation that happens at the user level is called learning. These two processes are important and critical sides of the same coin. Informing without learning is the equivalent of placing article photocopies and books on a desktop and not reading them. No matter how carefully selected and chosen, the end result is moot. Learning without information or content is again risky and, arguably, significantly impacts progress in an intellectual arena.
When the Web and Internet exploded in the 1990s, so too did the tantalizing promise that a corresponding wealth of understanding and communication would be available within private companies. Private companies both large and small were quick to create intranets and extranets to serve their employees, clients, and customers. By 1996, more than two-thirds of Fortune 500 companies had an intranet up and running. But 5 years later, were they working? Not really, according to usability expert Alison J. Head in her groundbreaking research study, “On-The-Job Research: How Usable Are Corporate Intranets?”
How do you handle a problem like online issues in the workplace? It may sound like the title of a song from The Sound of Music, but many companies are finding online issues are getting more complicated every day, whether it’s the use of an intranet or the Internet. Relevant questions include the following:
Intranets are networks made available to employees or to contractors to an organization. Most people assume that intranets are more secure than public networks such as the Internet. Any network is vulnerable, even internal networks operated by companies that sell secure online transaction systems. In the course of our work at commercial and governmental clients, we find many examples of excellent security systems. However, even the best security system can erode over time if security procedures are not followed and modified.
e-Business Connection was a small idea that became a LotusNotes database and then took off to become an extranet. When the Information Center at MasterCard International was established in 1997, LotusNotes was leveraged to promote library services. In 1997 and 1998, e-mail was used as an alerting service to employees that covered important articles in the secondary press. In the beginning of 1999, the service had grown to the point where e-mail was inadequate. Given employee needs, the Information Center Exchange (ICE) was launched in July 1999.
At UC Berkeley’s Institute of Industrial Relations, the library is charged with monitoring networked information developments, and the staff was on the watch for a campus portal product selection. While a variety of departmental intranets had popped up at UC Berkeley, no single standard had emerged. The campus had plans for a major new portal, but the exact scope of the product was unclear. Rather than wait, the library staff partnered with IIR’s desktop support staff to create an Institute-wide intranet. The challenge was to create an intranet that would work with the other products and services available in the campus system without duplicating them.
The medical library is an essential part of every academic hospital. Medical staff constantly evaluate clinical findings at the patient’s bedside to establish the diagnosis and to provide evidence-based treatment options. Excellent care is the desired outcome. The search for medical literature is an important tool for the evaluation and precipitates a connection between the staff at the patient’s bedside and the medical library. Access must be time-effective to provide the best possible care for the patient. This article discusses how the Sidney Liswood Library at Mount Sinai Hospital used PDAs to facilitate bedside health information.
The word “gadget” has been used since the 19th century to describe small mechanical or electronic devices with practical uses. Personal digital assistants (PDAs), pocket, tablet, and panel PCs, and a menagerie of accessories are the gadgets “du jour.” This article explores the range of gadgets available, how these gadgets interface with the intranet, and possible applications.
XML is the most important technological advance for information professionals since the Web. Extensible Markup Language (XML) increasingly provides the underlying technological infrastructure for many of the information systems and services used every day. For a profession that is founded on the collection of information and the provision of services to users who wish to use that information, it is hard to think of a more useful tool. This article briefly describes XML and how it can be used, then highlights particular uses of it in libraries.
As intranets grow, providing access to more and more documents, their value grows. The larger the collection, the harder and harder is becomes to find that important presentation, contract, or HR form. Enterprise Information Portals (EIPs) provide a starting point to intranets, and a search engine helps locate information, including archives and unstructured data. Search engines need to be tuned and indexed to provide the best answers.
It is never too early to begin thinking how a new Web site or intranet is going to be launched. What promotion activities will usher in the new online resource? What are the promotion objectives? How will activities be coordinated? Who is going to do the work and make it happen? Whether revamping an existing site or bringing a new intranet online, it is important that plans include the resources and time needed for a promotion rollout. Here are seven components of a launch plan that put a rollout on the fast track to success.
This case study presents the benefits of adopting an intranet for the sales force of Centurion Vehicles Inc. of White Pigeon, Michigan. Centurion moved from a paper-based business to one that relies on the intranet for daily operations. Centurion is the leading U.S. manufacturer of luxury conversion vehicles, taking standard vans, SUVs and pickup trucks and turning them into feature-rich, high-quality vehicles with all the comforts of home.
This article covers when—and why—you should consider the technology route for taxonomy development and deployment.
An outline of how to build a mixed human/auto categorization model Tom named "cyborg."
Through work with corporate clients over the past three years, Open Door Technologies, LLC, a services firm specializing in enterprise portals and knowledge management, has developed a clear process for planning and defining an enterprise portal project. It is evident that the definition of the project is the critical element in projecting success. That process is explained in detail in this article.
Intranets consist of a number of different parts, including these key features and functions: Portals, Content Management, Knowledge Management, CRM, and Enterprise Information Systems. The first step is to know what type of intranet a particular group is thinking about or wants to deploy.
A discussion of auto-categorization, what it can offer a corporate intranet, and a case for a mix of human and auto-categorization.
Successfully managing intranet projects is a challenging task. Most intranet managers have experience managing a particular area, such as a corporate information center, marketing, IT, or publication areas. We know one functional area or type of work extremely well and suddenly we’re in charge of a multi-faceted project that requires multi-disciplinary and leadership skills, along with an understanding of other functional areas. Intranet project success requires that several areas come together which basically boil down to people, technology, and money.