Don’t Let Boring Homepages Kill Your Intranet Content

Intranet homepages are typically the starting points of any intranet experience, but too often they fall prey to a stiff, template-style layout that makes content appear generic, unappealing and stale; even the most well-written, feature-packed, media-rich intranet content is essentially useless if no-one wants to click through to it.

So what can you do to stop this happening? Well, one obvious fix is to look at changing the way you create your intranet homepages. Don’t think that you have to have the same homepage as everyone else – consistency is good, and standards are set for a reason, but if you always follow the herd then it becomes hard to stand out.

Keep to the things that make homepages work – give users the information that they want and need, adnd make it easy for them to find what they’re looking for – but try to think more creatively about how you might present a more attractive page to your end users.

For instance, you could try something like this:

It’s a bit different from the average intranet homepage, no? And all of the content above is dynamic, updated from a regular intranet back-end, just like your typical homepage – the difference is that the café-style background images on which the content is displayed are just a little break from the norm. It’s a strong concept, and one that actually developed into a successful homepage for an area of a globally-renowned client’s intranet: why stick to a grey square to display your content when it could be inside a coffee cup?

If your intranet platform can cope with something a bit different, then why not push it a bit? Grab your graphic designer, put your concept together and see what you can make happen; your users will help you in the long run. Creating a more attractive homepage gives good content the platform it needs to shine, and it can really give your usage levels a boost.

Clearly, whether this is appropriate for your intranet depends entirely on your business culture, and this won’t be everyone’s cup of tea (terrible pun fully, completely intended), but if you have a a bit flexibility in your overall approach, or an intranet area that might suit a less business-like feel, maybe a social or canteen area, then there’s no reason you can’t give it a go.

We’d love to hear about – or even better, see – some examples of other innovative intranet interfaces, so do let us know if you have any to share. We’ll be posting up another one or two soon so keep your eyes peeled. In the meantime, why not visit us and see what we do at www.orchidsoft.com.

Do Your Numbers Tell The Story Of Your Intranet?

For the latest episode in our efforts to find out more about intranet usage, we turned once again to the intranet community on twitter for some input.

Earlier this month, we noticed some tweets from @lukemepham about interesting statistics emerging from an intranet usage review that he had just conducted. Luke is an intranet manager for a globally-renowned finance organisation, and his thoughts can be found at his newly-implemented Intranet Job Blog – we recommend that you keep an eye on this as Luke builds it up, it should prove to be a very interest read for those with an interest in intranets and internal comms.

Luke noted that out of 130 pages viewed each month by the average user of his intranet, on average only 4 of these pages were corporate news items – seemingly a low number of views for corporate news (at just over 3% of total) if you consider that one of the primary purposes of any intranet is to provide an efficient tool for corporate and internal communication.

We got in touch to ask whether that percentage was in line with his predictions, and Luke replied that it was ‘less than expected. But this is a first run of the metrics, and there are many reasons why it could be low.’

This is of course absolutely correct: if you enter into a usage review with pre-conceived ideas about what the numbers will tell you, then it’s quite possible that you’ll be in for a surprise. Intranets are infrastructures for internal and corporate communications, and part of this is indeed the top-down, management-to-end-user model of information distribution,  but information access in a contemporary intranet environment is far more wide-ranging in its scope and purpose.

Since the dawn of the intranet (to coin a very clunky phrase), and even more so as intranets become more socially-focused (see this useful post from Prescient Digital Media as an example), information contribution and access in the workplace is becoming far less formal and structured in format; even adopting intranet usage at all is the first break in the chain of dissemination, replacing the previous emails from a management computer to employee inboxes with an online location for information that is more suited to a modern workforce less constrained by time and location.

We told Luke we’d be interested to see the bigger picture with his intranet statistics, and he promised to keep us posted. Well, Luke delivered with the post ‘How our Intranet is used today‘ on his blog, providing a range of interesting metrics that give a more complete account of how the average employee in his organisation uses their intranet.

It’s instantly noticeable that Luke’s users are starting from the perspective of occasional, though regular, web users – his first metric shows that the average employee opens their browser 40 times a month (just over twice a day), and that 15 of those times will be to use the intranet, with each session lasting around 4:00 minutes. So, though overall time online for Luke’s users’  is limited, showing that online activity may only form a part of the average employee’s wider duties, intranet usage represents a significant proportion of his users’ online sessions – over 37% of the time, users open their browsers with intranet access in mind.

This shows us the intranet’s significance to the online side of its parent organisation’s activities; from this high-level perspective on how far intranet usage forms part of his users’ daily activities, Luke’s post goes on to provide more detailed information on what users focus on when they log on for their intranet sessions.

