Intranet Blog

Interact continues to lead the field in intelligent intranet software.  This intelligence combined with the easiest interface in the marketplace and new enterprise 2.0 tools helps organisations promote best practice and reduce duplication of effort.

Interact 4.6 includes many new features and tools to improve productivity, collaboration, communication and knowledge management.  We recently conducted a survey of the users of Interact and many of these requests are included in version 4.6.

Read more about these features in what’s new in version 4.6 >>

Collaborative Staff Directory
One of the most exciting areas of new development is a new collaborative element to the staff directory.  This incorporates more powerful Enterprise Networking tools in addition to all the previous intelligent features.

It actively promotes internal communication, collaboration, idea sharing and cross participation by using facebook/Linkedin style micro-posts and news feeds. These two new concepts live alongside each other in the central column of the page. It allows staff to post their ideas, sites and documents, submit suggestions to each other, comment on others ideas and suggestions as well as view what another staff member is working on via their status update. This can increase productivity by giving users a method for receiving fast, efficient answers to their questions.

Benefits include;

• Clearer layout – with no wasted space – more items clickable
• Easier and more flexible way to collaborate on documents
• Unify all departments / business units
• Replace email for intra-office communication – great way to share nuggets of information
• Stay up-to-date with others and what is happening in your organisation
• Ask questions and get answers from people quickly
• Reduce duplication of effort as everyone is in the loop

Within the status update we have also incorporated the ‘Clever Linker’ – giving users the ability to intelligently link to other objects on the intranet such as staff members, articles and forms.

The Clever Linker is a popular feature in Interact. When you hover over a staff member or follower their business card details, such as name, dept, phone number etc, are displayed making it easier for you to retrieve their contact details, improving communication and collaboration. 
 
Within the new enhanced Staff Directory page you are also able to post comments directly to other members of staff, simply by clicking on their profile and selecting ‘Only this person’ in the messaging board. This allows you to have a direct conversation with the individual without it being posted on their wall for everyone to see.

As with everything in Interact all of the content on the new profile page is searchable under Interact’s Intelligent Search, so you can be confident that the knowledge stored here can be retrieved in the future.

Read more about these features in what’s new in version 4.6 >>

Interact has loads of hidden secrets (not that we are trying to hide all these things – it is just that we have so much to shout about some of the smaller things that make a big difference get missed).  So – in an effort to showcase those small things – here are 3 little gems in interact

Show a style sheet based on the IP address

We realised very early on that people in the same organisation have different needs and requirements from their Intranet.  Interact goes a long way to ensure that it promotes the correct information to the correct people with things like Interact recommends, personalised homepages and My widget.  However, sometimes it isn’t just about getting the correct content to the correct people but how that content is delivered.

Interact allows you to set a stylesheet based on an IP range

Stylesheets in Interact can be tailored to department, group and individual needs.  We have for some years provided stylesheets for accessibility for colour blind, visually impaired and dyslexic users and now have added the ability to tailor a stylesheet based on an IP address range.  This can then be used to deliver low bandwidth stylesheets to people on the road or with poor connections to the Intranet.

Failure to find report

Interact’s sophisticated and unique Statistic & Search Analytics enables Interact to offer detailed analytical usage reports that show you at a glance what is, and more importantly, what isn’t, working on your intranet.
The Statistics application tracks and monitors search behaviours and results giving you a unique insight into what users are searching for and identify areas of your intranet that do not have adequate content, in effect avoiding intranet ‘black holes’.

 
Interact removes a lot of the guesswork involved by including reports such as the popular “Failure To Find” report.

Intranet Media Manager

Interact 4.0’s built-in Media Manager is an image library and more. You don't have to have image editing software on your desktop as it automatically scales large images down to more usable sizes, removing the need to have a separate image editor. Images can have keywords set against them too, for easier search and retrieval.

 
Interact’s Media Manager also allows images and videos to be uploaded and edited without the need for any ICT knowledge.

Videos are a great way to communicate a message and can be far more effective than delivering the same message in text.  As well as static images you can also upload video files to the Media Manager for use in documents or on homepages.  Having dynamic visual content is a great way to attract and engage a reader.   The Media Manager supports a variety of file formats; .swf (Flash), .wmv, .avi, .mpg and .flv.
 

 

Store video files in the Media Manager to further enhance your content and homepages.

In a recent survey conducted with our customers the following intranet applications proved to be the most popular among users.   We share them with you here so that you can check that your intranet is providing your staff with the tools that they want and need.

1. Search

When searching for something on the intranet, people want quick, accurate results.  If intranet search fails to deliver speed and accuracy then people lose confidence in it and usage drops off.

In order to provide user satisfaction intranet search needs to:

• Search all content on the intranet, including staff directory, calendars, and applications and
• Prioritise search results by, for example, popularity, date, ratings, or ‘best bets’.
• Rank search results on criteria such as popularity, date, document or content ratings

Coupled with an effective search engine, your intranet should be able to provide you with search analytics so you can see trends in what people are searching for, what searches are successful, and how many searches were not successful so you can identify missing content?

2. Staff Directory

Connecting people is an important function of a collaborative intranet.  Users expect far more than just an internal phone directory from their staff directories.  

Those that incorporate elements of the popular social networking sites with collaborative tools are the real crowd pleasers which help gain employee buy-in.  The ability for users to create blogs and share what they are working on via status updates transforms the intranet into a truly collaborative platform for better idea sharing and cross company knowledge sharing.

