Intranet Blog

By Robert Baldwin, Odyssey Interactive Ltd

I’ve spent a lot of time talking to intranet managers from all walks of business, including charities, retailers, manufacturers, social housing providers, professional services companies and other large private sector clients.

Each business has its own, often unique, set of challenges and this is reflected in how the intranet is used.    

There is no doubt that the best intranet implementations encompass the four key areas of communication, knowledge management, business processes and collaboration, to varying degrees. How big a part each area plays tends to depend on the nature and culture of the business in question.

However, some of the least effective intranet deployments can often be seen in the manufacturing sector as some of them tend to ignore many of the key areas to their detriment.

The reason for this, from what I can tell, is that management draw a distinct line between themselves in the office, and workers on the factory floor. There is a culture of 'them and us'. I’ve come across management teams that tend to think that the intranet cannot be of benefit to factory floor workers, and that their feedback doesn't matter. The intranet becomes a glorified document store for compliance purposes (ISO etc) and that is it.

Too much emphasis on knowledge management (document storing), and too little regard for communication, collaboration and business processes makes the intranet a dull place to be.  

Furthermore, it doesn't help that the factory floor workers are not given access to IT areas where they can access the intranet.  So why do some senior managers think that if an employee doesn't sit in front of a computer all day there is no point giving them access to an intranet?

Back in the 1980s an advertising agency was hired by a luxury car manufacturer to promote the virtues of their cars over their close rivals. After struggling to work out a marketing message with the head office staff one of the advertising creatives walked on to the production floor and approached a mechanic who was assembling a V8 engine. "Tell me why your engines are better than the competitions?" he asked the mechanic. Without saying a word the mechanic took a glass of water from a shelf nearby, placed in on the engine and opened the throttle. The water barely rippled. "Do that with our competitors V8" the mechanic replied and continued what he was doing. Sure enough the competitor’s engine was unrefined and vibrated massively. The advert showing the comparison was an instant success and boosted sales for the company massively.

The lesson some manufacturing intranet managers should learn is that all staff can have a positive impact on the business, its processes, its products, its strategy etc, if only they are given a voice.

Add more breadth to your intranet deployment by touching more on communication, collaboration and business processes, challenge the existing culture and move with the times. Try to make sure that in every rest area or canteen there are access points for IT.

And if you don’t think staff will want to use the access points make sure you give them information and things to do that will draw them to it, even if it isn’t totally work related ( competitions, highlighted staff profiles, people news). From here you can steer them more towards work related content, canvass their opinions, ask for ideas and input on operational issues, may be even get inspiration for the next major marketing campaign.

By Sue Whiting, Odyssey Interactive Ltd

Interact automatically finds and promote links between all aspects of content; between articles and authors, between authors and the content they are responsible for, between articles and similar articles, between comments and relevant blogs, between users and users. 

This works in a similar way to Amazon, which welcomes you back and it recommends things to you.  The same happens on iTunes; you purchase a song and, based on your choice, it will recommend the top 5 songs by the same artist and based on the genre - via the ‘Listeners Also Bought’ function it will suggest five other artists and tracks you might like.  You follow any of these suggestions and five more suggestions are made.   Facebook follows similar principles; its ‘Suggestions’ links will suggest people who you may want to add as friends.

Interact uses its intelligence store to log information such as browsing routes, search entries, documents ratings and hits and then uses this information to promote content to users.  It then automatically creates links to other information such as articles, discussions, events and people.

For example, if a user views an organisation’s Health & Safety policy, Interact would recommend related content and provide clickable links to take the user to that information.

 
This revolutionary application will:

• Improve internal communication and knowledge sharing by making it easier to tap into the collective intelligence of the workforce
• Provide a consistently positive experience for the user who can rely on and trust the intranet to help them do their jobs better by anticipating their knowledge requirements and presenting them with relevant information.
• Encourage browsing of intranet which will improve overall usage statistics.
• Take the burden off content authors to manually create links to related information (although they can still do this)

‘Interact recommends’ is just one of many 100s of simple to use features.