Sprints, leaps and baby steps – What it takes to make an intranet strategy work.

Next week I’m speaking at Intranätverk – the newest star on the intranet conference sky. Kristian Norling has done a remarkable job of putting together a great lineup of speakers mostly from Sweden but also some notable people from around Europe. Kristian promises to bring a twist to the regular intranet conference and I am happy to play my part in making this happen.

My talk will be about intranet strategy and how we at Grundfos have been quite successful with a more sustained model but now find ourselves faced with a challenge. It will not be about Sharepoint although there IS new version out there which is awfully hard to ignore. Heck, just last week I walked though Copenhagen Airport where Microsoft banners lined the security check area. I’m sure there are a whole bunch of jokes that can be made based on that but I’ll leave that up to you J

A new Sharepoint – that also means that whenever intranet peers meet it doesn’t take very long before the conversations turns to the topic of this new version. Sometimes it makes good sense to upgrade but all too often this is done simply because an eager and very tech focused intranet manager wants the newest version. An even more common scenario is that the IT department tells the intranet team that they will now upgrade to the latest version as a part of the overall strategy (or some other reason) with no questions asked.

Let me always having the most recent piece of software is NOT a strategy. It’s an operational thing. Even if it is labeled as a strategic ambition, it is an incredibly stupid one! Strategies need to be made around what the platform – be that the intranet, record management system or something else – can help your colleagues, the users, achieve.

What about the scenario where the USERS are the ones asking for the new version of a given platform? It is not at all a common thing so I was really surprised that when Grundfos announced that the entire company should move to MS Office 365 I was approached by quite a few who excitedly asked “when are we getting Sharepoint?”. Why was that?

The answer is buried in the fact that our intranet is more than 10 years old. It is grown with the company and with the needs of my colleagues but more importantly, it has grown INSIDE the organization and little heed has been given to the outside world since our intranet was – and is – doing a good job. We are in a situation where we have had great success growing our intranet with the company to serve the needs of our colleagues but if you compare to what’s going on elsewhere it is clear that what started as a small discrepancy – a hairline fracture – has now grown into a big crevasse and we now need to prepare to take a big leap.

This is obviously a very daunting task but nevertheless one that has to be done. If we fail to do so people will start looking elsewhere. In Grundfos we have seen a spectacular uptake on the use of Yammer which I think is excellent but it also underlines my point that although a sustainable development model is the best way forward you inadvertently find yourself in a situation where radical change is needed. It’s a fact of life!

So how do you create an intranet strategy that work? My answer is short and simple: Make sure that you always grow with the company. Users hate surprises but every once in a (great) while you need to take a great leap forward to catch up otherwise people will be leaving. Most importantly you should never, ever stop listening to what your customers really need and it is NEVER “the latest version of SharePoint”…

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If you are interested in reading more about my thoughts on the development gap that I have outlined here, I hope that I’ll see you in Gothenburg. If not, you can take a closer look at the J. Boye blog where I wrote a blogpost titled “Mind the gap – also when developing your intranet”

It’s like Facebook – and it’s OK…

You’ve seen them: 7 steps for a more social enterprise, 3 top-tips for increasing employee engagement, 5 strategies for…. These are all very good and useful, although rather repetitive, but one thing is always left out: The fact that Social networking is for entertainment – not for work! Or at least that’s the way many people still see social media.

I have been working actively on an internal Yammer project for the last 8 months and while we have had lots of people sign up and also quite a few engaging actively in the discussions on the platform. Notwithstanding the relatively large contingent of people who are not active, we think that it has been a quite successful journey – more about this journey in later posts.

Introducing Yammer to the masses.
Nothing beats face to face contact so My colleague and I have introduced and demoed Yammer and what it can do for a certain department at department meetings and conferences. Two statements have stood out and we hear them almost everywhere.

1. We don’t have time for a new tool.
2. it’s almost like Facebook.

The first preconception is relatively easy to address with the simple answer that you need to take some time to get used to a new tool – any new tool – and that this obviously starts with a cultural change and a handshake that a given group of people will give it a try. As always, with things that requite a change of habits, it is much easier said than done but that’s also a topic for another post.

