Feature

posted 8 Mar 2007 in Volume 10 Issue 6

Intranet management

The secrets of intranet success

What tools and methods are award-winning intranet sites using to stay one step ahead in the usability stakes?

By Jessica Twentyman

With more than 50 patents to his name and a reputation as the world’s foremost authority on web usability, Jakob Nielsen PhD knows what makes an intranet work – and what doesn’t.

Every year, he publishes a list of the top ten best-designed intranets in the world and the results are eagerly awaited by an international audience of web design professionals and information managers.

Among the great and the good on the 2007 list – released in January this year – are some of the world’s largest and most profitable multinationals: DaimlerChrysler, Microsoft, Dow Chemical. But the list also contains a surprise – the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), a modest UK-based charity, also made the top ten.

“That shows you don’t have to be a large organisation or a traditional company to benefit from intranet usability,” says Nielson’s report on the winning intranets. “Well-designed intranets support employees and volunteers in achieving non-profit missions just as well as they improve productivity – and thus profitability – in for-profit businesses.”

It also shows that an award-winning, highly usable intranet doesn’t necessarily need a large team to keep it running smoothly, he adds. “Just a handful of people maintain RSPB’s intranet. To judge by its delightful design, however, you’d never know it – this lively website soars with creativity.”

If only more intranets deserved such praise. Unfortunately, that’s simply not the case, says Gerry McGovern, content management specialist and author of Killer Web Content. “A great many intranets are not achieving their potential because, at a very basic level, they are not being managed. Nobody is really in charge and there are no proper business metrics in place to measure success,” he says.

It’s clear, then, that there are many useful lessons to be drawn from successful intranet projects such as the RSPB’s. For a start, the RSPB intranet started life in October 2005 with a clearly defined set of ‘core aims’ – a prerequisite for a best-practice intranet.

“We were very clear on our mission: to provide a single place for employees that are scattered all across the UK to access information, share knowledge and get to know each other better,” says Sheena Huxley Duggan, the charity’s intranet manager. “So we started with core functions that fitted those core aims: an employee directory and a repository of policy and legislative documents and information.”

Today, these core functions remain the most frequently accessed parts of the intranet, according to Huxley-Duggan. But on top of these solid foundations, she adds, new features and functions are being added, albeit judiciously.

“I strongly believe in keeping things simple and I think that’s been a major factor in our success,” she says. “We’ve only ever introduced something new to the site when we have identified a clear business need. Otherwise, with the technology available, it’s far too easy to get carried away!”

“Web design techniques are evolving so quickly that you can be tempted to use new technology for the sake of it,” agrees RSPB senior web designer Graham Bird. “But it’s important to put the users’ needs first. So although we’re using new technologies, we go to great lengths to make them unobtrusive and, most of all, useful.”

A case in point is the RSPB’s use of Ajax technology. Short for asynchronous JavaScript and XML, Ajax is a web-development technique for creating interactive web applications. An example of the simple but effective applications that can be built in Ajax is the RSPB’s ‘car-pooling map’ of the UK. When a user clicks on a particular area, they are provided with full contact details for colleagues local to that area who are willing to offer other employees a lift to work.

Tools like this have helped the RSPB intranet to rapidly evolve beyond its role as an online publishing mechanism to become a platform for strategic tools and applications. The same is true for other award-winning intranets, such as ‘Lowe Go’, the intranet run by advertising company Lowe & Partners, which scooped the Best Intranet award at the British Computer Society Information Management Awards 2006 in December.

Via Lowe Go, advertising executives and their support staff can access not only a host of useful information and documents, but also a range of sophisticated collaboration and digital asset management (DAM) applications and real-time editing tools. These enable them to view and manage more than 90,000 advertising film clips and other media assets, work with each other in collaborative project areas and to edit clips to create show-reels.