This sense of community is also driven by giving staff the ability to easily find colleagues with particular skills and experience, or location.  A sense of community increases employee satisfaction and encourages knowledge transfer, so it’s no surprise that the staff directory is one of the most popular applications.

3. Forms and Business Processes

Getting business processes online is a great way of keeping users coming back to the intranet.  Whether it be holiday requests or filling out expenses forms, it’s crucial that they are visible, easy to find, and quick and easy to use.

Online forms offer a simple and effective way of adding interactivity to an intranet and our customers tell us that they deliver clear productivity benefits and costs savings through time saved for both staff filling in the forms and administrative time in processing them, not to mention the money saved by eliminating the printing of paper forms.

4. Interact’s ‘My Widget’

Interact’s 'My Widget' feature gives users the ability to select the information they need themselves and therefore increase the relevancy of content.  My Widget enables users to integrate their personal favourites easily into the intranet and provides them with a shortcut to content that is interesting and relevant to them. 

This is particularly successful because it enables users to follow progress on selected content without having to go and actively seek out the information.  It keeps them informed of content they have an interest in by displaying any comments made on their blogs (or blogs they have subscribed to) as well as comments on articles, they have commented on and progress on any documents they have added to their 'favourites'. 

5. Blogs

Intranet blogs are becoming more mainstream and popular amongst our customers.  Blogs are informal, direct and natural and reflect the personality and voice of the person who is blogging - these qualities make blogs a very popular feature.

We are finding that as well as senior executive blogs, where corporate vision can be reinforced and news communicated quickly, blogs also give the power of communication to individuals at much lower ranks within the organisation allowing companies to capitalise on the opportunity to encourage communication and knowledge flow upwards through the organisation.

In order for your intranet to be really user-centric and provide all the key tools that your staff need on a day to day basis, then you should make sure that you have these killer apps on your intranet - they will drive people to your intranet and keep them coming back.

Do you know which keywords / search phrases people are entering and how to choose the most appropriate ones for your intranet content?

Finding this information is easy with Interact’s Statistics & Search Analytics which will give you detailed reports including:

• Failure to find report:  Highlights content deficiencies prompting content managers to add the missing information and can identify differences in terminology used.

• 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.
Having this information to hand is one thing; converting it into action that will benefit your intranet search is another. 

Find information black holes on your intranet

I’d like to share with you a couple of ways in which our customers use this information to stress the importance of keywords to content authors and ensure that content is tagged with appropriate keywords.

Helen Haynes, Intranet Manager at The Nottingham Building Society finds Interact’s search reports extremely useful:

“With the stats provided I forward all the details collected to the publishers of those articles. They then see a long excel list of information in their areas which people find hard to find. This is giving people an idea of the words to use when adding articles in the future and also highlights the use of the search facility”

Nicky Robbins at Rooftop Housing Group looks at the ‘failure to find report’ for review at their regular Intranet User Group meetings content authors are then tasked with changing or adding keywords to their content, hence improving search.

How do you use search statistics to ensure that your intranet content is tagged with the right keywords?  Post a comment and let us know.

We got our office iPad yesterday and after everyone finished playing with it then I took a look at interact on it and it look fantastic.  Here is a short video of interact intranet software using the iPad Safari browser.

Interact is compatible with all major browsers including browsers on the iPhone and iPad

Over the last 10 years we have successfully fulfilled a huge amount of requirements for our clients of all sizes. We now work on Enterprise level intranets more frequently and have been successful in deplying intranets to organisations of 5000+ users across multi-regions and multi-languages. 

So what are Enterprise-level Intranet’s? Well one way to approach this is by asking the following;

• Are you a large organisation with multiple offices in a variety of countries?
• Are you looking for a standardised easy-to-use shared intranet communication platform for all your employees?
• Do you require a multi-language intranet with language translation technology? 
• Do you have a need to push global communications to each country using an alternative method than email?

If the answer to some, if not all, of these questions is yes then it’s an Enterprise-level Intranet that you need.

 Choosing Languages in Interact Enterprise Edition

Interact 4.0 has been developed from the outset with enterprise Intranets in mind.  Some of the many exciting features and benefits for larger organisations include;

• Multi-Lingual Support - Providing on-the-fly translation technology to help usability and communication in multiple languages.
• Localised Intranets - The ability to roll-out a new intranet per country or location using the same single platform with just a few clicks saving valuable IT time for deployment.
• Global Communication & Collaboration - Letting employees from multiple countries to communicate and collaborate promoting shared ideas and a sense of company cohesion.
• Employee Visibility - Providing your staff with full visibility of employee information from any country including click-through organogram structures improving inter-country communication.
• Email Reduction - Targeting rapid global communications through local intranets (per country) at low cost easing the traditional load on corporate email traffic and bandwidth.

There are two fundamental features every user of an Intranet expects when they use their intranet and without these two the trust relation in an Intranet breaks down

1) The ability to find content on the Intranet

2) For that content that they find to be relevant and up to date

When developing Interact's new search we pushed the boundaries further than ever before and included a revolutionary search algorithm based on the unique intranet software intelligence store. It searches all the content on the intranet including documents, the staff directory, calendars, blogs and all applications. The latest release of the Interact search incorporates adaptive learning capabilities and continually optimises search results - ensuring that the Intranet user finds exactly what they were looking for.