Of the average user’s ten or eleven searches each month, between 18 and 30% are for people, showing a marked lean towards using the intranet as a social tool; organisation charts and user profiles are natural targets for intranet users, and these statistics show that further development of the social side could be an option for future strategic planning, as this method of interaction sits well with the user base.

This is backed up with the revelation that 9% of views are social forum posts – while some organisations have mixed views on social usage, this actually shows a very healthy attitude towards intranet usage, and is something that could be leveraged through use of ‘sponsored links’ in each thread to content relevant to each forum subject.

It’s not all about social, though – far from it. The intranet shows strong business usage too, with 6% of views for business-related forums, 4.5% on office services and policies, 10% on team-specific sites or tasks and 3.2% on HR services/policies – that’s almost exactly quarter of all activity in indisputably business-oriented content areas.

So, in contrast to our initial impression from Luke’s first tweet, the intranet is indeed an efficient business tool: when you add in the fact that more than 20% of overall views are concentrated on the homepage, plus 3% focusing on global or local news items, and not forgetting the 3% of page views focusing on corporate news that kicked off this analysis, and that’s almost exactly 50% of page views dedicated to business-related content items or areas.

So, overall, we can see that the metrics show a very healthy mix of activity – the strong social aspect obviously goes a long way to maintain user interest when it is the driver behind over 37% of end-user web access, and the social side is interlinked with a strong business element that backs it up. Of course, whether you should even separate the social side from the business side when discussing overall benefit is another matter altogether: we would say that social media is now an inescapable and indeed indispensable part of any intranet, especially with regard to tools such as blogs and wikis, while strong forum usage often provides a source of innovative ideas as well as keeping staff happy and involved. The ‘soft’ benefits of social usage are often hard to quantify, but even at a basic analytical level they constitute a very important factor in maintaining strong overall intranet usage numbers.

This all goes to show that you can’t judge intranet usage on a single statistic alone: although in isolation 3% seemed a low percentage of overall views for corporate news pages, when viewed in the wider context of the intranet’s usage it is evidently a key element of a strong, broad focus on business information and communication.

Check back soon for the next Intranet Ideas blog post; in the meantime, why not visit us and see what we do at www.orchidsoft.com.

Conducting an Intranet Performance Review

An intranet performance review is something that you can find on every intranet manager’s roadmap – and if you can’t, then there’s something wrong with the map. Reviewing content, usage levels, effectiveness and other key factors on a regular basis is absolutely vital to ensuring the long-term viability of any intranet installation.

So, cutting to the chase, how should you go about reviewing intranet performance? Well, there’s no single answer to that question, but there is a wealth of advice available on the subject, with most of it just a quick Google away.

There should be no doubting the validity of a theoretical perspective on the issue, for those people in the front line of intranet deployment – intranet managers and internal communications professionals – there is real value in obtaining practical advice from the people responsible for reviewing intranet performance on live, real-world installations.

We turned to Twitter once more to find out more about performance reviews: we’re always interested to hear what members of the online intranet community have to say, so we looked back at some conversations we had that related to performance reviews, and found some useful guidance on different aspects of the review process.

Looking back at our tweets, the first observation that we made was that there was no fixed format to a performance review. For some people, it was a major annual event that assessed the previous twelve months’ progress using a specific intranet installation. For others, it seemed that performance review was an ongoing process that meant staying in regular contact with key individuals and/or intranet teams to gauge progress on an ongoing basis, while for other still it was more a mix of the two.

There are obviously benefits to both the one-off annual basis and the regular approach: annual reviews allow you to build up a large base of system data, giving you an information resource that you can use to map overall usage trends, analyse adoption for new applications or functionality, monitor popularity levels for different types of content published at different times, and generally develop a high-level, strategically-focused approach.

On the other hand, regular reviews allow you to stay in touch with user requirements as they happen, which produces a more immediate and reactive way to ensure intranet usage by taking immediate steps to resolve any issues. As a manager or comms professional, this approach has the benefit of showing intranet users that you are always in touch with what they say and that you have an open and organic approach to the management process.

Of course, frequency of review is a key factor here: taking too long to implement a review runs the risk of your intranet being seen as immovable, unchanging and unfriendly to its users. We really wouldn’t recommend much longer than a year at most between reviews. At the other extreme, scheduling reviews on too regular a basis stops reviews being reviews at all – they start to blur uncomfortably into the area of technical support. If the review doesn’t have to be a monolithic event, you can achieve effect and keep content relevant by holding regular, ‘bite-size’ reviews of important elements like intranet content along with the strategic side of things – but not too often.

