I am in the process of writing a book about the Lean Intranet © approach and its associated tools and techniques. The book will be called-

Lean Intranets 

with the strapline

How lean thinking can improve communication in your organisation.

The book will be made freely available as a PDF.

If you have suggestions for the book I’d could grateful if you post a comment.

This will mean that posts will be few and far between while the book is being written. I envisage it should take some months….

….in the meantime have a good Christmas and a peaceful New Year

In this post I’m attempting to provide an approach that may help intranet teams to make the case for better resources and to break out of this vicious circle for good.

Why intranets are a low priority in most organizations

Intranets in trying to be everything to everyone have generally failed to be anything to anyone. Continual failure has led to a healthy scepticism in many senior managers that intranets can ever work. Gerry McGovern states that -

Unfortunately, I have come across many senior managers who could not care less if the intranet was switched off or not. And I have come across so many staff over the years who only use the intranet as a last resort because they think it’s a big waste of time.

I agree totally with the quote above. You can see that many managers wonder why they should throw good money after bad when there are no many other areas of the organization which will provide a greater payback? Many staff just ignore the intranet because their jobs are hard enough without having to waste time looking for content they may never find.  So what happens?  James Robertson in the same blog post states -

The only time the vast majority of intranets ever get a budget of any size is for a new technology.  “The technology landscape has changed hugely for intranets over the last year or two,” James states. “I am of course talking about the rise of SharePoint as an intranet platform, but it’s more than just that. Social and collaborative tools of all sorts have made their way into organisations, alongside a range of new business tools.”

There is a problem with the idea that new technology will somehow magically solve existing problems. It won’t. This has been called ‘fleeing into the future’. If the problems were technological in nature this might work but the problems are content and people based. Issues such as poor governance, poor content management, poor navigation and findability, have become the running sores of many intranets eroding the trust of both users and stakeholders.

However for some reason most organizations still think they should have an intranet but never give it enough resources to have much chance of success. It’s like keeping an apple tree in a cellar and wondering why you never get any good apples.

In order to break out of this vicious circle intranet teams need to -

• Be honest about where the intranet is
• Prepare a sustainable plan for success
• Sell the plan to senior managers
• Carry out the plan using a kaizen approach
• Announce successes then…

….ask for more resources

Be honest about where your intranet is

In order to measure any improvement you have to know where you are. You need to carry out some extensive research with your users, relying solely on web stats will not provide robust data if the goal of your intranet is to help your users do their job more effectively.  The more research into users wants and needs you can do the better.  Go and talk to users and stakeholders and capture their ideas and levels of satisfaction with the intranet in such a way that the exercise can be repeated over time to provide evidence of trends.  Be brutally honest with everyone about what the data is showing. If satisfaction levels are in the basement then okay, you now have your  starting line in the race to intranet success.

Do not an initial lack of resource stop you from carrying out this research.  Do the best you can, using smaller samples if you have to, backed up with online surveys and approaches like the elevator interview.

Prepare a sustainable plan for success

Based on the research data put together an improvement plan using the lean intranet approach. This approach basically suggests that intranet content should be reduced to a level that can be sustainably managed by the intranet team. The trick is in identifying the 20% of current content that 80% of your users need most of the time. Again be brutal in pruning content and ask the following of all large content sets -

Is the content really relevant?

Is the content really going to help anyone?

Can the content be sustainably managed?

This last one is really important when it comes to sustainability. However some content might be desirable, if it cannot be effectively updated and maintained within the resources available, then it shouldn’t be in your intranet. With less content navigation and findability will be vastly improved.

Once you have your plan you now need to get some backing for it.

Sell the plan to senior managers

This is the tough part. Many senior managers have seen new intranet initiatives come and go and, with good reason, are highly sceptical that anything intranet related could be made to work. You have to be honest about the current state of the intranet and then persuade stakeholders that your plan has a chance of success. Try to gather whatever evidence you can to back your approach both internally, from your users, and externally from intranet case histories.

Importantly do not ask for more resource at this point. Your plan will stand a better chance of getting backing if your stakeholders do not feel they have to put their hands in their pockets straight away.  Once you can show them quantifiably improvements asking for resources will become less of an uphill struggle.