Search results can be ranked on a number of criteria including;

• Interact Ranking - A intelligent result based on user feedback, collaboration, keyword density and relavance
• Popularity - Results based on the most popular documents and content on the intranet
• Date - Results based on when the content was added to the Intranet
• Document and Content Ratings - Ranks the results on the best quality content on the intranet

Interact Intelligent Search - Interact Intranet Software

The search is intuituve and easy to use and enables you to use filters to only see a particular type of search results such as blog posts, or calendar entries. Key users can manually influence search results and promote specific content by using 'best bets' - ensuring that the searcher can find the most relevant information quickly.

Ease of use is the most important thing in any intranet and we have worked hard to ensure Interact has an easy to use interface throughout.  The new search is no expection and allow users to quickly get access to information, filter the results and the unique feedback tool means the search improves with use.

Nigel Danson, Interact Intranet Software

Why name your intranet?

When implementing an intranet for the first time or re-launching an existing intranet, I’m often asked whether it’s a good idea to give the intranet a name. 

The answer is simple – yes it’s a fantastic idea!

The intranet is part of your business and the last thing you want is people saying “it’s on the intranet” because this sounds too staid, boring and impersonal and makes it much harder to engage employees.

By naming your intranet an identity with personality is born and you’d be amazed by how quickly your intranet will become a vital business tool as it makes it a lot more friendly and approachable to your employees.

How do you choose a name?

Employee engagement is critical when it comes to user adoption of the intranet.  If you can engage employees from their first visit to the intranet, you are well on your way to long-term intranet success.

From my experience, the most successful launches have involved running a competition to name the intranet as part of the launch strategy with the winner receiving a prize and a feature news item being run on the intranet homepage on the day of launch.


Northumbria Probation Trust named their Intranet Noris (Northumbria Information Systems).  Noris was promoted on mug coasters and internal newsletters prior to launch and is now seen changing his intranet image for special events and seasonal changes.

Although we strongly recommend naming your intranet, there are a couple of occasions when it’s not a good idea – only use a name when promoting a new or re-launched intranet.  It will need more than a new name to aid a flagging intranet.  If an existing intranet is already well used and trusted by employees, it will just confuse employees if you change the name and may do more harm than good.

Shout about the name!

Remember to use the intranet name throughout your launch campaign and once it’s gone live.  BCS (The Chartered Institute for IT) were going through a “Transformation Programme” when they were implementing their Intranet.  During this time their branding changed from blue to green.  After running a competition their Intranet was named “The Green Room”.  This was reflected in all promotional literature and on the day of launch they handed out green cupcakes with a flag in it within the new URL of the Intranet on it.  They even ran a competition on the day of launch to win a green i-Pod to encourage employees to complete their Intranet profile.

Examples of names that our customers have used

A catchy name, consistent use and good marketing may be just the thing to give your new intranet a successful start.

Mike Hague, Head of Design, Interact Intranet Software

One of the most frustrating things about any intranet is being unable to find the content you want quickly and easily.  Over the last 10 years of development on Interact Intranet Software we have constantly strived to ensure that tools are in place to make it as easy as possible to add keywords to documents.  Tagging serves two main purposes in any intranet.

• It ensures that intranet users can quickly find any content
• It allow users to find content on a certain topic – such as a product or specific hot discussion that is relevant in an company currently

The intelligence store in Interact makes this process a lot easier.  Here are a few of the ways that Interact helps content authors to tag and add keywords to content.

Interactive content tagging – Interact’s unique keyword suggestion tool suggests keywords that are similar to the one that you are adding.  More importantly it also tells you how often those keywords have been searched for in the last month so you can see what users are looking for.

Built in Thesaurus - The tagging tool links to the built-in thesaurus, which is fully editable by intranet managers.  This allows the intranet to learn a company’s jargon, technical terms or acronyms and relate them to commonly used words.  

For example, if you were running a project on Climate Change, but felt that many people would search for “global warming”, the two phrases can be linked.   By doing this, two things happen:

• Authors tagging a document with one phrase are automatically suggested the other phrase
• Like Google, users searching for one phrase are asked “Did You Mean... ?” and given a link to quicksearch for the other phrase

It is also important that the onus doesn’t just lie with the content authors and as enterprise 2.0 technology is becoming more prevalent in organisations users are demanding a more interactive approach to content.  We therefore allow users to suggest new keywords to tag a document or item of content.

 Posted by Nick Lewis, Product Manager, Interact Intranet Software

People often see an Intranet as a private application that is hosted and accessed exclusively on the corporate network.  The Infrastructure, access and security can all be managed internally, typically supported by an Internal IT team. This method of hosting is the most popular choice with Interact Intranet software customers as it allows them to integrate their Intranet within their existing infrastructure and build integrated applications on their intranet using the Interact Intranet software API.   This allows for integration with Active Directory for example to enable the Intranet to be used as a central single sign on portal.   
 
There is however another option – some Interact Intranet customers choose to host their Intranet externally on the Internet using our online hosting services. We often find this is a popular choice with smaller organisations who don’t necessarily have the infrastructure to host their Intranet internally as well as organisations that have offices spread over many locations such as Sony BMG.. There is also less requirement for IT staff to manage the servers on a day to day basis, as maintenance and backups are carried out remotely.     
 

Hosting the Intranet online vs in-house

In either scenario, Interact Intranet is a perfect fit for your organisation’s collaboration and communication needs.  The question of where to host your Intranet is simply down to which of the two options above fits your business.

Darren Nadin, Technical Operations Manager, Interact Intranet Software
 

Enthusiasm for your Intranet is critical and can make a huge difference to the amount of use your Intranet gets, and therefore its benefit to your organisation.

