10 Worst practices for intranets

10 Worst practices for
Intranets
Sam Marshall
sam@clearboxconsulting.co.uk
Twitter:
@sammarshall
www.clearboxconsulting.co.uk

www.clearboxconsulting.co.uk © ClearBox Consulting 2012
Sam Marshall
—  Director of ClearBox
Consulting
—  Former Global Intranet
Manager at Unilever
—  Associate benchmarking
lead for Intranet
Benchmarking Forum
Strategy, governance &
implementation:
• Intranets
• SharePoint
• Collaboration
• Digital Workplace
ClearBox Consulting

Interlude #1: a quick survey

Its good to
learn from
your
mistakes…
…but it’s a
lot cheaper
to learn from
someone
else’s

10 Worst Practices

1. Make it all about the head office
—  Focus on big deals,
high-level strategy
—  Give everyone the
same homepage
—  Confuse head office
location with role
—  Use the ‘Corporate’
tone of voice

Targeted Communication
Global navigation
Function news
Regional news
Country news
Workplace news
Quick services links
Global content & news

2. Make it all talk
—  Rely on people wanting to
read news every day
—  Make them go some other
place for:
—  Expenses
—  Travel
—  Room booking etc.
—  Don’t let work get in the way:
—  Finding people skills
—  Workflow
—  Collaboration
#iconf | @sammarshall

@ellenvanaken | http://mydigitalworkplace.wordpress.com/
Product Recall example

3.

3. Make it unreliable
— Unstable
— Slow
—  0.1s / 1.0s / 10s still applies
— Unreliable content
—  No creation expiry dates
—  No owner
—  Which policy version?

4. Hide all the good stuff
—  Structure content by
who provides it
—  Put a big “search all”
box on the main page
—  But only index a few sites
—  Keep the best bits on
your C: drive
—  Email the whole company if
a document ever changes

Why finding stuff is hard…
—  Poorly structured sites & page layout
—  Poor search engine
—  Doesn’t search everything
—  Results badly presented
—  Search is much harder than on the Web
—  Fewer providers – more gaps
—  People don’t think about Search Engine Optimization
—  Content in documents, not web pages

4b. Assume someone knows best
—  Only ask sponsors
—  Political design
—  Not like the rest of us
—  Never ask employees
—  Feedback@trash.ourco.com
—  Meaningless star ratings
—  Always ask employees
—  Poor at predicting future
behaviour

Understanding needs
1.  Sponsors
—  Top-down priorities
2.  Employees
—  Bottom-up priorities - frustrations
—  Aesthetics
3.  Hard data
—  Usability testing
—  Analytics
—  Pilots

Interlude #2: a quick quiz

How social are you?
—  1 point for each account you have on Facebook / LinkedIn / Google+ / Pinterest
—  -1 point if you went “what’s Pinterest?” just then
—  2 points if you own your own blog on the web
—  2 points if you blog inside your organization
—  1 point if you commented on someone else’s blog or video post in the last 3
months
—  2 points if you’ve ever put a video on You Tube
—  1 point if you have ever used a wiki
—  1 bonus point if you can name a wiki that isn’t Wikipedia or WikiLeaks
—  1 point if you’ve done a tweet this week
—  1 bonus point if you used a #hashtag
—  1 bonus point if you’ve tweeted since the start of this presentation
—  2 points if you’ve used a location app to check in at this event
—  Add up your points!

5. Promote Silence
—  Only let Comms
professionals write
content
—  Other people might say
something wrong
—  If you ask for feedback,
make it general
—  …and only every 2
years
—  Don’t let employees talk
about their concerns
—  it only causes trouble

AEP

6. Include Runaway experiments
—  Let the intranet find its
own purpose
—  Keep everything in ‘pilot’
mode
—  Be sure to include the
latest buzz technologies
—  Yammer, gamification,
app stores etc.

A good intranet strategy…
—  Sets out how the intranet supports the
organisation’s strategy
—  Is responsive to changes in business need
—  Has clear, time-bound milestones
—  Drives the technology choices, not the other way
round

The Benefits Map
Capability Benefit Outcome Strategic
Goals
Feature
Customer
satisfaction
Corp-Wide
Comms
Single identity
“One”
Organisation
All employees
see same msg.
2-way comms
channel
Employee
engagement
Less churn
Time savings Response
times faster
Fewer outagesBetter stock
control
Discussion
Forums
Single CMS
ERP
Dashboard
Quicker
access to data
Single place to
collaborate
Flexible project
resourcing
Best people on
a task
Project Spaces

7. Create information overload
—  Why have one intranet
when you can have
1000’s?
—  If there is an
announcement
—  Print it in your magazine
—  Scan it as a pdf to put on
your intranet
—  Tell people you’ve done
this by email
—  Ask all managers to
cascade a reminder to
their teams

8. Exclude half your workforce
—  Don’t worry about
factory people
—  They’re probably not
interested
—  Ensure all online
processes can still be
done on paper
—  Don’t worry about
mobile workers
—  They can always log-
in on a Friday night

Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech
& Nielsen-Norman Group
Mobile
Intranet

40% of students would
accept a lower paying job if
they could choose their work
device
--Cisco survey 2011

Create generation divides
—  Google generation —  Grumble generation
Why can’t the
intranet be more
like Facebook?
If my company
won’t provide the
tools I need I’ll just
use the web
Why can’t I just
message them?
The intranet’s for
business, not talking
about X Factor
There’s too many
different tools to
learn, I haven’t got
time
Why don’t people just
pick up the phone and
talk when they need
something?

intranet team IT
9. Don’t plan the adoption part

Adoption
Health
Value
Health

What would get you to cross?

Diffusion of innovation curve
http://blog.yammer.com/blog/2012/01/how-much-adoption.html

and finally….

10. Go for gizmo interfaces
—  Use bright colours to make
important things stand out
—  And bold
—  AND CAPS
—  AND FLASH animations
—  add ticker tapes
—  tagclouds

If people miss things
—  Put it in the magazine…
—  Send an email….
—  Tell managers to cascade….

Thank You
Questions?

Sam Marshall
Director
sam@clearboxconsulting.co.uk
+44 1244 458746
@sammarshall on twitter
ClearBox Consulting
Talk to us about strategy, governance and implementation:
• Intranets
• SharePoint
• Collaboration
• Digital Workplace

10 Worst practices for intranets

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