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The corporate intranet has been hailed as the most important business tool since the typewriter, but the track record so far has been mixed. Despite many successes, particularly in cost and timesaving, many owners of corporate intranets are dissatisfied. They have spent time and money on development, web-enabled desktops, even intranet training, but still aren't enjoying significant enough productivity or cost savings. Why? While critics often point to technological glitches, the real problem in my opinion lies in design and poor or no measurement.
Let me relate a short true story to you. A colleague of mine was working on an intranet redesign project for a top 100 FTSE Company. He is a cognitive psychologist and usability expert, so what he was doing was analysing how people actually use the existing Intranet, to inform the new design. Specifically, he was timing and analysing how people completed certain tasks using the company intranet. He had arranged to carry out the work on client site, to analyse staff interacting with the intranet in situ. He entered a workers office, and noticed that all around the member of staff’s PC screen were lots of Post-it notes with notes scribbled on them – it did in fact resemble a sunflower more than a PC screen. He sat down beside the member of staff and asked him to carry out a task on the intranet, and the chap explained that each time he took a call, and had to access the Intranet, or insert some calculation into the intranet screen, he could not easily follow the design, so he collected Post-it notes and stuck them on the screen at the section on the intranet that he would have to access later, and input the data after office hours. The member of staff was so exasperated with the Intranet that he was clearly suffering from stress.
The Perfect Intranet Design
Successful intranets are built on smart information design, which means deploying Usability research throughout the design lifecycle. Secondly, they focus on tasks, not documents, and aim to integrate those tasks into distinct processes. Thirdly, the best intranets encourage collaboration by employees around content, and finally they measure what impact the Intranet is having on the business.
Think About Tasks
Thinking of the intranet as a tool means understanding it as more than a collection of documents. People use documents to complete tasks. Tasks may include logging calls, such as in the case of the “Sunflower” example above, fulfilling orders, or looking up a customer's order history. To complete these tasks, people need to have related documents and tools close at hand.
Poor corporate intranets can drain corporate finances in two ways, says Jakob Nielsen, an intranet usability expert who in the mid-1990s was a lead designer of SunWeb-the original intranet at Sun Microsystems—and is now a principal of the Nielsen Norman Group, a consultancy in California. Firstly, searching on a poorly organised intranet is a huge time waster. " [Think about] every time you have to download a change of address form or any of those small things that take half an hour rather than five minutes," he says. "When you multiply those 25-minute periods across a big company, there is a very direct and very explicit loss."
Ignore the user at your peril!
The best way to determine your employees' needs is to go right to the source. At Allied Van Lines, Senior Manager of Strategy and Development Annette Pierson emphasizes the importance of involving Allied's 600-plus agents in every new intranet product. Before introducing a move-management system, the company beta tested the new service with a core group of move coordinators in the field. "They helped us identify functionality that needed to be changed or enhanced," says Pierson. Last year, Allied redesigned the user interface based on coordinator feedback.
Content is King
When intranets lack fresh, relevant content, managers have usually failed to entrust content ownership and management to those closest to it. To encourage topic employees to contribute and maintain content (within guidelines) companies should consider offering incentives for contribution.
At Chicago-based Accenture, where the ability to capture and retain the knowledge gleaned in consulting work is central to the company's expertise, contribution to the intranet is an element of each employee's performance review. "There is often a disincentive to share knowledge," points out Mark Allen, Director of Internet services at Accenture, "especially in a weakened economy when employees worry that if they put everything online they'll reduce their own relevancy and importance."
Measure
Many companies neglect to build metrics into their intranets, so they have no way of knowing what kind of content is being accessed or which tools are used. Before Occidental added its first site analysis tool in 1998 to measure intranet usage, the company's best guess (based on the number of calls when the site went down) was that a few hundred employees out of a few thousand were visiting the site. In fact, more than half of all employees were visiting the site at least daily but weren't staying. Until then the company hadn't realised the tool's strategic potential.
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