Generating enthusiasm for the Intranet project is important. It is obvious that having the buy-in from Management is vital to getting the project launched, but at what other levels should you look for input and enthusiasm?  If you don’t get that excitement for the Intranet, how can you generate it?

Enthusiasm can come from three main sources:

• Senior Management
• Middle Management and Intranet Champions
• The Users themselves

Senior Management will have been involved as project sponsors from the outset, but an important part of their role is to use the Intranet as a primary communications tool.  However, their time is valuable, so it’s OK to have PA’s or the communications team working as “ghostwriters” – but nothing undermines an Intranet more than the total absence of Senior Management.  After all, if they don’t believe in it – why should anyone else?

A perfect example of this is BCS – the Chartered Institute for IT – The Directors of the business were involved at all stages of the Intranet - At launch the even handed out cupcakes with the URL on to staff across the organization.  What was more important is they used it and understood its benefits as more than just a document store

The role of the middle levels of management is critical – these are your Champions, and their belief in the Intranet as a tool to improve the way your organisation works is imperative.  More than anyone, they have the ability to convert Intranet cynics by creating and maintaining excellent Intranet content – and telling people about it.

Trust with the Intranet is crucial

The other source of enthusiasm is personal – people form very strong emotional connections (or disconnections!) with Intranets, often forming a trust relationship with it that ensures it’s their first and last port of call.  This means:

• Users trust that the information they need is available on the Intranet
• They trust that the information on the Intranet is correct and accurate.
• They also trust that the information is the most up-to-date version available
  
  

Finally, a strong driver for Intranet use is curiosity and a thirst for information – but these only emerge when the user understands that the Intranet is useful, and is updated on a very regular basis.  
If your employees have this relationship then they will be far more likely to remain enthusiastic, excited and active on your Intranet. It’s far easier to keep people enthusiastic about the Intranet by ensuring it is kept fresh and exciting than it is to get staff excited all over again after letting the Intranet go stale. 

Also, making sure the Intranet contains information that is both accurate and up to date will reward you with a culture of trust and responsibility.  This will lead to greater usage of the Intranet which will positively impact your organisations efficiency and profitability.

Matt McCourty, Intranet Consultant, Interact Intranet Software

Launching a new Intranet is always a critical part of the project's success.  We had many entries for this award with some inventive ideas.  We wanted to highlight two Intranets as they showed critial aspects of any successful intranet adoption - Senior Stakeholder Buy in, Knowledge presentations, and an element of fun! 

British Computer Society run by Sarah Farrand

BCS are joint winners of this award due to a launch strategy that encompassed every level of the organisation.

Launching ‘The Green Room’ on the same day as the Staff Awards was part of a complete rebrand and saw the Chief Executive and Directors handing out bright green cupcakes with a flag detailing the Intranet URL to every member of staff. Displaying such senior buy in and combining it with another high profile event was a very clever technique and along with a presentation and a run through of the structure ensured that it had the required impact required to make launch day a success.

Lee Valley Park Authority run by Simon Clark

Lee Valley Park Authority is joint winners of this award due to the very original and self promoting nature of their launch.

The tale of an organisation's pledge for good communication between staff in a unique 26 mile regional park - and how a new intranet helped them achieve it...

Using the analogy of a film the Intranet was brought to a screen near you with a director and supporting cast in place to produce the Intranet. Popcorn and a movie ticket, that was to double up as a raffle ticket for an ongoing competition, were placed on every desk. The competition to win cinema tickets with their raffle ticket kept staff logging on over the next couple of weeks to see if their number had come up.

The launch strategy made the Intranet self promoting through the use of original promotional materials that evoked high interest.

Posted by Linda Bolg, Marketing Manager, Interact Intranet Software

One of Interact’s many applications is the Mandatory Read, which improves information dissemination by ensuring that important information is read by those who need to see it by specifying an article as a mandatory read. It enables you to check who has read the document and issue reminders if necessary.

Interact Intranet Software - Mandatory Read Documents

The Mandatory Read can be used for any critical information such as ‘Heath and Safety Manuals’, ‘Company Social Media Guidelines’, and ‘Emergency Procedures’. Once, the users have read and understood the information they must tick a box to confirm this. This aids knowledge management and ensures company policies and procedures are adhered to.

The Mandatory Read feature is part of Interact's Intelligence store and includes features such as;

• Ability to mark Intranet documents to be as Mandatory Read throughout the Intranet
• A mandatory read homepage widget that can be added to any homepage - so that important documents that remain unread are pushed to the relavent users
• An Intranet administrator tool that allows authors to check who and when somebody has read their document and also issue reminders to people that haven't read important documents
• A tool to control who a document is mandatory read for - ensuring that the correct people see the correct content.

The ‘Mandatory Read’ is just one of Interacts many 100s of simple to use tools.  Many Interact users also take the mandatory read feature further with Interact's Question Bank.  This allows authors to set questions or tests to ensure users have read and understood the documents.

Posted by Nick Lewis, Product Manager, Interact Intranet Software

November saw Odyssey’s ‘Interact Intranet customer awards’, many companies were nominated for their Intranets to be entered for the awards, we saw a large amount of organizations had excelled in the branding, implantation and management of their Intranets. Various companies received awards recognising hard work and outstanding enthusiasm towards internal communication and collaboration. The ‘Overall best Intranet’ award was won by the North East Derbyshire District Council (NEDDC).

The NEDDC is a true success story; In 2004 the NEDDC was rated poor by the Audit Commission with Internal Communications highlighted as a key weakness. Following this was a remarkable turnaround which resulted last year in NEDDC being the first council to move from ‘weak’ to ‘excellent’.