Carry out the plan using a kaizen approach

Big ambitious plans only need to fail slightly to be perceived as total failures. Do not attempt to try and cure all your intranet’s problems in one hit, it won’t work. Improvement activities in any sphere always work better if done incrementally and in a managed way over time.  This is called the kaizen approach.  Go for the low hanging fruit, those things that you know you stand a good chance of achieving success with using only the resources you have available. The key here is patience and giving yourself the necessary amount of time. If you can do that then the small improvements you make will add up to very big ones over time.

Announce your successes

Keep your stakeholders and users informed of all of the wonderful things you are now achieving, however small. Creating an aura  of success around your team and their achievements will boost the confidence of your stakeholders and the productivity of your team leading to further success.

When you have reached this point calmly mention all the wonderful things you might be able to do with just a little more funding.

There is no magic wand, no new technology, no novel social media software that will make your intranet  work. However the lean intranet approach coupled with good planning, based on realistic expectations and carried out using a kaizen approach may just give you your best shot at the biggest intranet prize…

…an intranet that really adds value every working day for your users and stakeholders.

(Thanks to Cartermagna blog for the Vicious Circle)

In many intranet projects that I’ve come across or read about it seems that once the work has been done then everyone breathes a sigh of relief and walks away because there it is, like your first new car,  all gleaming and new. However rust never sleeps and, like a car, ongoing maintenance is essential. Indeed as much thought should be given to how you can maintain and adapt your intranet  structure over time as is given to forming the structure in the first place. In order to do this you need to know what your current structure is at any time. This means finding a ways of mapping your intranet and keeping that map up to date.

Mapping your intranet structure

There are many different ways of mapping intranet or web structures, some simple approaches that can be done manually and some more complex that can be done automatically using special software.  For myself I prefer the manual approach. While this might take a little more time it has some real benefits -

- You can choose the mapping approach that suits your organization best

- You can ensure that it is made available in suitable formats to users and stakeholders

- You can ensure that it is maintainable i.e. not dependent on bespoke software, particular skills sets or personnel

- Getting your hands dirty by manually digging into the dusty corners of your intranet makes you really aware of what you’re dealing with and you can often see where things can be improved as you construct the map

My candidate for this is a version of Frank Beck’s famous tube map which can be seen below and accessed here -

http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/a-map-based-approach

The advantages of this approach is that it is simply represents the structure and importantly it also maps the structure of the links as well. The map is intuitive, as almost everyone around the world understands the concept of this type of map and it can be saved as a clickable set of web pages allowing you to  upload it to a site so others can access and comment on it.

Why should you need to spend time doing this? A very true saying from the world of  Quality is that ‘if you don’t know where you are, you can’t improve’. The map represents the baseline, at any point in time,  of where you are. But what about improving your intranet structure?

Continuously improving your intranet structure

I have seen intranets that resembled a house of cards. Extra sections and content on loaded on to the structure until it inevitably falls down – failure in this case being defined by no-one wanting to use your intranet because they can’t find anything and its structure resembles a plate of spaghetti. So how are we to ensure that our intranet structures remain fit for purpose?

   All organizations change over time and our intranets must reflect that change if they are to stay effective. We must think of our intranet structures as being fragile and in need of constant attention -

- Like an unruly hedge it will need pruning back into shape by removing obsolete or low value content or even sections

- Changes to responsibilities and departments will need to be updated in a timely way

-  The intranet may need to be re-aligned to new and changing business goals

- The intranet must continually improve to stay where it is

That last point is important. I think it is possible to maintain an intranet in a near pristine state but what is needed is the resource and the right approach. This approach allows an intranet team not only to preserve a record of their intranet’s structure but also to play around with alternate structures and try out new configurations when change is needed.

Basically if you’re standing still you’re going backwards, as change, and sometimes rapid change, is inevitable. This lightweight approach to the design of the structure of intranets and websites may help you keep your intranet ahead of the game.

It is useful when thinking about structures to roughly define some parts of the intranet structure -

Macro structure – The top levels of the intranet structure

Section structure – Any discrete part or section of the intranet that can be clearly defined e.g. HR, operations etc.

