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Building Better Intranets

This evening seminar looked at how to build more effective intranets - and how to persuade employees to use them.

Building Better Intranets

Report on an NMK seminar in July 2002.

Speakers

• Dr Peter Colman, Business Strategist, Scient
• James Duffy, Intranet Product Manager, INVESCO Global
• Sarah Walton, Back2Front
• Simon Collins, Account Director, eSubstance
• Chair: Patrick Towell, SimulacraMedia

Medium to large companies typically spend between £25,000 and £1 million per year developing intranets, with nearly 90% of these citing improved corporate communications as the reason for their investments (figures from Melcrum Publishing Ltd). Large multinational corporations can make annual efficiency savings of tens of millions of pounds by using intranets to streamline processes and improve knowledge management. And yet intranets frequently fail to live up to expectations, often because of a lack of attention to the needs of the very employees whose working lives intranets are supposed to improve.

The simplest corporate intranets generally feature some basic pages of company information, a directory of employees and, if you’re lucky, an internal search engine. Often starting life as the personal project of an employee with some time on their hands, it’s not uncommon for a company’s first intranet to resemble something built by the CEO’s teenage son as his GCSE computing project!

At the other end of the scale, and increasingly the norm, you get what Dr Peter Colman of Scient (www.scient.com) describes as ‘Enterprise Portals’. These are sophisticated, personalised internal sites providing employees with everything they need to do their jobs, including supply chain management, HR, training modules, email, procurement services, and information from partners and suppliers.

The cost of building and managing such applications should (in theory) be recouped through savings made in areas such as corporate communications, knowledge management, and the digitisation of company processes. GEC, for example, was able to save $40 million in three months by digitising its travel booking system, Cisco saved $50 million by introducing online management of employee health benefits, and Microsoft reduced its annual procurement budget by $190 million. In terms of knowledge management, Ford claims to have saved $1billion worldwide through the electronic promotion of best practice between plants and across territories.

It is perhaps unsurprising that multinational behemoths, with huge workforces and offices all over the world, are able to make vast savings by streamlining the company-wide distribution of information, but smaller companies also have much to gain from a decent intranet. Peter Colman claims that corporate data now doubles approximately every six months, and in an age when knowledge is increasingly the most valuable asset your company possesses, anything you can do to capture crucial information and make it available to those who need it, when they need it, will give you an advantage.

According to Peter, an effective intranet should do all of the following:

• Increase productivity
• Minimise administrative tasks
• Support decision making
• Enhance corporate culture.

Above all, it should be easy to use, and designed with the user in mind, through a process of research, user testing and refinement.

Where did it all go wrong?

For Sarah Walton of web consultants Back 2 Front, the commonest problem with a failing intranet is simply that people don’t use it. In companies with intranets, around 90% of staff generally have access to them, so the problem is not one of connectivity. Rather, it is boring and irrelevant information that is most likely to discourage employees from using the intranet regularly.

Problems often arise when the intranet has evolved in a haphazard fashion, with little or no input from the intended users. To prevent this happening, Sarah recommended consulting steering groups made up of a representative cross-section of employees when planning your intranet strategy, and returning to these groups for user testing during development. At the same time, it is vital to have a clear understanding of the business aims and objectives the intranet is designed to support, and to think about how you will be able to measure how successfully it is doing its job.

Another common problem is content that is out-of-date, uninteresting or irrelevant to users. Having blown their budget on development, many companies discover they don’t have enough resources left to manage and maintain the intranet they have built. Building intranets is an ongoing process, and resources should be allocated to keeping them constantly updated. If your intranet doesn’t provide the information your employees need to realise the company’s business aims, it is as good as useless. Similarly, if information is found to be inaccurate or unreliable, employees will lose trust and usage will drop.

Sarah gave the example of Compaq, whose intranet was so infested with ‘toxic content’ that hardly anybody used it. Their solution was to create a content management system which prioritised information according to the department a user worked in, and to ensure relevancy by giving content managers from each department responsibility for their own knowledge areas.

Finally, Sarah explained that employees might need active training and encouragement before they will adopt an intranet, particularly if its introduction necessitates a change in working practices (for example, among sales teams which have a competitive interest in the success of the individual team and may not be used to the concept of knowledge sharing). A simple but effective way of increasing usage is to make the intranet the default homepage on all employees’ browsers, and build familiarity from there.

Are We Having Fun Yet?

Simon Collins of eSubstance (www.esubstance.com) believes that if companies are prepared to invest in their public-facing websites in order to build their brands, engender customer loyalty and facilitate transactions, then they should be prepared to adopt the same approach towards their employees.

Simon suggested that one of the main aims of an intranet should be to make employees think ‘hey, this is a great place to work’. Employers should cognise that employees are ambitious, and include training applications, relevant news and reference materials on the intranet, in addition to tools to improve working processes. You can also increase a sense of ownership of the intranet by encouraging workers to contribute their own content to the site (moderated if necessary).