Fran Walton, e-information officer - receiving award for best overall Intranet

The NEDCC recognised that the key to a successful council is the collaboration of all staff within the organisation. Interact Intranet helped NEDDC achieve its key driver of improving its internal communications by designing and implementing the North East Derbyshire Intranet (NEDI). Generating over 90,000 hits per month from 500 users NEDI has improved communication and has resulted in 80% of staff using NEDI even though 40% are based away from a PC. For instance, refuse collectors access the intranet via shared computer stations, this keeps more employees involved in the decisions of the company who otherwise would not be kept informed.

During this period of financial hardship NEDI has been proven vital in communicating change within the council. Updates on bulletins and blogs have kept staff constantly updated reducing anxiety and worry that can be caused by rumour. The communications team at the NEDDC has been managing the news and ‘call to action’ on NEDI which are updated daily, therefore keeping the information on the intranet up-to-date and accurate. 

The NEDDC have redirected common procedures through their Intranet, such as booking resources and ordering equipment. This has saved them time and money, as well as making services more efficient by using interactive document comments and the discussion forums.

Employees across the organisation are praising NEDI and its benefits. By having an effective, well maintained and feature rich intranet the organisation has been able to make large financial savings as well as keeping enthusiasm and staff morale high.

This remarkable change has lead the NEDDC to receive the award for ‘overall best intranet’, because of its collaboration of staff and the hard work of all involved to make sure that NEDI was implemented and is being maintained to an outstanding level.

Read a full case study about NEDDC's intranet >>

Posted by Linda Bolg, Marketing Manager, Interact Intranet Software

By Linda Bolg, Odyssey Interactive Ltd

In November 2009 we announced the winners of the 'Interact Intranet Customer Awards'. One of the many categories was ‘Best Intranet Branding’, which was won by ADT EMEA.  ADT, part of Tyco International, is a world leading provider of security and fire protection solutions in over 50 countries worldwide where their products and services are used to prevent fires, deter thieves and protect people, property and profit. So why did they win the Best Intranet Branding award?

Well, last year, ADT EMEA launched a new intranet site to all of their fire and security employees in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.  This was the first time that they had been able to introduce a shared intranet platform, and they decided to run a competition ahead of the official launch to give this new intranet a name. 

By running a competition, it meant that hundreds of employees were able to play their part in shaping the new intranet.  Apart from getting employees involved and engaged in its development, it also gave them the opportunity to advertise the launch and get people excited about the new intranet. Altogether, they received more than 750 entries! The competition generated a massive response and the clear winner for them was ‘The Safety Net’.

This name not only relates to the intranet itself, but it also sums up what is at the very heart of their fire and security businesses – safeguarding people, property and the environment. As soon as the name was decided, they stopped referring to the intranet in all of their communications, for launch and beyond, and simply referred to the Safety Net.   With the help of Interact Intranet’s design team, ADT created a unique intranet design which then reinforced the Safety Net brand. A year later, and employees across all regions now talk about the Safety Net rather than the intranet.  Not only that, but they were able to use some of the other entries to name the different sections on the intranet. For example, Tycopedia was an entry from one of their employees in Italy and they used it to name the section where they keep information relating to their parent company, Tyco.

Having this name in place has really helped ADT EMEA to differentiate the Safety Net from other ADT sites and has created a greater understanding of exactly what the Safety Net is for. ADT EMEA is a great example of how to successfully brand an intranet.

Read a full case study about ADT's intranet >>

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.

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

By Sue Whiting, Odyssey Interactive Ltd

In its most basic form, Enterprise 2.0 is about communication.  The premise is that the more easily people can communicate, the less information will be siloed and the result will be a more efficient, productive and intelligent workforce.

When intranets first emerged, they were simply a platform for corporate information and policies. Over the years, companies have added business tools to their intranets, and more recently, collaboration and corporate social networking tools have become the latest must have.  In the latest global intranet survey by Prescient Digital Media it shows that collaboration and social media tools on the corporate intranet have “not only become a collection of mainstream technologies, it has become a necessity for organizations that want to be an employer of choice”.

Allowing staff members to have their say, put forward ideas, views and opinions improves people’s work ethic by providing them with a voice or an opinion about their company.  It also increases efficiency by providing a real time response to any questions or queries.  Most importantly, it gives organisations a platform to capture new ideas and gain a competitive advantage.

Interact’s document comments facility is just one way in which Interact is embracing Enterprise 2.0 technologies.  Comments enable contextual and simplified information exchange and collaboration across the workforce.   Conversations are built upon comments going back and forth and branching out in new directions.  Users can join in the comments on blog posts, documents and articles and are liberated from the constraints of legacy communication and productivity tools like email.

Comments build on the content that an author has posted allowing users to collaborate on the subject matter.  One of the benefits of comments is that they provide a wider view of a subject and harness the wisdom of crowds.   A Facebook style user friendly interface encourages user feedback – it’s really easy to add comments – just type and post.

Interact’s comments facility not only makes it easy for users to contribute and share ideas, but importantly, Interact keeps them informed of comments from other users when they are added. 

Interact has a unique new tool which makes it a much more collaborative environment for users.   Users can subscribe to specific content by adding it as a favourite using Interact’s unique ‘My Widget’ personalisation tool.  Interact actively promotes content that users have an interest in by displaying any comments made on users’ blogs or blogs they are subscribed to.  Similarly, comments on articles the user has commented on and any ‘favourite’ documents.  This means that users are kept up to date with any new posts and can follow progress without having to go and actively seek out the information.