Micro structure -Any part of the intranet at a lower level of granularity

Users and stakeholders

In normal circumstances users and stakeholders will only ever get involved in structuring intranets through card sorting techniques. These techniques may still be required to identify how users view categories and genres on the section structure or micro structure levels but will probably not contribute greatly to the macro structure. The main reason for this is that only a open card sort may be used for the macro structure and, in my experience, it is rare to get a highly convergent set of results when no clue is given as to what the structure should be. It usually ends up with someone in the team having to invent the macro structure thus allowing only limited input to users via a closed card sort.  The approach outlined here and in Part 3, the ‘wall of URLs’,  should allow all users and stakeholders to comment on every level of the structure and at every phase of its deployment.

For both users and stakeholders, at least those at the same location, make sure that the wall of URLs is in a place they can easily access at any time.  Somewhere near the coffee machine or kitchen is good.  Alert them of all changes and they can then go and have a good look for themselves. For stakeholders and users that aren’t co-located send them updates by photographing the wall of URLs and bullet pointing the major changes.

For users you will need to identify particular user groups and then organize an intranet  focus group. Unlike many focus groups this one should not be short lived but should last as long as it takes to complete the intranet structure.  The group should be involved in forming the initial structure and in any major changes that may be required later on.  If the group is representative of your users, and you can encourage members of the group to report back to their user groups, this should help increase ‘buy-in’ from all your users.

For stakeholders this approach should enable them to not only constructively comment on their areas within the intranet but appreciate the intranet as a whole.  It should make it easier to explain the needs of other stakeholders and users and to sell potential trade-offs.

Input from both users and stakeholders has to be iterative and frequent if it is to be effective. It will also be very useful to hold joint reviews of the structure involving both users and stakeholders so that a conversation can be started about the inevitable trade-offs that will need to be made between users and stakeholders as the project progresses.

Considering Content

It is also important while iterating ideas for the structure to get an idea of what content goes where and the volume of content as this can have an effect on the structure. It is also very convenient to use this opportunity to lever knowledge from users and stakeholders about existing content and possible future content requirements. Content can be represented by a post it note where the  content type only is detailed e.g.

intranet/hr/policies/holidays/:forms/

where the semi-colon represents a content type and not a page.

Think of the future

One of the problems that intranets suffer from is keeping up with change. Organizations inevitably need to respond to an ever changing world and, if it is to be effective, the intranet must reflect these changes. It is possible however to, at least partially, ‘future proof’ your intranet by levering knowledge from your user focus group and stakeholders. They know a good deal about their areas and making sure that your intranet structure allows for foreseen change should reduce the need for re-designs.

In the fifth and final part of Designing Intranet Structures I’ll be looking at how you can map your intranet structure and how this approach can offer ongoing sustainable improvements to your intranet.

See Part 5 Mapping and Continually Improving Your Intranet

(Many thanks to Ramberg Media for the Flickr CC photo)

When discussing the system map in Part 2 I said that categories, genres and other aggregations should not be considered in order to keep the map as simple as possible. The principal points in adopting the URL design approach is to -

• Map and agree  the top level navigation structures
• Agree the pages/resources that your intranet needs (and doesn’t need)
• Indicate which aggregations need sorting e.g. by categories, A-Z, by number etc.
• Involve everyone in the discussion

So what attributes should our URLs have?

There are many things that have to be thought of when designing URLs but for the purpose of keeping things simple I have gone for four main URL attributes that will be of benefit in intranets -

• Readability
• Hackability
• Persistence
• One URL per resource or ‘thing’ (not page!)

Readability – A good URL should be a source of information to your users. It should read like a breadcrumb trail with a page for every section of the URL. As search becomes more ubiquitous, even in intranets, a good intranet URL can give instant information to your users on whether the content is what they are looking for.

For instance if I put a search query in for ‘form for booking holidays’ in many intranets (and web sites) you might get a URL looking something like this -

intranet/forms/bqws1234

All I get out of this automatically generated URL is that it is a form and that’s it.  A good intranet URL for the same form might look like this-

intranet/hr/policies/holidays/forms/staff-booking-holidays

You can see that a readable URL presents the user with extra information which will give them confidence in making their selection. Also very importantly it is much more memorable. Once I’ve seen the readable URL above I stand a much better chance of being able to remember it and return to the content at a later date. There is virtually zero chance of remembering the automatically generated URL.

