Intranet Blog

By Sue Whiting, Odyssey Interactive Ltd

The recent launch of Interact’s sophisticated Statistic & Search Analytics means that Interact now offers detailed analytical usage reports that show you at a glance what is, and what isn’t, working on your intranet.  You can easily identify ‘black holes’ in content and ensure that the information your users need is added.

They help you learn how users interact with your intranet and enable you to identify ‘black holes’ in content.  Intranet content management is easier and more efficient when you know what users want to see.

Interact’s new Statistics and Search Analytics help you keep your intranet successful by providing answers to questions such as:

• Is usage increasing or decreasing?
• What are the most popular pages?
• What content is being ignored by users?
• What are the most popular search terms / phrases?
• Who uses the intranet most?
• Who contributes content to the intranet?
• Is important information on the intranet being read?
• Have marketing and training initiatives increased intranet usage?

The easy to use, intuitive interface shows usage trends at a glance.

• By analysing what your users seem to expect and comparing this to how you intend the intranet to be used, you can make intelligent decisions about how to fine-tune the organisation and content of your intranet.  You’ll be able to confidently identify missing content, improve inadequate content and get rid of useless content.
• You will be able to see if intranet usage is going down, or not growing at a reasonable rate, and you then have the opportunity to consider further marketing your intranet or providing more training.
• Increase user satisfaction by ensuring your search gives a prompt and adequate response your users will benefit from an improved intranet experience and will have confidence that the intranet can help them work more efficiently - they will then be more likely to use the intranet.
• Ensure that all content can be found easily by ensuring relevant keywords are included to ensure easy ‘findability’.
• Measure you intranet ROI.  Interact will work out how much money your intranet is saving your organisation by calculating time and cost savings from analysing monthly user statistics.  This gives you a real insight into how efficient and effective your Intranet is and helps you measure your return on investment.  It can also be useful to help you build a case for expanding your intranet functionality.
• Interact’s ‘warnings’ feature means you can identify documents which have not been viewed.  You can then look into whether they are no longer required or whether they are difficult to find and act accordingly. 
• Find out who contributes most to your intranet and who doesn’t contribute anything.  This can highlight training needs or enable you to market your intranet to particular individuals / departments / groups. 

Key Features of Interact's Statistics & Search Analytics

Top Items:  What are the most popular areas of your intranet?  These obviously reflect the information that is of greatest value to staff, and the relevant sections of the intranet should be further developed and enhanced. This also gives a good indication of what items should be listed on the home page of the intranet

Out of date reports:  keep your content fresh and relevant

Ratings:  highest / lowest rated documents.

Searches with zero results:  highlights content that is missing, helps in the development of effective navigation and suitable keywords or metadata.

Documents without keywords:  a list of documents where no keywords have been applied.  Highlights which documents may not be included in search results but may be relevant.

Popular search phrases:  means you can assess whether you have enough appropriate content to fulfil users’ needs.  Highlights the most important information on intranets, and shows how this changes over time. This can be used to target intranet efforts, as well as allowing common searches to be reviewed and enhanced.

Failure to find report:  Highlights content deficiencies prompting content managers to add the missing information and can identify differences in terminology used.
 
Never underestimate the importance of knowing how your intranet is being used.  The benefits gained from using intranet statistics are considerable; you can obtain valuable information about usage which will help you improve the design and structure of your intranet and increase the number of users reading important information.  Intranet statistics can also be a great help if you want to further invest in expanding functionality of your intranet by being able to prove its effectiveness to senior management with budgetary control.

By Sue Whiting, Odyssey Interactive Ltd

Measuring value and return on investment for internal business systems has always been important, but now more than ever organisations want to be sure that the systems they’re spending money on offer a significant return.  ROI has never been more vital than it is now.  You need to be able to prove that your business systems are actually helping people do their jobs more efficiently. 

Intranets provide businesses with many benefits across a wide spectrum, and not all of these can be evaluated with simple ‘bottom line accounting’.  Sometimes the positive impact can be secondary, causing improved performance that is difficult to directly measure.  An intranet is difficult to compare with other software systems as it impacts almost every area and department of an organisation.  It brings a huge range of benefits but each business uses these benefits differently depending on their sector and size.  It’s for this reason that sometimes people find it difficult to calculate an exact return on investment.

Intranets offer the perfect platform to ensure that the efficiency of business processes are maximised.  For example:

• Use the intranet as a portal into other systems.  Today’s intranets are seen as broad productivity tools that include process specific business applications and management tools.  The intranet needs to be the starting point for all users to find the information they need and to perform tasks that make their jobs easier.
• Take advantage of the structure, users and security to create systems on the intranet that simplify processes, such as resource booking, support desks etc.
• A Forrester Research study in 2002 found that HR staff spend almost 80% of every day administering employee benefits and answering routine questions.  Using the intranet for these HR administrative processes such as training administration, holiday booking, sick leave management, expenses management, timesheets and overtime records, saves time and allows your HR team to concentrate on other tasks.
• It is critical to have a sophisticated document management system that allows you to save hours of time looking for documents.  It will also speed up the processing of documents for ISO, compliance, project management etc.
• Workflow and forms.  The following diagram illustrates how the intranet can make significant time /cost savings by enabling organisations to get their paper based processes online.

OK, so that’s the theory – but how does it work in practice?   Here are a couple of examples of how Interact is helping organisations achieve ROI.

Republic use Interact to cut direct costs across 93 stores
The intranet was introduced to streamline communication between the Head Office and 93 stores.  This led immediately to large savings in mobile phone calls and a reduction i the printing costs as stores now have easy, timely and permanent access to information directly related to the operation of the store. 
Saving (looking at just communication to stores) is roughly:

Printing savings:  approximately £2,000 pa
Posting savings (1 item per month to 93 stores @£4.50 per item) - £5,000 pa

This doesn’t take into account the saving in time which is significant as it takes minutes to place information on the intranet that all stores can see immediately compared to sending the information in the post.

Annual cost savings of over £150,000 for Gallions Housing Association
Interact saves Gallions over 360 man-hours per month, and the cost savings resulting from greater efficiency and reduced paper and print resources are estimated at over £12,000 per month, resulting in annual cost savings of over £150,000.

According to The National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR) the economy remains weak.  Their October 2009 Estimates of Monthly GDP suggest that output fell by 0.4 per cent in the three months ending in October 2009, following on from a similar decline in the three months ending in September.  For some companies this challenges their survival.  However for other ‘high performing’ organisations it offers them the chance to strengthen their position and emerge stronger.  The intranet offers a significant opportunity to help them ensure that their organisation will be one of the survivors.

How much will an intranet save your organisation?
Use our interactive ROI calculator to find out