5 Ways People have used the Document Comments Feature to Improve Collaboration

• Encourage open staff feedback about the content of a document during a 'consultation period'
• Allow multiple people working on a document to discuss the changes taking place, providing a collaborative review tool
• Allow people to comment on your blog posts, creating a two-way knowledge sharing platform
• Meeting agendas can be built collaboratively by adding discussion points over time to an agenda document
• Informal knowledge capture - recording ideas and thoughts that would otherwise be lost

Allowing staff members to have their say, put forward ideas, views and opinions improves people’s work ethic by providing them with a voice or an opinion about their company.  It also increases efficiency by providing a real time response to any questions or queries.  Most importantly, it gives organisations a platform to capture new ideas and gain a competitive advantage.

by Sue Whiting, Odyssey Interactive Ltd

As intranet managers it’s easy to assume that all users will share your enthusiasm and see the intranet as a vital part of their working lives.  If only it was that easy; in reality it can be a real struggle to get staff to engage with the intranet.  Arousing interest and a sense of anticipation is a great way to inform staff that your new intranet is about to be launched, but the old adage ‘you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink’ often applies when trying to convince your users to actually use the intranet.

Over the years, we’ve helped many of our clients to successfully launch their intranets and, I thought I’d share with you a few of the good ideas our clients have used to help ensure users interact with the intranet from the very start.

One client sent round a box containing a fun-sized KitKat and a message saying ‘take a break’.  Everybody got this and they were allowed to take a half hour break from work to familiarise themselves with the new site and eat their Kit Kat. 

Intranet treasure hunts are another great idea to familiarise user with the new intranet.  Another interact client based their treasure hunt around Kermit the frog and clues were hidden throughout the intranet which directed users to different areas of the intranet ensuring that they explored the site and visited areas that they would perhaps not naturally gravitate towards.   E.g. Staff were pointed to the Staff Directory with the first clue which was ‘What is Kermit’s official job title?  Subsequent clues led them to other areas of the intranet including Forms, Calendars, Discussion Forums, Document and Image Library.

Another client was launching their intranet in December so used a Christmas theme.  On the morning of the launch day the Intranet team surprised all employees with a chocolate advent calendar each saying “Have a Happy Christmas with your new Intranet".   Employees were shown how to use the new intranet and further instructions were posted on the intranet homepage.  All members of staff were allocated time to familiarise themselves with the new intranet and the intranet team was on hand to assist anyone who needed extra help on the day.

If you used a great way to get your staff to engage with the intranet then let us know by posting a comment.

by Nigel Danson, Odyssey Interactive Ltd

Over the last ten years I have seen many intranets develop from simple document lists to powerful portals that act as the central hub of a business.  During this time I have attained an excellent understanding of the factors which influence intranets, which has allowed us to create a model for success. This has traditionally been based on the three pillars of Communications, Business Processes and Knowledge Management.

There has been a lot of buzz recently about using the intranet as a collaborative tool to facilitate knowledge sharing amongst users, raising the questions as to whether collaboration is a key success factor.  I think that there is definitely a good reason to add collaboration to our list, as it promotes mass participation and improves best practice.

This makes our four key success factors:

• Communications - e.g. News and events
• Business Processes - e.g. Absence Booking workflow
• Knowledge Management - e.g. Best Practice documentation
• Collaboration – e.g. Cross-department working group discussion board

Early intranets were mainly communications driven and over time evolved into broader productivity tools that included more process-specific business applications and management tools.   Intranets today do much more than simply host the staff directory and HR manuals - although these remain important. They are growing in strategic importance and increasingly incorporate collaboration support and Enterprise Social Networking features. 

For an intranet to be truly successful it must provide a balance of all of these elements.  Some elements may form a greater percentage of the whole depending on an organisation’s particular needs.  Also, the proportional split of these elements may well alter over time to meet changing business and employee requirements.

The ratio of these components will depend to some extent on the type of organisation e.g. in a professional services organisation the ‘knowledge management’ constituent is likely to form the largest element as these organisations usually have masses of documentation, research and policies that staff need access to, whereas in a more project based organisation ‘collaboration’ may form the largest proportion with people working together in collaborative workspaces on the intranet.

However, none of these elements should exist in isolation but have a connection with the other elements; there is a relationship between them in many instances.  For example, a document about swine flu is published on the intranet and pushed out to staff via a ‘communication’ but it then forms part of the ‘knowledge’ of the organisation.  A collaborative intranet will enable people to comment on the document or ask questions about its content. 

A successful intranet will retain all this information and link it to other relevant information e.g. sickness policy, recent discussions on the subject, latest posts, HR presentation on swine flu and other users’ comments on swine flu.  This additional information may be spread out across the intranet in an unconnected way, but intelligent intranets should bring this information together and connect users to content in meaningful and contextual ways.

This works rather like leading websites such as Amazon which use anonymous data collection technology to look at what users are browsing and buying; their purchase decisions, product searches and movement around the website adds to the site’s store of anonymously gathered intelligence.  This in turn develops insight into a user’s preferences.  It outputs this intelligence in peer-rated product suggestions.  It is this same technology, applied to an internal audience, which will enable modern intranets to effectively ‘push’ the most current, useful and important content.

The Model for an ideal intranet

In order to understand what each of these elements constitutes we need to look at what they should consist of in a successful intranet.