Hackability

‘Hackability’ means being able to access higher levels of the intranet by deleting parts of the URL. If we use the instance above -

intranet/hr/policies/holidays/forms/staff-booking-holidays

If, having booked my holidays, I wanted to see more information about holidays I should be able to snip the URL so it reads -

intranet/hr/policies/holidays/forms/

Which will be a page in the HR section containing all forms related to holidays. I can go further -

intranet/hr/policies/holidays/

Which will be a page containing general links to all content about holidays. In order for users to be able to hack intranet URLs this way there must be a page for every section of the URL. In some informal research carried out a couple of years ago it was found that around a third of users will try hacking URLs to get at the content they are looking for so spending a little time ensuring that URLs are hackable could pay dividends for years to come.

Persistence

This is probably of more importance for web URLs in terms of  achieving better SEO however I think it is well worth considering when designing your URLs. Using terms with a limited life span will mean that your URLs will become nonsense in time. Giving some real consideration to making your URLs as long lasting as possible will help those users who use bookmarks or shortcuts and save you time in the future by not having to go back and fix obsolete URLs.

One URL per resource or ‘thing’

The days when all content was static are now disappearing and are being replaced by dynamic pages. A dynamic page will have its own URL but so will the content that appears on the page. By ensuring that everything has its own URL it then becomes possible to tailor content so it more closely fits your users’ needs.  For instance it becomes possible for users to start creating their own ‘pages’ with links to individual procedures, policies and other content at a quite granular level. Perhaps more importantly it allows content to be accessed from more than one place, from multiple genres or categories that make sense to all your users. It also makes it easy to change your structure when change becomes necessary. Rather than having to change swathes of content it becomes more of an exercise in re-arranging your links.

Designing your URLs

All you will need for this is some different coloured post-its and a wall.

(Taken from Michael Smethurst’s Radio Labs blog post)

Using the systems map as reference start with the highest level sub-domains of your intranet as agreed in the sytems map. These might look like -

intranet/hr/

intranet/mystuff

intranet/corporate

intranet/operations

and so on. Write these on different coloured post-its and place them on the wall in a row. Then start building up the child resources for each sub-domain which should also be detailed in the sytems map -

intranet/hr/policies

intranet/hr/H&S

intranet/hr/forms

and so on. Place these below the ‘intranet/hr’ post-it, stand back and have a think. Keep going, writing up URLs and moving post-its until it all makes sense, not just to you and your team but your stakeholders and even users. Iteration is the key to making this part of the process work. Once you’re happy with your URLs you will have structured your intranet and decided on your top level navigation.

A tip – keep photographing the wall of URLs every time something is changed just in case the cleaners take it down!

The next step is to define and re-define your URL structure and how you can consider ‘future proofing’ your intranet. I’ll show you how this can be done in the next post.

Further info on URL design

Silver Oliver’s and Deanna Marbeck’s presentation URL Design for Information Architects

TimBL’s  Cool URIs don’t change

Rield.com Clean URL Design Guidelines

Manas Tungare’s URL Design Sins

See Part 4 of Designing Intranet Structures

(Thanks to RambergMedia for the Flickr CC image)

Before any system map can be compiled it is important that in depth user and stakeholder research is carried out as well as a content inventory (see Content Value Analysis). The analysis of these activities will contribute towards populating the system map.

What goes in the map?

From the research and inventory it should be possible to identify user and stakeholder needs and wants. The map should then be populated with ‘data objects’ that is real data not aggregations of data like genres and categories,that is for later. For instance HR may have many different types of policies but for the purpose of the system map it can be summed up as ‘HR policy’.

I have put together a very simplified system map just to show how it works.

As you can see the map only incudes ‘things’-a policy, a procedure, a form etc. At this stage it is necessary to keep it a simple as possible. You can clearly see that there are different areas or domains of the intranet and there are ‘things’ that go in those domains.  Forget about labels, genres, categories. What the map is for is to document what ‘things’ user and stakeholders want and need and to also consider what the content inventory has discovered and to place those in  appropriate domains.

