So far in my short time at Step Two I've worked in a broad range of organisations spanning education, government, health and corporate (the latter two have been the main projects I've been involved with). There have been plenty of common themes between them.
1. Content management systems
In terms of intranet technology, the CMS is often the beating heart, but of the organisations I've been involved with so far:
- 3 did not have a CMS but were going through the selection process or starting to draw up requirements.
- 1 has a CMS but is working hard to train enough publishers on how to use it
- 1 was planning a new intranet from scratch and had yet to think about the CMS.
Platform-wise, the CMS is a significant challenge. It will likely be the most expensive component of any project should you need to buy and implement a new one. Yet a proficient CMS with plenty of capable users is highly desirable, and necessary, if you're talking about an organisation with more than a few hundred people and want to spread the content load (which you probably will).
James wrote a post recently about his experience last week with a CMS selection. The aspect that strikes me is that even with a blank sheet to work with (and most don't have that luxury), the choices are hard to make and you shouldn't aim for a perfect match, they do not exist. Each organisation is unique in the combination of systems - legacy and otherwise - that it has to deal with. With a great deal of expertise you can find a CMS that's a good fit, but it takes plenty of further work to implement successfully.
2. Findability of information
The findability of information has perhaps been the biggest challenge worked on to date, especially in the two projects I'm working on closely. The typical situation includes lots of systems, knowledge bases and applications (usually around 20), large amounts of vitally important documents, PDFs and other types of data, and variable needs from employees to access this information via fast and efficient methods.
The findability of this information - and thus any notion of being fast and efficient - is hampered by three things:
- illogical and irrelevant information architecture (and a subsequent lack of choice around groupings and navigation);
- poor metadata and template use; and
- poor Search.
There's no short-term answer for any of these issues. Whichever of them is stronger can determine which area you target first. With ongoing and improving metadata work, search might be first. If it's a small site that's having a total overhaul, architecture might be better, but you will need to do all of it sooner or later.
Architecture
With regards to architecture, the complaint I have heard the most in both pieces of needs analysis work is that "nothing makes sense", i.e., information is not grouped in a logical way for those that need/use it the most. Logical in both cases has been, at a high level, by business unit or department, followed by job role, then a demonstrated desire for more personalised information. Usually however, we see groupings by products or very specific terms at too high a level, which makes it hard to drill down.
Metadata
Metadata is a deep topic and not one I'm going to go into much here. But the problems around this are clear - user input of metadata is poor, and even if its good, the duplication of a template can often result in the duplication of metadata. Taxonomies also come into effect here. We recently published an article on metadata fundamentals if you want to read more on this.
Search
Of these sub-points, Search is the most perplexing for me because it was cracked so long ago on the web. I'm not saying for a moment that intranet search is the same, it isn't, but it's amazing that organisations don't simply invest more in decent intranet search. If you see the way a person navigates the internet, it's in large part by Search. On smaller intranets, say 10,000-30,000 pages and documents, search should be simple, easy and solved. But I'm always surprised when the emphasis is not on search, and I've been surprised several times of late. Good intranet search isn't an answer in itself and it requires plenty of tuning (with best bets, synonyms and so on), but these days it has to play a vital role in any intranet of a decent size.
3. Collaboration
There is an increasing demand for more sophisticated tools and ways of working. That is unarguable. Collaborative document authoring for news stories or policies and policy changes, for example, would be so much improved by more common use of wiki-style software. Discussion forums - well managed and moderated (like the great British Airways example) are superb.
But my recent experience (and cautious approach prior to that), suggests that this is not "Enterprise 2.0", (discussion forums aren't even "2.0" at all!), it's simply a desire for a better, improved way of working, enabled to some degree by technology.
And, while organisation-wide examples of collaborative working are there (although in the minority), where they're happening at the grass roots level it's often in pockets, scattered around organisations (or forming in lumps, as Craig Thomler put it). As ranted on earlier this week, the wholesale change connoted by "Enterprise 2.0" - adapted from what is a significant development on the web in "Web 2.0" - is something of a dream for lots of organisations. A distant ambition. Aspirational. Most are still wrestling with their technological foundations and deep-seated problems with email overload, system/database fatigue, change fatigue, a dated CMS... This is something made abundantly clear to me recently.
In fact, if recent experience is anything to go by, having a more robust staff directory is often higher up the list or priorities than a smart collaboration or blog site that runs the risk of developing into another half-baked knowledge base that dies as soon its creator moves on.
This brings me on to...
4. Governance and ownership
Ownership of material and content is another big concern. Immediately you can see this is for a couple of reasons, one of them being destructive movement.
Before the global economy took a sprinting jump off a cliff, a problem of ownership was because people would stay in a job for a year or two and then move - internally or for somewhere new. Now it seems this particular problem could well develop into the general information management chaos that happens when redundancies are made.
One example: I was having dinner with a friend this week whose commercial property employer here in Sydney, and at its HQ in Queensland, was making vast cuts to their business (his job included, sadly). The cuts have been staggered but quick, with people pulled from their desks and marched out the door. Subsequently, when the retrenched employees' clients were calling, nobody had any idea as to the status of their portfolios, let alone where all the files and documents were held, what correspondence was there.... It was carnage. The long-term problems this type of event will cause are huge.
Original problem
The deeper problem of information ownership is harder to pin down, however. There is the basic ownership factor ("Who really does own this page?!"), especially if something is created by committee (a policy or procedure, for example). With procedure-type documents there's also usually several layers of approval, making it a time-consuming process to update - even if you are the designated owner.
If you don't have a decent CMS (i.e it's a dog to use), or one that employees aren't familiar with, or authoring is treated as a hobby (http://www.steptwo.com.au/papers/cmb_authoringhobby/index.html), updating of content quickly becomes an easily-postponed task. If the intranet is in wider decline anyway, then the care factor can hit the deck fast.
In relation, governance is a facet that that has many organisations stumped. It's a broad topic too, which doesn't help as it makes it seem vast and impenetrable. But there are a lot of ways to get started with governance (even right down to the homepage policy). Governance is made even more important with developments in collaboration spaces. Unmetered development of Teamspaces in one case seen recently resulted in 1200 sites before they pressed the "Stop!" button. Now a much more restricted, governed model is in the pipeline (the Intranet Innovations Awards case study from Transfield is a superb example of how to do this).
Site ownership
The second point here is one that's affected governance in both the organisations I'm working closely with; a lack of actual and direct ownership of the site itself. The lack of an intranet leader/manager has (in both cases) affected the coherence, maintenance and direction of the site. It's something we're focusing on and, as written in one client report so far, long-term progress, development and success of the intranet necessitates the appointment of a dedicated resource that works full time. Appointing anything less than that is likely to be a false economy.
More to come...
So, those are the notables so far. My two main projects have both been intranet reviews and they do have a lot of similarities. Yet they're quite different organisations. Even though some of the findings are common, how we're going about tackling them is very different. More on that to come soon.
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