Communications

Tends to be information classified as time sensitive i.e. information with limited ‘shelf life’ e.g. corporate news announcements, internal job vacancies, corporate events, latest KPIs.  This type of information is pushed to employees on a regular basis.  Traditionally this element has formed the greatest part of most intranets.  It is important that a good mechanism exists for making sure the right people see the right communications and it shouldn’t get lost in an intranet ‘black hole’.

Collaboration

Collaboration can be defined as two or more people working together to achieve common goals by sharing knowledge, learning and building consensus.  Research shows that a staggering 36% of a company's overall performance is driven by its ability to collaborate[1]. 

A real strength of successful intranets is the collaborative platform they can provide to organisations to help harness the collective intelligence of everyone.  Increasingly Enterprise 2.0 technologies such as wikis and blogs are being used on intranets as they facilitate collaboration.  Discussion boards, comments and feedback facilities on content, and polls also promote collaboration amongst employees.

A recent report by ECM industry researcher, AIIM, shows that business take-up of Enterprise 2.0 has doubled in the last year.[2]  According to this report, there has been a dramatic increase in the understanding of how Enterprise 2.0 technologies such as wikis, blogs, forums, and social networks can be used to improve business collaboration and knowledge sharing, with over half of organizations now considering Enterprise 2.0 to be "important" or "very important" to their business goals and success.

In the Nielsen Norman Group Intranet Design Annual 2009, a common theme amongst the Year’s ten best intranets was the incorporation of Web 2.0 community and social features.  They pointed out that “as social networking’s popularity increases, more employees will expect such features on their intranets, too.  Further, the intranet is a perfect place to use social networking because it can help employees share information and knowledge and find the right people for a job”

Collaborative tools open up channels of communication across an organisation. For example, project teams can have a collaborative workspace on intranet where they can contribute and share information.  This can cut down on face to face meetings reducing the travelling time and therefore cutting costs, particularly if staff is spread across different locations.  Collaborative tools empower staff by providing them with the ability to contribute opinion and share knowledge thus improving overall staff morale.

In the real world intranet managers still see these collaborative tools as a draw into the intranet but have not fully appreciated the efficiency gains they can provide;  In my opinion they promote knowledge sharing and best practice which leads to efficiency gains by improving productivity.

However, the key to a successful intranet is that they should not merely provide the collaborative environment but they should actively connect all relevant information that has been amassed as a result of collaborative working and present this content to the users where relevant.

For example, taking the swine flu scenario again, a user searches for information about swine flu and posts a comment asking a question, say, as to whether the company is offering vaccination against the virus.  HR respond accordingly.  All this information should then be stored in the intranet so when another person searches on swine flu they are presented with this information automatically.  As more and more information on swine flu is added to the intranet it is automatically pushed to the relevant people without them having to laboriously track it down across several people and documents. 

Traditionally, intranet management takes the form of a handful of Intranet Managers contributing information and documents to intranet.  The beauty of collaborative intranets lies in the fact that all employees can contribute.   Intranets should provide open access to everyone and need to encourage individual responsibility for content and involvement. Therefore knowledge can be shared among a wide variety of people, each with their own perspectives on a subject.  The intranet facilitates more connections between people across departmental and divisional boundaries and, as a result, fosters a more collaborative culture.  The ability for employees to add comments to articles on the intranet, or contribute to a collective Wiki, means that collective knowledge is harnessed, retained and shared.

Effective collaboration on the intranet can also be facilitated by an effective staff directory.  In the early days of intranets, a staff directory was little more than a list of names and telephone extensions.  Good intranets should have staff directories with more Facebook like features to enrich the profiles.  In his book ‘The Hidden Power of Social Networks’, the author, Rob Cross, affirms the importance of connecting people:  “Research has consistently shown that whom you know has a significant impact on what you come to know, because relationships are critical for obtaining information, solving problems and learning how to do your job”. 

Good intranets must facilitate easy connections with other people in order to collaborate.  They should be able to either suggest or easily find experts in the organisation to help solve a business need.  Successful intranets achieve this by having extended profiles in the staff directory which facilitate people being able to find each other - listing the specific expertise, skills and knowledge of a member of staff enables searches to be made for sources of knowledge.

Business Processes

The intranet is a great place for your staff to get things done.  Getting business processes onto the intranet is key to increasing efficiency within an organisation; it pulls people in as they have to it to the intranet to carry out a certain task, like filling in a holiday request form.  They can then be pushed other information

Intranets can directly assist staff complete business processes in three ways:

• By providing instructions for how and when to do things (policies, procedures, work instructions, templates, etc.)
• By enabling the completion of a task through web based forms and workflow.  For example, an IT help request can be logged over the intranet using an online form instead of making a call into the help desk.  Online expenses, holiday booking etc.
• By providing a portal to applications/websites required to complete a process.
  Knowledge Management

Knowledge Management is an approach used in organisations to identify, create, distribute and enable adoption of insights and experiences.  Such insights and experiences comprise knowledge, either embodied in individuals or embedded in organisational processes or practice. Collectively this knowledge comprises an organisation's intellectual property or intellectual assets.  Intellectual property is often recognized as the most important asset of many of the world’s largest companies[3]

Within any organisation knowledge resides in many different places such as databases, filing cabinets and peoples' heads and is distributed right across the organisation.  All too often one part of an organisation repeats work that has already been done, because it is impossible to keep track of and make use of the knowledge other parts of the same organisation have created. 