When carrying out the initial mapping it might be easiest to get a group of people together who have knowledge of the domain(s) and use a whiteboard and post-it notes to construct the first map. That way the lines that define the domain and the ‘things’ that go in them can be easily changed as the conversation progresses.

OK so is that it?

What the system map is for

Absolutely not. The system map if it is to be successful must go through many iterations with different types of users and stakeholders contributing and approving. The beauty of the system map is that it is simple and can be understood by virtually everyone, especiallly important when talking to users and non-technical stakeholders.

If the initial overall map starts to get a bit complicated then it might be a good idea to put together some level 2 maps which can document domains and sub-domains in more detail.

This map can also be of use to those wonderful people who may have to build your intranet – the software engineers. It is something they should understand and if a domain model, which also details the link between the ‘things’, needs to be created this should supply much of the data that’s needed.

In Part 3 I’ll be explaining how designing your intranet’s URLs can be an important part of the intranet design process

If you want to find out more about domain models I strongly recommend you look at Michael Smethurst’s brilliant blog post ‘How we make web sites’ which also provided the basis for the design approach I’m advocating here.

See Part 3 of Designing Intranet Structures

(Many thanks to Ramberg Media for the Flickr CC photo)

In James Robertson’s excellent book Designing Intranets he brings together much of the best practice around how to design and re-design intranets. So I won’t repeat what he says about the importance of adopting a User Centered Design approach and carrying out robust user research and a content inventory before even attempting to define a structure . (I would recommend the Content Value Analysis (CVA) approach instead of the traditional content inventory as being more cost effective). Also I won’t be covering what should be structured, James covers this very well in his book, but rather how in detail a structure might be developed.

Getting the structure of your intranet as good as possible from the outset and building in flexibility will pay dividends for years to come. Many intranets unfortunately undergo the boom and bust cycle due to ‘intranet inflation’ – simply too much content. A good intranet structure can contribute to controlling the content and ensuring that user journeys are kept as simple as possible.

One of the aims of this methodology is also to help do away with the intranet re-design.  Your organization doesn’t stand still, it is constantly changing, and the structure of your intranet should reflect this. Refining your intranet structure should be an ongoing activity. You should always be looking for ways to simplify and improve things for your users. Standing still for an intranet is really going backwards.

The methodology

The methodology I’m proposing consists of the following activities -

System mapping your intranet – How you can produce a simple map bringing together all the findings of your user research and content inventory allowing conversations with stakeholders to begin

Designing your intranet’s URLs – Designing your URLs is a simple way of documenting the overall structure of your intranet

Defining and re-defining the structure -Using URLs  enables rapid iterations on the structure through brainstorming and other collaborative techniques

Mapping the structure – Once a structure is agreed upon it needs to me documented so that future changes can be considered holistically

Ongoing improvement of your intranet structure – How this methodology can help sustain your intranet through constant improvement

I will be devoting one post for each of the above activities so that the methodology can be explained in detail.

See Part 2 of Designing Intranet Structures

(Thanks to Ramberg Media for the great Flickr CC Photo)

What is your intranet for?

This eventually became the central proposition of the presentation. Defining what your intranet is for is a necessary consideration before any progress can be made in attaining the Lean Intranet or any type of  intranet improvement. Not defining what your intranet is for is, in fact, the greatest of the intranet wastes.

Intranet wastes

The Lean Intranet approach is partly built around the concept of continually improving your intranet by reducing waste.

Waste comes in many forms. In the ‘Toyota Way‘ Jeffrey Liker identifies eight types of waste that occur in lean manufacturing. I’ve identified below how these wastes might apply in intranets.

• Overproduction – producing more content to cover a topic than is needed by the user. Not prioritising high value content
• Waiting – time wasted by users trying to find content and time wasted waiting for responses to queries from the intranet team
• Unnecessary transport – Can the content be brought to the user (e.g. by RSS feeds or personalisation) rather than the user having to come to the content?
• Overprocessing – ‘Gold plating’ or ‘gilding the lily’. Fancy graphics and page layouts that do not contribute to the user’s ability to access and assimilate content. Overprocessing does little more than setting up further barriers between the user and the content they need to access
• Excess inventory – simply too much content; especially obsolete, poor and irrelevant content
• Unnecessary movement – making the user take longer journeys to access content that is strictly necessary. Minimising the content set will also minimise this waste
• Defects – poor or missing metadata, broken links, typos, poor grammar make the site look unprofessional and untrustworthy
• Unused employee creativity – not considering and utilising the ideas of the intranet team, users and stakeholders.

