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Intranet Benchmarking Forum

IBF Blog - sharing the views, experiences and challenges faced by intranet and portal teams


What are the New Year resolutions from Intranet Managers?Today

What are intranet managers planning to do during the 2009 recession? From the January 2009 episode of our monthly Intranets Live show, it was fascinating to hear about the New Year resolutions from intranet managers around the world.

We had more than 500 intranet professionals listening to our live show on 6 Jan from 25 countries and drawn from 273 companies and organisations globally and their plans had a similar tone to them:

  • Use the "downturn" as a chance to cull and clean up content across the intranet space
  • Take stock on technology investments but don't postpone upgrades too long - there are technology vendors deals to be done in tough times
  • Look seriously at piloting open source and "software as service" technologies rather than large scale systems (alternatives to SharePoint 2007 gaining attention)
  • Get your intranet into strong shape so that when the upturn comes (and it will) you are not left lagging behind the competition

The start of 2009 was a great time to have our first Intranets Live show this year and those involved in running intranets globally are certainly in a generally confident mood - which is in marked contrast to some other business areas.

You can see clips from the first two episodes of Intranets Live here. Watch this space for regular updates from the Intranets Live media channel!

Improving employee involvement on the intranetDecember 12 2008
In a post last month, Sam Marshall talked about some recurring patterns in intranet strategy and governance. Having  recently joined the IBF benchmarking team, I’ve been digging around in the archives to see how members fare in another area of the IBF benchmarking model: communication and culture. This looks at how well the intranet supports the culture of the organisation and functions as a two-way communication channel.

Looking at how organisations score, one of the weakest areas within communication and culture is how effective the intranet is at making employees feel informed about what’s going on and that they can contribute to the organisation.  The themes arising here where scores are weak include:

  • The intranet is seen as a one-way channel to push information and communication to employees, with other channels (often email) used for getting employee input and feedback.
  • A lack of visibility of senior executives online and, even where they are visible, a lack of opportunities for employees to engage in two-way discussions with them.
  • Surveys and polls may be run from time-to-time, but a lack of ongoing opportunities for discussion.
  • Where two-way communication does happen it is carefully managed and edite
Some recurring patterns in Intranet Strategy and GovernanceNovember 26 2008

IBF benchmarking Model looks at intranets from four different perspectives:

  • Strategy & Governance
  • Metrics & Performance
  • Communication & Culture
  • Design & Usability

One of the areas that I focus on is Strategy & Governance  which looks at how well an organisation manages and develops its intranet. This includes alignment with business strategy, senior sponsorship, enforcement of controls and risk management. In this post I thought I'd summarise some of the themes that seem to keep coming up:

Keeping decision-makers involved

Intranet managers understand the importance of having some kind of steering group in place and normally work hard to get stakeholders together. Unfortunately, what sometimes happens is that senior people begin to delegate their seat to a more junior representative. The representative feels unable to make a decision without consulting their boss, so the meetings cease to be productive. This shifts the business of the steering group to more operational matters, so even more senior people disengage and the steering group grinds to a halt. Counter-measures to this include:

  • Have clear role definitions and a charter for the steering group. Use the chair's influence to resist delegation
  • Keep it strat
Should you have a Web 2.0 Strategy?November 19 2008

I've seen a number of conference flyers recently that talk about "developing your Web 2.0 strategy" for your Intranet. It set me wondering if an organisation have such a thing as a separate Web 2.0 strategy - in the sense of an agreed roadmap for the next few years?

The Case For

Generally, when a substantial change is taking place, it does make sense to have a structured approach that involves all stakeholders and asks the usual good questions: why? Where? When? and Who? This applies if the change is internally driven (e.g. to improve supply chain efficiency) or due to external circumstances (an economic downturn is an example that springs to mind).

Having a Web 2.0 strategy will allow an organisation to focus efforts - avoiding duplication of effort and sharing knowledge gained. Without it there's a risk that users become confused with multiple innovations all offering similar features, for example. It also means that resources can be pooled, so that infrastructure can be properly supported rather than 'best efforts' by an enthusiast.

The Case against

I can see two different camps that would counsel against a specific Web 2.0 strategy, however:

The 'Integrators' will say that Web 2.0 should not be treated as something apart from what the organisation already has or is trying to achieve. A wiki, for example, is an approach to content management, so to have a strategy for wikis that is set a

Intranet in a boxNovember 13 2008

I was recently with an IBF client who was thinking about a new navigation design and information architecture for their intranet. "Can't we just adapt someone else's?" they asked. "How different can we be?".

This was a thought-provoking question. Certainly we see a great diversity of layouts and designs when we benchmark (you can see a galley of examples from the "My Beautiful Intranet" competition by signing up to Intranets Live). However, intranets fundamentally all do very similar things, so much of the diversity may well be more about history than necessity. Jakob Nielsen has also claimed that with the increasing adoption of portal software, many home pages are converging. he produced a composite image of The Canonical Intranet, which showed that at least the placement of menus and page apportioning was becoming more consistent.

Where intranets differ tends to center on:

  • How it reflects the company structure. The degree to which the main intranet page is a common launching point for everyone or just the homepage for the head office says a lot about how centralized or federated a company is.
  • How it reflects the company culture. A people-driven organisation will typically dedicate more space to news and even two-way communication suc