“The key aspect of Lowe Go is the ability to bring people of different communities (such as account management, planners, creative, finance and so on) into one workplace to generate ideas and review new creative work. This helps account directors to gain an insight on how a new campaign is perceived and provides valuable information to a wider audience that was not possible before,” says Lowe Go project manager Drew Murdoch.

“For example, [users can] post up the latest Nokia advert from the DAM [digital asset management] system, then ask selected users for their feedback. That results in a more accurate business decision before the advert is previewed to the client. The results and feedback are kept and can be used for future campaigns,” explains Murdoch.

Rich, dynamic content

But it is not just the tools available on best-practice intranet that are becoming more sophisticated, says Jakob Nielsen – intranet content itself has never been richer or more dynamic.

“A trend from last year was even more pronounced this year: intranets are going multimedia,” he says. “On the simpler end of the scale, ‘photos of the day’ grace many home pages and beautiful bird photos illustrate many top stories on the RSPB’s intranet,” he says. “On the higher end of the multimedia spectrum, video is proliferating – often for training purposes, but also for executive communications,” he says.

From his 2007 list, Nielsen points to two examples. “American Electric Power has its own TV studio for intranet productions, offering both streaming video and live webcasts. National Geographic has webcam feeds that would be the envy of most organisations, including one focused on Alaskan grizzly bears,” he says.

It’s certainly a strategy that Jagdeep Gill, intranet manager at the British Transport Police, is keen to adopt – budget and resources permitting. “At some stage, we’d like to incorporate streaming media into our intranet, because right now, most of our in-house training videos are held in a library of DVDs. By putting those films on the intranet, they could be disseminated far more efficiently,” he explains.

Information from outside sources is also a key differentiator of best-practice intranets, says Nielsen.

“Many intranets have long offered news feeds, but this year’s winners have taken extra steps to make their news offerings more relevant to employees, both for internal news and for industry-related external news,” he says. “Labelling and categorisation are more extensive than before, and several intranets let users rate and comment on stories.”

On the Lowe Go intranet, for example, users can access client news, media intelligence and latest news from the network and from Lowe’s management. Really simple syndication (RSS) feeds, meanwhile, bring back press releases from around the globe by accessing over 14,000 trusted websites and news feeds. Likewise, the RSPB subscribes to an RSS newsfeed from Magenta Solutions, which supplies the intranet with stories from the national media on conservation and wildlife issues.

Intranet 2.0

RSS technology is not the only social-networking technology to be making its mark on forward-thinking intranets, says Kathleen Gilroy, CEO of the Otter Group, a company that specialises in helping organisations to make the most of new social-networking technologies.

“The internet is evolving from a channel for content distribution to a platform for collaboration, sharing and innovation – the so-called ‘web 2.0’. And where the internet goes, your intranet will surely follow,” she says. At best-practice companies, she says, preparations are already underway for ‘intranet 2.0’, with these companies starting to explore the ways in which blogs and wikis can enhance the corporate intranet.

Take, for example, aid agency the British Red Cross: its intranet, the RedRoom was a finalist at the Information Management Awards 2006 and its manager, Miguel Fiallos, is keen to keep one step ahead of emerging trends. “We’ve got a whole stack of things to look at that we think are really going to transform communications within our organisation and ensure that all our associates feel continually involved,” he says.

“Already, volunteers working in Afghanistan have benefited from access to RedRoom to receive news, but in future, I can envisage them posting their own news from the field to the intranet using blogs and wikis, so that it can be read by others back in the UK,” he says.

Likewise, at the British Transport Police, Jagdeep Gill is considering implementing wikis on the intranet so that members of staff can collaborate in authoring and editing policy documents. And at the RSPB, wildlife enquiry teams are already starting to blog on the organisation’s intranet, letting their colleagues know what areas they are currently researching.