The biggest intranet waste of all however is not knowing what your intranet is for.

If you don’t know what it’s for how can you know if you’ve been successful?

Defining your intranet

If you don’t define your intranet and match expectations to resources before you start thinking about the design or re-design of an intranet you are dooming your intranet to the ‘boom and bust’ cycle.

It is vitally important, as early in the process as possible, that realistic goals are set and documented so that everyone in the organization has the information required to judge whether or not the intranet is performing as it should. Otherwise stakeholders and staff may expect the intranet to provide everything for everyone; an impossibility unless you have infinite resources.

I have had experience with this not just in intranets but over decades working with management systems. As part of the requirements for ISO and other management standards was the need for a mission statement.  The statement documents at a high level  -

• What the management system goals are
• What resources are required to achieve the goals
• How success or failure is assessed

This statement is then signed by the CEO and displayed in reception and meeting rooms. I personally have found the mission statement to be of great benefit in resisting pressure from powerful stakeholders within the organization who may want to do something that conflicts with the goals in the mission statement. If any senior manger or stakeholder suggested something that went against the mission statement, I would get it down, point to the top guy’s signature and suggest that they take it up with him or her. I’ve found this approach to work wonderfully well.

The intranet mission statement

So every intranet should have a one page mission statement that succinctly states –

• What the core priorities are. Intranets sometimes try to be everything to everyone, an impossible goal. Ensure that what your intranet is trying to achieve is possible considering the resources you have available. This inevitably means prioritization
• What you will do for all employees as a basic service
• The person who is responsible for the overall control of your intranet. Intranets that are run by committees, especially those with powerful stakeholders involved, will always end up as a mess
• How you will judge the success of your intranet
• How you are going to keep it maintained over time

Then get the top guy in the company to sign it, frame it and hang it on your wall.

So what might your mission statement look like? I’ve put together a generic mission statement which I think would be a good starting point for anyone wanting to write their own –

‘Our intranet exists to -

• Satisfy the information needs and wants of the employees and their managers who add value through the transformations that pay our salaries and those key staff who directly support these value adding activities
• Provide a personal service to all employees that will allow them to complete timesheets, book vacations and feedback their suggestions

The Intranet Manager is responsible for the running of the intranet including all content, structural and IT issues. The Intranet Manager reports directly to the CEO. The CEO is responsible for supplying the necessary resources over time to achieve the goals stated in this document.

We will judge our intranet not on the amount of visits it gets but by how useful and usable our staff find it. To establish how satisfied our staff are with our intranet over time user research will be carried out at regular intervals and the research results will be a major factor in helping us to attain our goal of providing our users with the best intranet possible.

We have adopted the ‘continuous improvement’ approach to ensure that our intranet remains a valuable resource over time. We will actively manage content to ensure that our staff can find the information they need and we will provide a service to help staff when they have trouble locating the information they need.’

Powerful stakeholders can all have their own view of what the intranet is for and what it should be doing for them. Without a mission statement who can tell them they are wrong? Write your own mission statement, get the CEO to sign it and then everyone in your organization will know exactly what your intranet is for and, probably more importantly, what it isn’t for.

‘You say you want us to create our own profession but what exactly are the differences between intranets and internets?’

To my shame I waffled and gave what might have been to many an acceptable answer but it was not acceptable to me. Afterwards I realized that I needed to give this question some more thought and the result is this post.

‘It’s all web sites isn’t it?’

Is what someone once said to me. They were wrong. From once static pages, web sites have evolved and specialized. A quick trawl through some  internet sites will yield sites with very different models, aims and methodologies.  The successful ones will have figured out what their site is for and what model best suits getting the job one. I think that intranets in general have not yet achieved this. I honestly think that many intranet workers look over their shoulders at their big brother, the  internet, and think that somehow they have the answer and we don’t. I think that when it comes to intranets neither have the answer…yet.

So as for my assertion that intranets and internet site are really different how can I back that up? I have thought of some areas where I think there is a real diference and I will enlarge on these differences below -

Users

Information needs

Knowledge

Shared Goals

Environment

Let’s have a closer look at each of these.