Simon went on to suggest that staff would be more content (and work more efficiently) if you provide some non-work related content on your intranet. If people are working long hours and their time is precious, they’ll appreciate some features that make their lives easier and more enjoyable, such as games, travel offers or even stock trading services. If you don’t provide these things, they’ll look for them elsewhere, most likely on company time. One client Simon worked with even installed web cams in the canteen so that staff could see how long the queues were from their desktops.

Case Study: Invesco

James Duffy is Global Intranet Product manager for Invesco (www.invesco.co.uk), a fund management and financial services company owned by the US-based AMVESCAP group. Invesco’s original intranet site failed to take off, and James explained why. For a start, the site was branded with the name of the parent company, even though all non-US employees were employed by Invesco. It was also an ‘ivory tower’ intranet, developed in corporate headquarters in Houston, Texas, and rolled out worldwide with little regard for the needs of international employees. When information had to be amended, it took four to six days for the site to be updated, while details such as American date formats served to alienate users further.

James, who believes that internal communications are as important as client relations, saw the need to start afresh, and to foster a better communications culture within the company through the development of a new intranet. The starting point was a single Invesco homepage, which became the default homepage on browsers throughout the company. This soon evolved into a number of regional homepages for the UK, continental Europe, Asia-Pacific and other territories, while individual offices such as Frankfurt, London and Dublin received even more targeted pages of their own. The eventual aim is to create communities of practice and departments with their own homepages (e.g. IT support staff), as well as communities based on geographical location.

Next, all corporate communications, reports and journals were made available on the intranet in electronic form, while printed documents were discontinued. This had a number of advantages, including a more structured and better organised knowledge management system, significant savings on the cost of printing and distribution, and the ability to monitor demand and track the information needs of individual employees.

Better scheduling and workflow processes were also introduced, so that urgent information could be posted immediately, while less important content could be published at the most appropriate time. The next step was to make the content more compelling, to encourage greater usage of the intranet. Some of the most of the most successful features include Invesco-themed games and quizzes, and a relatively informal weekly editorial from the CEO (other senior staff members are now following his example, and MPEG video broadcasts are being considered for the future).

Ultimately, James hopes the increasingly ‘portalised’ Invesco intranet will become every employee’s desktop workspace, from where they will be able to access not just company information, but also software applications and their own documents.

This NMK seminar took place in July 2002

Speakers Profiles

James Duffy
James has been with INVESCO since Spring 2000 responsible for the Development and evolution of Connect, the INVESCO Global Intranet including vision and strategy. A large part of that has been devoted to communicating internally. James has several years experience in Intranet roles for organisations including KPMG, AMEC, and Conoco and has a background in IT Training, Technical Writing, and production and presentation of Radio and Television programmes.

Sarah Walton
Sarah started her career as a programmer and a frontend designer. She learnt her skills on the job and her BA in Linguistics helped her understand the levers and cogs of machine and human communication, whilst an MA in Interactive Multimedia got her thinking about what drives users in an interactive medium. She has always worked agency side. Clients have included BT, Post Office, Gucci, Abbey National to name a few. Project management was an obvious progression and she has managed both private and public sector projects for the EU. Sarah has developed and maintained intranets for both corporate monsters and SMEs. Sarah is currently running the London office for internet company Back2Front. She is also working with Douglas Englebart’s team at the Bootstrap Institute in California to initiate improvement communities within European Universities for the Augmentation Research Centre programme, the development and implementation of which could change the way intranets and all human/computer interaction is used in the future.

Simon Collins
Simon Collins is an Account Director at eSubstance the content solutions company. His seven-year career in interactive media has encompassed retail multimedia development for ekingfisher, e-commerce solutions for icollector and eBay, interactive entertainment for a number of major European airlines and intranet development for Shell, Guinness and BAE Systems. More recently he has focused on traditional and digital communications strategy.

Peter Colman
Peter is a senior Business Strategist with Scient, a leading consulting and professional services company. During the past two years, Peter has worked with some of the world's largest companies, helping them to realise cost efficiencies, generate revenue and strengthen customer relationships. Peter has worked in the Financial Services, Manufacturing, Retail and Energy industry sectors, focusing on knowledge sharing and digitisation initiatives. Before joining Scient, Peter was a Business Development Manager within the Financial Services sector of BT. Peter was responsible for developing new business propositions and marketing events, including developing partnerships between clients and BT Labs.

This event was presented in association with:

Digital Eve: www.digitaleveuk.org

DigitalEve is a resource for women who have a passion for the digital world and IT. Our aim is to provide women of all ages, backgrounds, and skill levels an environment where they may learn about technology in a supportive community where questions, ideas, and creativity are shared. We have 15,000 members worldwide as well as several local chapters in the UK. For more information, visit www.digitaleveuk.org, or email Digitalshannon@yahoo.com.

Have a look at the original event.