We always start every introduction by asking a few questions about people’s social media habits and since Denmark is one of the countries where Facebook has the highest penetration rate everybody know Facebook – also if they don’t have a profile. Usually this is very helpful and people who compare it to Facebook will be more prone just to get started but there is another side to this statement. Why does this matter in relation to social media at work? More importantly: Why does the Yammer/Facebook comparison pose a challenge for user adoption?

Entering the ‘Corporate Facebook’
In Denmark we have, like many other places, lots of stories in the media about what social media can and cannot do and along with this also quite a few stories about people losing their jobs or getting bullied on various social media. Additionally some of the larger Danish unions early on told people to be very careful with what they share on social media – especially when it comes to work. People listened and learned. Companies were also quick to announce that social media (ie. Facebook activity) was banned or should be minimized during working hours. Again people listened and learned. Just imagine what could happen if I started using Facebook during my workday…

This is where we are today. Our colleagues have been ‘brought up’ with the fact that social media is something that belongs in the private sphere and when you are at work the use of social tools should be kept to a minimum.

Next thing you know is that your manager has invited two strange guys who are talking about how important it is that we share information in the company and how important it is to ‘break down silos’ – and then they show a tool that looks just like Facebook. WHOA! Slow down! Less than a year ago we weren’t supposed to use this stuff at work – and now you’re saying what…..?

What basically happens is that in addition to the change of habits that is connected with the introduction of a new work tool you also have to come to terms with the fact that you must abandon the thought that using social networks is something you do in your private life – certainly not during 9 to 5. It is not real work! You may argue that this is an ‘age-thing’ and to a certain extent you are right. There ARE more young people among the early adopters but you would be surprised how many 20 and 30-year-olds who roll your eyes at you in the beginning of each presentation, some even saying out loud that these social networks are a waste of time and that they have no place in a work context.

It starts with the managers
I’ve had this talk with quite a few managers who have been wondering why the adoption is relatively slow even if the group has received introductions, training and it has been given an official seal of approval. When we talk about the change of habit and that social networking in a work context largely is like eating forbidden fruit, the manager often realizes how much more there is to it than just throw a new tool into the mix.

The biggest upside is that the “Facebook is not for work” argument works – it makes intuitively sense and it helps underline the importance of the change management effort connected with these tools and I believe that it will ultimately improve adoption. It still takes the 5, 7 and 10 tips that I mentioned in the beginning in order to truly succeed but make sure that you repeat after me over and over: “Yes! It’s like Facebook… and it’s OK…. Really….”

The first rule of Sharepoint is…

You do not talk about Sharepoint! I’m sure there are many other Fight Club related quotes to be said about intranets and platforms but the one mentioned here is very appropriate for my experiences from two conferences in the past month.

I have enjoyed the privelege of speaking at J. Boye 2012 in Aarhus and Intranett 2012 in Oslo and what stood out at both events was that technology is no longer taking center stage when you talk about intranets. Until very recent you could not attend an intranet event without half of the presentations were either about social media orSharepoint. Now we are talking about search, user experience, content strategy, etc. – why this change?

Part of the explanation is maturity. The technology platforms that intranets are built on have come of age and it is no longer common to hear of big migration projects or big bang launches (the latter, I find particularly good). The platforms now develop more consistently and continuously which makes the need to perform the “quantum leaps” of the past much less. Another part of the explanation might just be that many companies have been forced to prioritise differently due to the struggling economy. This means that you need to make ends meet and use what you already have.

The other big part and also the big upside is that the user is now in focus. It’s now about efficiency and productivity and to achieve this you must focus on the user experience. In my opinion this is indeed great news for both the end users but also for intranets in general.

Mind the gap – also when developing your intranet

It happens – more frequently than it should – that you meet an intranet manager with a somewhat disgruntled look on her face when you start talking about how their intranet is doing. More often than not this is because they are in the middle of a big redesign or a big upgrade to the next version of the intranet platform which ought to be good news. But often it is just one more in a long line of intranet projects which historically have been testing the patience of the intranet team – not to mention the colleagues.

The big problem is that the intranet is too often seen as a project. You may have a nice intranet vision that talks about how your intranet will be the one place above all and must support the business goals and strategies. So, I ask: Since when did it become a business goal to always use the latest version of SharePoint?