Ultimately, best-practice intranet teams distinguish themselves in their ability to integrate these kinds of new elements into their existing intranet strategy with great care and with a sharp focus on business objectives – not just “trendy technology for its own sake”, says Jakob Nielsen. “This year, our intranet contest winners used the same trendy technologies, but they aimed instead for utility and pragmatism, and achieved them without any sacrifice to the coolness factor,” he says. And that, it seems, is what sets them apart as winners in the intranet strategy game.

Pick of the bunch

The winners of the Nielsen Norman Group’s Intranet Design Awards for 2007 are a pretty mixed bunch: different sizes, different industry sectors, different geographies. However, they do have certain things in common, says Jakob Nielsen of the Nielsen Norman Group: “This year’s winners emphasise an editorial approach to news on the homepage. They also take a pragmatic approach to many hyped ‘Web 2.0’ techniques,” he says.

But while page design is becoming more standardised at all best-practice intranets, he adds, there’s no standard technology to support them, with a diverse range of content management applications (both packaged and bespoke) supporting winning intranets.

The ten best-designed intranets for 2007 are:

American Electric Power (AEP), United States;
Comcast, United States;
DaimlerChrysler AG, Germany;
The Dow Chemical Company, United States;
Infosys Technologies Limited, India;
JPMorgan Chase, United States;
Microsoft Corporation, United States;
National Geographic Society, United States;
The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), United Kingdom;
Volvo Group, Sweden.

The 10 best-designed intranets for 2006 were:

Allianz Australia Insurance, Australia;
ALTANA Pharma AG, Germany;
Bank of Ireland Group, Ireland;
Capital One, USA;
IBM, USA;
Merrill Lynch, USA;
METRO Group, Germany;
O2, UK;
Staples, USA;
Vodafone Group, UK.

Ten intranet success factors

Martin White, managing director of intranet consultancy Intranet Focus, has worked on intranet strategies with a lengthy rollcall of well-known organisations: the British Museum; the Inland Revenue; the Open University and Rolls Royce to name a few. He has put together a list of ‘success factors’ that diffentiate a best-practice intranet from the rest. These, he explains, encapsulate the lessons he’s learned on client engagements, “and from papers presented at conferences around the world by intranet managers willing to share their experience”.

1 Document the intranet strategy

Develop and document an intranet strategy, based on a consideration of the requirements and balance of information/content, technology and governance. This strategy has to be aligned with the overall strategy of the organisation.

2 Use personas and tasks/scenarios to identify user requirements

Personas are virtual CVs that summarise the main characteristics of employees undertaking specific roles, and the tasks that these roles require. Focusing on perhaps six key user scenarios can make a significant difference to the quality and acceptance of the intranet.

3 Understand and support content contribution

Information quality in an intranet is essential. Invariably intranet content contribution is not included in job descriptions or valued by managers and, as a result, is a low priority.

4 Enhance the intranet in a series of small, manageable, steps

An intranet should be continuously enhanced to reflect changing requirements, rather than wait for the opportunity and resources to carry out a major revision.

5 Manage metadata

Content authors may not have the skills and expertise needed to add metadata. Metadata is not just about keywords. The effort involved in developing metadata schemes and taxonomies is always underestimated.

6 Provide effective search capabilities

Users have to trust the search functional so that they feel totally confident that either they have found all relevant information, or that information is not on the intranet.

7 Provide access to the business environment

Make sure that the intranet provides access to information from external sources, such as business and market information. It is easy to be so focused on the provision of internal information that access to external information is overlooked

8 Undertake regular usability testing

Usability testing should be carried out at all stages of the life of an intranet, and there should be a range of feedback channels to ensure that the content and the information architecture continue to meet the expectations of contributors, users and stakeholders.

9 Support collaborative working

Intranets on their own are not good collaborative applications. There could be significant benefit in implementing wikis and blogs.

10 Establish a suitable governance structure

The governance structure should reflect this enterprise value of the intranet. There should be clear communication channels to the staff and also back to the intranet team so that changes in business requirements can be identified at the earliest opportunity.

Source: www.intranetfocus.com