Sam Marshall shares 7 things he has learned the hard way about intranets. He discusses issues like sponsors disappearing, relying too much on data, over-personalizing intranets, getting carried away with design principles, forgetting about late adopters, having over-zealous governance, and trying to fix everything at once. For each issue, he provides recommendations for how to approach intranets differently next time.
1. 7 Things about intranets I learned the
hard way
Sam Marshall
www.clearbox.co.uk
2. Sam Marshall
Director of ClearBox Consulting
15 years intranet and digital
workplace
Former global portal manager
at Unilever
Consulted on & benchmarked
over 60 intranets
Comms, KM & IT background
sam@clearbox.co.uk
@sammarshall
#IntranetNow
6. Next time…
Cultivate 2-3 champions
Maintain a business case even if you’re not
asked
Measure the ‘before’ so you can show the ‘after’
@sammarshall
16. Some of your intranet should
look like your org chart
17. Next time…
Intranets should reflect how an organisation works
If the company does a re-org, is it such a big deal
to change the intranet?
Employee services are the exception!
20. Next time…
Don’t rely on a business case that demands high
adoption levels everywhere
Don’t assume enthusiastic pilots scale linearly
Focus on specific communities and grow from
there
22. You only need a 100 page
governance document if you
plan to hit somebody with it as
a means of enforcement
23. Next time….
Governance is about changing behaviour not a set
of rules
Define the basic principles
Governance is also about encouragement,
modelling & conversation
How many people on twitter globally?
250M
Internet users globally?
2.5bn
--About 10%
This is fine for Web social media, but not enterprise social if we’re talking about building strong networks, breaking down silos etc.
You may have seen the Guardian ‘Ask Jeremy’ column from somebody working in a charity that had been asked to fill in their profile in the employee directory.
Yammer argue payback tails off – OK for social, not for mandated processes
Facebook launched campus-by-campus
The best intranets are ones where everyone is both a contributor and a consumer of content. So it’s a bit like throwing a party – you have to step back and let people do their own thing.
And ye it’s awfully tempting to think of every terrible thing they might do in advance and tell them not to do it.
I once wrote a governance document for a client. Every time we met we thought of more and more things that might come up.
Eventually we had a document over 100 pages long.
We backtracked from the 100 page governance document and said “What are the 5-6 things that really matter?
Like driving
Don’t hit anyone
Don’t let anyone hit you
You know on TV makeover programmes where people describe this visionary house, but all they have is a muddy hole? Sometimes major intranet overhauls can be like that.
At Unilever, we had around 4000 intranets on 3999 different platforms and were tasked with integrating them into one.
If that wasn’t enough, we also wanted to make it highly personalized, so every user saw an automatically customized view on the portal.
AND we needed to get Internal Comms working together in a way that they never had before
AND we needed to get all the people data in the phone book sorted out before we could log people in
Now the vision was fine, the problem was that we tried to get each part of the business to do all the hops in one. To them it felt like they went from a nice simple stand-alone intranet to this whole wave of very complex changes. The ones that got the vision were OK with it, but many weren’t
At every stage, you still need to live in the house
It would have been so much easier to do the changes step by step:
Get everyone physically on the same platform no matter what
Sort out the phone book
Start to personalize by geography, then by function etc.
So yes, sometimes you can reach the limits…
…but then you’ll find that with a little persistence, people will come with you.
The good thing is that you don’t have to learn these the hard way – if you want advice on anything intranet – talk to us!