Read the answer and the entire post on the J. Boye blog – Posted ahead of the J. Boye conference in Aarhus next month where this will be the topic of my talk. I hope that I will see you there.

Continuous measurement of intranet user satisfaction – Can it be done?

Measurement and user satisfaction is something that all intranet people think about now and again me included. I have been running satisfaction surveys for a couple of years and although these big, annual surveys have produced very useful results I have thinking about a more continuous measurement of your intranet and how this can be done. I was introduced to the idea of Net Promoter Score which inspired me to think whether it was possible to create something similar for intranets. To explore this further I posted the following question in three LinkedIn groups.

“How do you continuously measure intranet satisfaction?”

I got some very good and insightful feedback from the group members and I will try to summarize and conclude in the following.

First of all the concept of Net Promoter Score where you ask users one and the same question will not work well for intranets. Firstly, the people in your target group are left with little choice where to go for information. You may have a fragmented digital workplace but the employees are still ‘forced’ to use what’s put in front of them. Secondly, you will be asking the same people the same question over and over expecting different results and that’s not very likely to happen.

Several contributors pointed out that people are fed up with surveys and pop-ups. I even blogged about what I have dubbed ‘survey fatigue’ so I cannot agree more but if we don’t ask, we won’t know.

After reading through the discussions I have discerned two themes which could be relevant for continuous measurement.

1. KPI Quesions
The key is to make these relevant to the organisation and to the purpose of your intranet. If you have an intranet strategy and/or purpose in place, this should be fairly easy and this sbould also enable you to find the Critical Business Requirements which you can base your questions around.

2. Feedback analysis
This obviously requires a structured method for collecting feedback. A great way to do this could be to team up with your helpdesk. This will allow you to create a sentiment analysis of the incoming feedback which will provide an insight into the atitude towards intranet and it may even tell you something about the organizational mood at any given time.

Inspired by the omnipresent feedback tabs on websites the two mentioned above could be combined in a quick questionnaire like the one below where I have assumed that the Critical Business Requirements are to be able to find up-to-date information quickly and easily, and of course that the intranet is relevant for the employees:

The obvious downside of the KPI measurement is that does not give you any pointers as to what areas you specifically need to address if you need to improve. I have some concerns that a generic satisfaction KPI will be just ‘for show’. It doesn’t provide anything but small clues as to what to change in order to improve, and it does little to justify why and where you need to invest time and/or money in developing your intranet. That said, I also believe that if you have a professional intranet team they are very likely to know exactly what levers to pull and buttons to push in order to improve, and by running the continuous analysis you will not have to wait for the annual survey to adjust your efforts.

In addition to this, I can’t help but think that if the Intranet community could agree on three benchmark questions we would have a way of comparing what we do. Intranets are sufficiently similar when it comes to the purpose of having one, yet different enough to create a need for bigger surveys and benchmark studies like they do at IBF or WIC. You still need those to get specific details on WHAT and HOW to improve your intranet, but for a quick comparison, the concept of an “Intranet Satisfaction Score” could still be useful.

What do you think? Will it make sense – let alone be possible – to have this kind of metric?

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A special thank you to Martin White, Nigel Williams, William Amurgis, Nicolas Lethbridge, and many more for sharing insights thoughts and resources in the LinkedIn discussions. Among these resources I’d like to mention two in particular: A Metric Model For Intranet Portal Business Requirements and the Intranet Management Handbook

The intranet vs. The digital workplace

In November I was in Stockholm for Intranätdagarna 2011:2 (The Intranet Days 2011:2) and during my two-day visit to the Swedish capital, I had the pleasure of talking to Paul Miller from Intranet Benchmarking Forum. Among other things we spent some time talking about the proclaimed death of intranets which I believe is greatly exaggerated.

Since then I have started at my third intranet related job at a new company and this has given me an opportunity to get a closer look behind the scenes of an intranet that has remained largely unchanged for an impressive 10 years. This also allows for a rather unique perspective on how the very traditional intranet fits in the online landscape of 2012.

In 2002 online was equal to websites and maybe also an intranet if your company had realized that there was a need for an internal website. This was for communication, information, forms, and selected documents. Self-contained with no integrations since there was nothing to integrate!