Ideally, then, there is a balance between the two approaches, where users are able to obtain quick responses to their everyday needs, while intranet managers are able to analyse and take action on a strategic level by looking at long-term and the emerging trends from an analytical perspective.

So, then to the tweets and the practical advice itself: @markmorrell is the intranet manager for BT, and a very well-respected member of the intranet community on Twitter; anyone who values sound, practical advice on intranet management – as well as useful snapshots of the daily life of an intranet manager – should be a regular reader of his blog at http://markmorrell.wordpress.com/. We’re one of his followers on Twitter, and earlier this year while we were thinking about the intranet review process, we noticed Mark tweeted that he had received ‘Over 800 responses to intranet survey in first 24 hours’. We were instantly interested, with the receipt of such a high number of responses indicating a large user base and therefore a sizeable review process, and the timescale indicating that there could be more responses to come.

We asked Mark whether the focus of his survey was intranet management per se, and he replied that ‘User satisfaction and views with intranet overall, key sites, applications, etc.’ was his focus – a wide-ranging remit for the review, and one that indicated to us that the review would be taking place on a strategic level.

Citing the impressive response rate we asked whether he conducted the survey via the intranet itself, and enquired as to his methodology. Mark told us that ‘GfK NOP (excellent agency) send an email with link to online questionnaire. Can track who has/hasn’t completed and guarantee anonymity and allow completion in chunks rather than just 1 go.’

We thought that the section-by-section, save-as-you-go approach was an excellent idea, giving users space to breathe by allowing them to dip in and out of the survey, providing a good strategic method for longer surveys. Of course, the use of an outside agency to provide the survey takes the responses out of the intranet zone and de-links them from any intranet user profiles – we asked whether this was to allow anonymous responses, and how highly Mark rated anonymity as part of the process.

Mark replied that he ’would like anonymity not to be an issue for any organisation’s survey because respondents are encouraged to be honest.’ It is an interesting point to ponder – is anonymity the best way to ensure honest responses? It certainly seems to work for Mark, and we replied that this could vary depending on a company’s management structure and style. Perhaps anonymity is the right way to go for questionnaires across your entire end-user base, with accountability more appropriate for those directly involved in intranet teams or project discussions.

Moving away from the finer points of the survey’s implementation, we asked whether Mark found that such surveys extend intranet lifecycles in general; he (not unreasonably) asked us to clarify the term ‘intranet lifecycles’ as it could mean several things. We replied that we ‘assumed it was a satisfaction survey conducted pre-intranet revamp for guidance on enhancements to prolong the intranet’s lifespan, though it could easily have been to produce a new iteration or any other purpose’. Using two tweets, of course, given the character count.

Mark replied that ‘it could turn out to be that! It is a check taken each year on user satisfaction and where any improvements needed’, indicating that his review is a high-level survey designed to focus on the strategic side. Furthermore, we can see that this is an example of an intranet review being conducted on an annual basis with significant success; whether there are more regular reviews in during the year is not specified, but Mark seems to be gaining a great response rate for a genuinely in-depth review model, using anonymised user surveys that include saveable sections that allow users to come back. This seems like a perfect fit for an intranet with a large user base, and takes the respondents themselves, the scope of the review and the size of the user base into account in its model and delivery. Whether the survey represents the whole review or a preliminary stage, this is a good benchmark for a successful review on a strategic level.

A differing approach was offered by one of our other Twitter contacts when addressing the idea of a content review. Content is the lifeblood of any intranet, and implementing a review process to ensuring that content production is at its optimum should be just as important as strategic analysis at a management level.

A few months back, @ChristySeason – who regular readers should remember from her extremely valuable input in defining the role of an Intranet Manager – tweeted about how to engage content authors, mentioning that she chairs bi-annual Best Practice sessions where everyone comes together to audit each other’s separate sites on her intranet.

We noticed her tweet, and decided to ask Christy how her site managers react to others auditing their content, and whether the review process itself was conducted on an open basis or in closed groups. Christy tweeted that ‘We pull everyone into a computer lab – swap sites – & everyone gets a check list 4 guidance & we spend an afternoon auditing.’

This demonstrates a very user-focused approach. Rather than having a review team come in from outside of the user loop, Christy employs an organic approach that draws on the very people who produce her intranet’s content, creating a community that regularly reviews its own output on a collective basis – a great way to build trust and foster team spirit among those responsible for making the intranet a success.

