7 things about intranets I learnt the hard way
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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.
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7 things about intranets I learnt the hard way
- 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
- 7. 2. Relying too much on the data
- 8. Next time…. Intranets need leaders not managers Identify who will actually take a strategy forward Test with “What if…” scenarios early
- 9. Home London Paris Rome
- 10. Global Rome Global Global London Paris
- 11. Profile Location = London Global London
- 12. Profile Location = Rome Global Rome
- 14. Next time…
- 15. 4. Carried away with design principles
- 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!
- 18. 5. Forgetting the late-adopters
- 19. Diffusion of innovation curve http://blog.yammer.com/blog/2012/01/how-much-adoption.html
- 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
- 24. 7. Fixing everything at once
- 25. Next time.. Think big, but ensure every step adds value on its own You can support organisational change with an intranet, but not drive it
- 29. Credits Original cartoons commissioned by ClearBox from: Duncan Scott
Editor's Notes
- 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!
- duncan.scott2@yahoo.com