Somewhere along the way other systems came about and slowly they started to nudge into the online realm offering more and more advanced portal functionality and taking over functionality from the intranet. Big investments were made and in some companies this was at the expense of the intranet because it did a great job at publishing news and forms. This means that we now have a landscape of many portals or portal-like functions. Many of which would fit snugly on the intranet and this poses the question: What to use where and when?

The process leading up to this has been that of evolution. The solutions have developed in relative isolation, but the needs that they serve are largely the same and this is where the notion of the digital workplace comes into play. We have a landscape of monoliths where some are grouped closer together than others and if the intranet does nothing that publish news and provide a phonebook, it doesn’t take much imagination to declare the death of intranets and that the remaining

This puts the intranet in a quite unique position: You can argue that the intranet doesn’t serve a business purpose and that it should die, but you can also argue that the intranet is the independent alternative that can form the mortar between all the monoliths out there and this is the big challenge for intranets and intranet managers of today: How do you bridge these gaps between the components of the digital workplace?

Evolve or die!
Intranets and their managers are faced with an exciting challenge regardless whether you use state-of-the-art portals or of you have a homegrown HTML site: How do you connect all these vital pillars of the digital workplace to form a strong intranet that serves as a single point of access?

The notion of creating an intranet that contains everything is that of 2002. Today’s intranet will be a thin layer on top of a number of other highly specialized tools to form a ‘Patchwork Intranet‘ or ‘Heterogeneous Intranet‘. This layer may provide some core functions like news, and possibly the social dimension, but most importantly it is a layer that gives you access to what you need while hiding the underlying complexity.

“Digital workplace” and “Intranet” are not interchangeable and also not contradictions. The intranet is an integral – possibly the most important – part of the digital workplace of the future. The intranet is not dead, but if you fail to realize this potential, you’d better brush up on your life saving skills

About organisational inertia – and trees…

Summer has come and gone – some argue that it was never really in Denmark – and today I was reminded of an article from N/N Group that was published in the slow summer weeks. It was about  inertia in the organisation. I sat in a status meeting which inevitably moved on to discuss budgets, or maybe the lack of the same. In the midst of this, I remembered this passage:

Although big organizations get the biggest ROI from intranet improvements, they might suffer under a particular type of ambition inertia: upper management has often been in the same company for a decade or more, so they’ve never experienced how good intranets can get in other companies. This can make them reluctant to sponsor a new portal.

I both agree and disagree. True. You need input from “the outside”, but could the inertia be rooted somewhere else? Let’s look at the IT departments. IT is a cost, right? Over the last couple of years we’ve had to spend less on everything from heavy machinery to paper clips – surely we can use a little less IT while we are at it. The problem is that IT is not a commodity. You can work smarter, negotiate better contracts, etc. but in the end it’s a bit like trimming a tree. If you do it carefully it will look nicer next year, but if you cut off too many of the big branches it will take many years for it to recover, let alone look nice.

In my opinion this is what has happened in many organisations. Some of the “strategic” branches have been cut so far back that there’s hardly anything left and all there is to do is to wait for it to grow back. You may have a nice strategy for your portal, but with no ressources to back it up you are not going to get very far. Add to that the notoriously difficult task of justifying investments in knowledge sharing – You might as well get the camping gear out now since you’ll be staring at that tree for a loooooong time!

The fact that management never saw a proper intranet may have caused ambition inertia, but a very unnuanced view on IT may (inadvertently) have put IT (and the Intranet team) in a position where they are stuck with an old, decimated ‘tree’ and have no chance to create solutions that support business goals and in turn this is very likely to reflect poorly on – guess who – the IT and/or intranet team…

All there is left to do is to hope for someone to stop by with a beautiful new tree – someone who believes in change for the better.

Flight E-2.0 taking off – Destination: Unknown

Back in December I was recommended to read Enterprise 2.0 by Andrew McAfee and so I did. A very inspiring book which really provided some food for thought and put some of my own thoughts into a new context. This is not a review of the book – I have included links to a couple of reviews at the end of this post.