We were interested to find out more about the format, suggesting that perhaps the prospect of peer review motivates users to write more frequently & make more of their content. Christy confirmed as much, telling us that ‘everyone appreciates having another set of eyes reviewing their sites & catching things they missed + new feedback’. Clearly, Christy’s management and review method is very well suited to the requirements and setup of her intranet team; keeping your key users onside is of great benefit to any intranet manager or strategist.

Christy’s stated six-month content review timeframe sits right in the middle of the review frequency range, providing a bridge between the annual, strategic approach and the everyday user engagement method.  By creating ‘go-to’ teams that are responsible for maintaining different intranet areas, she has created a hierarchy of responsibility that is shared across her user base to encourage accountability, creating key user groups on which she can rely when it comes to conducting regular reviews.

Christy’s approach is based on breaking her user base down, and engaging her end users for a compare-and-contrast, workshop-style session on a bi-annual basis. From her comments on user acceptance, the arrangement seems to go down very well with her user base, and this level of acceptance can only help to ensure a consistently high level of content for her intranet while fostering goodwill towards the intranet and its management group within her end-user base. This is another extremely useful reference point for those investigating the intranet review process.

So, now we know what works for two of the people who manage large-scale intranet installations on a day-to-day basis, and hopefully this has been an interesting analysis of two methods that intranet professionals use within their review processes.

When we mentioned the value of a theoretical perspective earlier, though, we neglected to provide an example of such a perspective. So, to finish, it definitely seems worth pointing our readers towards an article that addresses the motivation behind intranet performance reviews with real breadth and depth: this blog post from @seanrnicholson provides real insight into what makes performance reviews so important – engaging and building trust with your intranet users, which is something that Christy and Mark both touched on in their tweets.

Sean is another of our favourite Twitter contacts within the intranet community, and he’s another person you might remember from our ‘So You Think You’re An Intranet Manager?’ post last month: his blog at www.intranetexperience.com is a regular source of valuable guidance, and this post is a good example of that. Fostering and developing trust and value in your intranet is at least a significant part of the purpose of your performance review, if not the entire purpose itself, and Sean dispenses some great advice on how to avoid some of the issues that users have.

The post delivers some practical advice grounded in the real world, as well as a good theoretical piece, so it represents a good piece of further reading after this post. In fact, it was this particular blog post that inspired us to write this piece, so please do click through and have a read – it’s well worth it, and we thought it would be only polite to give him the credit for inspiring us.

Before you go, though, if you have any other great advice or links on the intranet review process then please pop what you’ve got in our comment box below – we’d love to hear what you think.

Check back soon for the next Intranet Ideas blog post; in the meantime, why not visit us and see what we do at www.orchidsoft.com.

So You Think You’re an Intranet Manager?

If the organisation that you work for has an intranet, then chances are that it has an Intranet Manager too. That Intranet Manager might even be you. But what does the title of Intranet Manager actually mean: does the job focus on communications, or tech, or are you taking care of both?

During the last few weeks on Twitter, we have noticed a lot of talk within the intranet community about the role of an intranet manager and how it might evolve in future: an interesting discussion, no doubt, but it also got us thinking about what the being an Intranet Manager means here and now.

Working with Intranet Managers is a large part of what we do as a company: we rely on them to take care of our software within each one of our client organisations, and over the years we have gained some significant insight into the roles and responsibilities that the job encompasses.

We regard the role of Intranet Manager as being vitally important to an intranet’s success: they are the crucial link between us, the provider, and our clients, helping to keep an eye on everything that happens with each intranet and telling us what the system needs from us to perform to its fullest potential.

We talked, or tweeted, to some of our intranet manager contacts on Twitter to find out whether they think that the role of an intranet manager should be focused on internal communications, tech, or both, and we got some interesting answers from our respondents.

ChristySeason told us that she has a solid background in the tech side of things, but that her role evolved to include a mix of both.

Christy provided an interesting perspective on the comms vs. tech debate when she told us that ‘you solve communications problems and needs with technology’ – which captures quite concisely the driving principle behind any intranet installation or project team.

We asked Christy if her tech knowledge made managing her company’s intranet easier when it comes to problem-solving; sometimes, intranet management teams include two separate roles for tech and comms but Christy seems to have both aspects well under control.  ‘I’m a translator – I explain tech solutions to non-techs and business needs to the very techie…’ Christy tweeted. ‘I’m the liaison.’