Users

As an intranet worker you will have a unique set of users but, unlike many internet sites, they will not be homogenous. OK you might say that this is true for internet sites too as, for instance, many different groups of people use Google. However they have a simple model in that the only major user motivation is ‘I want to find something about a  topic’ and then connecting them with the most relevant content. I am not saying this is easy, it isn’t, but understanding the the user’s motivation is easy.  In intranets there are many different sets of users, all with differing motivations and ways of doing things and so it can get very complicated and messy if you try and satisfy everyone. In many ways an internet site can choose its users by what they offer. An intranet site is stuck with their set of users and so must modify the site to suit them.

Just think of a few types of user sets an intranet needs to provide for – finance, operations and procurement. It’s like an internet site trying to be a banking site, Wikipedia and Ebay all at once. It’s a big problem and one for which intranet workers must find workable solutions for themselves because no-one else will.

Information needs

I have already pointed out that there are differing user sets for intranets. Each one of these sets will have their own special information needs. What they want, when they want it and in which format. Intranets do not have the luxury of going for the average. An internet site may say that this method of communicating with its users will be good for 95% of their users and so they might go for that as a satisfactory solution. For an intranet if that 5% is made up of say Senior Managers or Engineering then the intranet will have failed. Solutions to identifying and prioritizing information needs based on what is good for their organization’s health have to be specific intranet solutions and sometimes perhaps even specific to an organization.

Knowledge

I have already written on knowledge issues and intranets and I believe that identifying, levering and documenting organizational knowledge is a process that is unique to the workplace. Efforts to gain and codify knowledge remotely on the internet, Wikipedia and a few other social knowledge sites excluded, have not always been successful. This is also more or less true for ‘Intranet 2.0′. With an intranet our users are all around us and, as levering knowledge is always an activity best done face to face, we have a real advantage but one that is rarely grasped. Organizations that effectively deploy simple knowledge techniques, integrated into an intranet team’s activities, will gain a considerable competitive edge.

Shared Goals

While at work, theoretically at least, all staff should be working towards unique shared goals, goals that senior management have identified as vital to the organization’s ongoing prosperity. In my experience these goals are rarely identified and communicated effectively. There is work to be done on how shared goals in the workplace can be identified and these goals should not only belong to senior management. Staff too have their goals – for instance goals like the right to fulfill their potential, the right to have their ideas listened to and the right to know what the overall goals are and how they can contribute. The intranet can contribute to this process by providing methodologies that would help achieve this and also identify how these goals might be then effectively communicated.

Environment

Although home working is becoming more common the huge majority of users access their intranets in the workplace. The conditions under which they access content is not always ideal. Obvious environmental factors such as noise, lighting and where access points can be safely situated are things that need to be considered. But there are other workplace factors such as speed of operation, stress, shift working etc that should also be considered. If a staff member’s work is time constrained then stress may be caused if they have to go hunting all over a complex intranet for a piece of important content. In certain workplaces access points may be of few out of necessity out of safety considerations. Intranet teams should also be responsible for taking this on board and providing bespoke solutions to solve such problems.

I’m sure that you can think of more, and if you do please comment.

Perhaps the major difference is the responsibility for unique content that intranet teams don’t always admit to or appreciate. Accessing both intranet and internet sites is a voluntary activity. For an internet site if you don’t give your users what they need, when they need it, they can always ‘walk with their fingers’ and try somewhere else. This is not true for much intranet content because it is generated by an organization’s activities and is unique to that organization. If users can’t find it on the intranet then they won’t find it anywhere else. So the opportunity for that organization’s staff to make the right decision, to work smarter and to have the right to fulfilling their personal potential is lost and the organization, at every level, is poorer for it.

I have been thinking about this concept for many years, ever since I carried out  some initial use research for a local government intranet I was trying to get off the ground.

I was doing some contextual research with staff, sitting down with people at their desks and asking what they did, trying to establish their information needs and wants. I started talking to one guy and gave him the prepared spiel about what the project was and what we were trying to achieve when a knowing smile grew on his face. He’d been with the organization for over fifteen years and he had seen it all before. He co-operated fully and gave me some great data but the way he wished me luck at the end of the interview made me feel like I was going to need it. I asked him why.