Working in a highly dispersed and specialised – but also fairly old – organisation it has become very obvious to me that we have a number of very strong informal networks within the company and I believe that’s one of the main reasons that the concept of weak ties really struck a chord with me, and also made me wonder if this could be a relevant angle for introducing the concept of an internal social network.

In one of my previous posts I wrote about our annual intranet survey, and back then I decided to include some questions around social media in the organisation. Now the results are in and as you can see below, almost 30% “don’t know” if an internal social network will improve collaboration internally.

From 2011 intranet satisfaction survey

This obviously helps make the case, and with a plethora of “free to try” tools available, I feel that now is the time to see if a corporate network can bring value to the company. The big questions: Can modern technology ie. a corporate social network…

…Bring “us” closer together?
…Help break down organisational and geographical barriers?
…Speed up the process of finding information and knowledge?

Now the next step is to get backing to run an actual pilot. We already have the obligatory rogue networks on eg. Yammer internally which, all things considered, will make it easier to recruit people to help spread the word, but there is no guarantee that this initiative will succeed.

Other companies succeed – we can too. It requires an effort, it requires support, but first and foremost it requires that the right people BELIEVE that this can make a difference. It almost sounds religious and maybe it is, but now that I think of it, many of the most significant changes in the world has not happened because of careful planning (and business cases) but as a result of a strong belief and commitment.

We’re ready on the tarmac – all we need is a ‘Go!’ from the control tower! Stay tuned for updates – over…

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If you are looking for more about the book I can recommend the comprehensive reviews by Samuel Driessen (who recommended the book to me – much appreciated) and Gil Yehuda.

User adoption – How hard can it be?

Today I was invited as guest speaker at one of the international communities of practice by J. Boye at their meeting in Gothenburg hosted by SKF. An excellent meeting with like minded people from all over Europe.

The topic for my presentation was the introduction of new features and subsequent user adoption. Unfortunately I am not allowed to share my slides here, but here’s the outline and recommendations I presented.

Get involved!
Don’t expect your colleagues in IT to look out for the end user. It may happen, but all too often projects start out with a tech-focus and this makes it likely that the user experience will suffer due to things which may seem logical from a technical point-of-view, but backwards for the users.

Know your audience!
Make an effort to find out how the new solution impact the daily work and what the IT skills the users have. This is a good opportunity to go sit down with someone, or just to see how they actually work.

Culture and values – ”This is how we implement”
The old, familiar way is not necessarily bad. When you implement eg. social features it is tempting to use radical approaches, but it is important to bear in mind that implementations create discomfort in the organisation. If the level of discomfort created is to low you will not succeed in creating sustainable change. If the discomfort becomes to big, people will object to the change.

Align user adoption strategy with business case – and vice versa.
What does the business case say? That everyone need to use the new solution? Then you need to set a lot of money aside for user adoption compared to if the business case calls for 50% adoption. The problem is that business cases listing less than 100% adoption are less likely to get approval!

For more on this topic, I can recommend Michael Sampson’s book “User adoption strategies” which I have written more about here Don’t just build it and throw it out there!

Another year – another survey

Admitted! I am fed up with user satisfaction surveys and has been for a while, but here I find myself preparing this year’s edition of our Intranet Satisfaction Survey – in other words, ready to spam a few thousand of my fellow employees. A good, and very relevant, question from my colleague was “What would you like to achieve with it?” got me thinking about the big “why?”. I know that very little has happened on the intranet over the last 12 months which effectively means that we are stuck more or less exactly where we are last year. This is of course sad, but also a perfect reason for running a survey.

Not only will you get an immediate picture of what that the state of the intranet is right now, but you also get a clear picture of what happens if you DON’T do anything to improve or just make some adjustments. In several conversations I have promoted the view that the most important characteristic about a good intranet is that it continuously adapts to the company. If it has stalled the company has either moved away from the intranet which is rather worrying or the company is going bust which is even worse!

Regardless of the outcome it will be really interesting to see the development and while painting a bleak picture in the above, we have made some improvements in the collaboration area so I have a hope that this can serve as a good example to be followed – that you need to invest to improve.

In other words, I’m sending out a survey to a bunch of people and in 8 of 10 areas I hope for the worst – Wish me luck!