This provides us with an interesting insight into the role that Christy plays in relation to her intranet: not only does Christy offer a link between tech and business from a project implementation point of view, but she manages the entire installation on a day-to-day basis by acting as a mediator between the two elements that intranets are designed to bring together – business and tech. We saw Christy’s intranet tour during the recent IBF24 online event, and it is clear to us that she knows her intranet inside out; the strategic element of her role was absolutely evident in her in-depth knowledge of an award-winning installation that was recently voted 1 of Nielsen Normans 10 best of 2010.

In the case of Christy, the role of intranet manager (or, more accurately, intranet strategist) is an overarching and directorial role that draws on her aptitude for business management on a day-to-day basis, but one which reaps the benefits of this approach by drawing on her tech background to make internal communications happen flawlessly under her direction.

For a contrasting take on the role of an intranet manager, we talked to Jserramitjana:  Júlia is a journalist working in Internal Communications, and responsibility for her organisation’s intranet is a significant part of her role.

When we asked Júlia how intranet management works within her organisation she told us that it is ‘definitely focused on comms. We have tech support from the IT Department as it’s not the role of the intranet manager’. As a journalist, Júlia’s background is firmly rooted within the world of communication, and her organisation’s intranet manager role is tailored to make the most of her undoubtable ability in this area.

As most intranet implementations are about getting a balance between tech and comms, we assumed that her organisation must include a separate tech role or team to give Júlia the control over internal communications that her role requires.  Júlia confirmed as much when she tweeted that her organisation’s ‘IT team works in many projects, so we have to share the service with others. The Intranet team is internal comms. specialist’, reflecting her company’s diverse range of operations.

Keeping tech and comms separate creates a need for exceptional communication between the two areas, and this definitely seems to be the case where Júlia is involved; at the same IBF24 event, Julia’s organisation won the award for ‘Most Beautiful Intranet’, so clearly Júlia knows how to make the most of the technical resources available to back up her communications strategy. Dividing the comms and tech roles works well for Júlia and her organisation, providing her with a flexible, communications-focused approach that makes the most of her professional expertise by drawing on tech resource as and when it becomes necessary.

So, it seems that the role of intranet manager can mean different things: whether your company needs a single source of knowledge and guidance to co-ordinate both tech and comms, or whether you would suit a flexible approach with separate tech and comms roles depends on the way that your organisation works.

As we can see above, both roles have produced fantastic intranets for their parent organisations, and this is in no small way thanks to the quality of the people who fulfil those roles – their respective employers clearly recognise Christy and Júlia’s talents, and their roles seem entirely focused on reaping the benefits of their respective professional abilities.

For another strategic perspective, we tweeted at seanrnicholson; his website at www.intranetexperience.com provides a wide range of intranet tips, best practice and experience that represents an informative and authoritative resource for anyone with an interest in intranets.

When we tweeted at Sean, his advice was that intranet management ‘Depends on size, but ideal is 2 roles. 1 focused on content & engagement, other focused on tech.’ A very sound assessment, suggesting that the role seems to vary according to resources available as well as the demands of the company, so we decided to draw further on Sean’s wealth of experience in the field of intranets to investigate the issue further.

Given Sean’s suggestion of a 2-role ideal, we asked him whether the term ‘intranet manager’ was too wide-ranging for what it describes. Sean suggested that the ideal setup would comprise a ‘Manager of Intranet Systems & a Manager of Internal Communications. Both co-chair the Intranet Governance Team’. This is an interesting approach: we can see that again the comms/tech duality is still the case, and that both fall under the umbrella of an Intranet Governance Team.

Of course, as Sean stated in his first tweet, this is an ideal: to use a cliché, companies have to cut their coats according to their cloth. If you have two roles, make sure that you fill them – whether your Intranet Governance Team is one intranet manager overseeing both comms and tech or two people managing one aspect each is entirely dependent on what fits your organisation.

So what can we take from this? In addition to Sean’s solid advice, and Christy and Júlia’s contrasting approaches, it seems that a logical conclusion would be to say that being an intranet manager is about more than just a pre-conceived idea, it is about choosing the right people in the right combination with the right skills to fit the way that your organisation works.

Equally, you might say that knowing how your organisation works enables you to assess the resources available, which in turn defines whether the intranet manager’s role will be comms, tech or both, and enables your organisation to find the right person for that role.

Either way, whether the organisation or the candidate defines the role, or a mix of both, it seems the common theme is that each intranet manager is unique to their own organisation, and each role reflects the culture of its parent company; just as a good intranet is one that fits the company in which it operates, the right intranet manager is simply the one that represents the right match for your organisation.

Check back soon for the next Intranet Ideas blog post; in the meantime, why not visit us and see what we do at www.orchidsoft.com.