He told me that this was the fourth time since he’d been with the organization that he heard someone give my little speech. The previous three times the projects had hardly gotten off the ground before they plummeted to the earth in flames. I could see in his smile that he thought this new attempt would fail as well. And you know what? He was right. I put together a good intranet but when I left no-one was appointed to take over and, although it is still use today (so I hear) it’s like an old house slowly falling to bits, it might give you shelter when you’re desperate, but it’s just going to get more and more dilapidated over time.

This started me thinking about intranets and what happens to them over time. If you are involved in intranets find someone who has been with your organization for some time and I’m sure they will give you a good perspective of the varying fortunes of your intranet over time.

Staff who have been in an organization for some years have seen it all before –

• The soaring hopes for a new intranet which, after a few years, fall grievously injured to the ground
• The re-design that gives the intranet the kiss of life before another inevitable crash
• The content clear outs that make the intranet more user friendly until the content builds up again into another plate of information spaghetti

No wonder staff are sceptical.  They have seen intranets work but never consistently and sustainably over time.  I call this cycle of hope and despair ‘intranet boom and bust’.

Let’s have a look at this in some more detail (if you suffer from sea sickness look away now)–

The chart above represents what might happen to an intranet over a 10-12 year period. It is based on something I sometimes refer to as the ‘ First Law of Intranets’ -

‘The volume of content held in an intranet and the usability of the intranet are inversely proportionate. When content grows usability inevitably decreases and vice versa.’

I think this is just common sense. There is no navigation or search system that can cope with huge volumes of content. There is an inevitable tipping point, where navigation and search break down and usability, findability and the good management of content hit rock bottom.

So looking at the chart you can see that -

• When bright and shiny new the intranet has a small content set and high usability levels. It works like a dream and you ask everyone to bring their content so that you can populate the intranet and everyone can share its benefits
• Only problem is that over time they keep giving content but hardly anyone is taking content away so the content set grows and grows and usability levels fall to the point where people start saying ‘something must be done!’
• And it is. A re-design is commissioned. The intranet is re-organized and a lot of obsolete content is removed. Once again the content set is small, though not as small as at the very beginning, and usability is quite good. Only problem is no-one has addressed the problem that caused the re-design so it just happens all over again
• Yes the content grows, choking the intranet, and it is decreed that a content clear out is required…

‘…they went through and automatically deleted (archived) every page that was older than a specific date, that hadn’t been reviewed. This eliminated 50,000 pages in a single act. They set up a “war room” within communications to respond to the complaints and questions. That day, they received 3 emails and two calls. That was it.’

That’s a quote from an item in James Robertson’s blog where he describes an intranet clear out. The two questions that occurred to me were -

-Why did the intranet get in such a state in the first place?

- What did they do to stop it happening again?

The real tragedy of the ‘boom and bust’ cycle is that each time usability drops to rock bottom and staff can’t find what they need you will lose some of your users forever. They just don’t want to have to rely on something that will inevitably fail at some point in the future.

The lean (and sustainable) intranet

If the roller coaster ride of the ‘boom and bust’ intranet with its long periods of poor usability is to be avoided what should we do?

The lean intranet is the answer. As you can see from the graphic below the emphasis is on keeping the visible content levels low ensuring that there is a good chance of keeping usability at a sustainably high level.

What are the key factors in keeping an intranet sustainable?

• Establish what the intranet is for. Where intranets try to be everything to everyone with limited resources they are ensuring their own failure
• Be realistic in what you can do. Doing a few key things really well is always better than doing a lot of things badly
• Establish a road map for continuous improvement for your intranet using approaches such as kaizen
• Always look to the long term and avoid short term gains that cannot be sustained
• Manage content centrally
• Adopt the lean intranet philosophy

In order to walk around the world you need to take a first step. In taking that step it is important that you recognize the fact that whatever ground you take must be kept. If you can do this, over time, you will win back your users and stakeholders leading to increased participation and increased resources.

You can find out more about the lean intranet in a series of three articles I did for the FUMSI online magazine or by posting a comment.

(Photo is a CC Library of Congress photo from Flickr)