There are two different types of knowledge: ‘explicit’ and ‘tacit’.   Explicit Knowledge is available from stored information which can be a wide variety of documents such as proposals, business cases, forecasts, project plans, processes, procedures, policies, forms, presentations, white papers, research papers, strategy papers, spreadsheets, mission statements, values, and many other document types.   Getting this information onto the intranet makes them more manageable and accessible.  Document management and search functionality are the key intranet technologies that enable organisations to manage this important asset.  The knowledge that resides in the minds of staff – their ‘know-how’ and expertise - is called ‘tacit’ information, and is much harder to utilise.

A successful intranet should enable staff to tap into tacit information which so often exists in the minds of employees as opposed to the explicit knowledge available from stored information. 

The Intranet is the perfect vehicle for employees to continuously contribute the knowledge ‘in their heads’ to the collective knowledge (through collaboration), which is then made available to everyone else in the organisation.  Intranets help create a culture that encourages knowledge sharing enabling organisations to harness collective intelligence of staff and keep it within the organisation so that when people leave the information doesn’t leave with them.

Knowledge management lies at the heart of any successful intranet.  The information that comes from communication, collaboration and business processes helps develop the knowledge base of the intranet. 

Effective intranets

I come back to the point that intranets need to have the ability to organise this information automatically and pull information from the different areas of collaboration, communication, knowledge management and business processes and present it in a relevant and contextual way.

For example, if a Marketing document about a new product in development knew that there was Sales PowerPoint presentation on how to present new products to customers then the intranet should be able to create a link to it, rather than the content being disconnected, disorganised and stored in multiple, isolated silos.

As I said earlier, different types and sizes of organisations will have a bias towards different elements and the key to intranet success is getting this balance right.  For an intranet to operate at optimum efficiency, these elements cannot be taken in isolation as connections exist between them and a successful intranet should bring together related elements. 

Nigel Danson is Managing Director of Odyssey Interactive.

Formed in 1996, Odyssey is one of the UK’s longest established internet companies with specialist knowledge in intranet technology.   The company specialises in providing the UK’s leading out-of-the box intranet solution, Interact.

To find out more about Interact 4.0, download the brochure or book a demo please visit: www.interact-intranet.co.uk

Odyssey Interactive Ltd

5th Floor

Station House

Stamford New Road

Altrincham

Cheshire

WA14 1EP

T: +44 (0)161 927 3222

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[1] Meetings Around the World: The Impact of Collaboration on Business Performance by Frost & Sullivan

[2] The AIIM research report is entitled “Collaboration and Enterprise 2.0: work meets play or the future of business?”  Jun 09

[3] The Value of Intellectual Property, Intangible Assets and Goodwill by Kelvin King

by Nigel Danson, Odyssey Interactive Ltd

If water was gushing out of the tap it would be a major problem and I would call a plumber right away; if I knew how to fix the tap, I'd do it myself. However, I just don't know where to start – so fixing it means taking a day off work to wait for a plumber. My shoulders slouch at the thought, I do nothing about it, and my tap continues to drip.

Intranets are exactly the same. If it is difficult to fix minor problems or make rapid changes, the chances are you won't act to make those changes and the Intranet will continue to plod along doing nothing for your organisation.  This slow ‘death by a thousand cuts’ is the most common reason some intranets struggle to add the value their managers hoped for.

If your intranet is inflexible and doesn’t easily allow you to change content then you need to change.  Interact Intranet version 4.0 has been design to allow non-technical users to easily update content on the intranet.  This content takes many forms such as:

• News, Bulletins and Meeting Minutes
• Policies, Processes and Procedures
• Product Information
• Promotional Offers
• Services Information

Screenshot of Interact Intranet's 'Easy add' content wizard.

Screenshot of the 'Interact Recommends'.

by Nigel Danson, Odyssey Interactive Ltd

If you go to any content website now such as the BBC then rich media forms a crucial part of delivering the message.  Images, movies and interactive flash diagrams add to the users experience to provide a complete picture on the story being told.  An intranet shouldn’t be any different and it is crucial that intranet managers and content champions take advantage of all forms of media now available.

Interact v4 Media Manager - manages all the images, videos and flash presentations in your Intranet

Interact’s Media Manager has been designed to make it easy to add images, videos and flash files in content throughout the intranet.  This powerful tool allows users to add these rich media files in blogs, wikis, documents, news articles, homepages, calendars, forms and any other content they wish.

Media Manager Tools - Tools are available to easily crop, resize and rotate images so your don't need expensive software on your desktop

When we sat down to design the Media Manager we used our experience and knowledge of the problems content editors have to ensure that uploading and embedding media was easy and required no technical expertise.  It was crucial that these editors and users of the system could modify the media without having image editing software on their PC.

Media Manager Videos - You can easily add videos with controls into any content (articles, documents, blogs, wikis, calendars etc...) on your site with no specialist skills

by Nigel Danson, Odyssey Interactive Ltd

It is generally accepted now that an intranet is far more than an internal phone book and document store, the portal approach has been adopted in many organisations with the intranet acting as a one stop shop for process specific business applications, management tools and links to business management systems. Increasingly, organisations are now adopting Enterprise 2.0 features which use collaborative and social technologies to improve business processes and bring increased efficiency to how organisations work. These tools make it easier for departments and teams to share information, develop documents and track progress on projects.

However, as more and more information is added to intranets valuable data can become locked away in separate silos, inaccessible by other employees. This can result in intranets acting more like information gatekeepers, limiting productivity and frustrating users, rather than achieving their intended goal of harnessing and sharing the collective intelligence of an organisation and providing a productive and collaborative platform for staff.

In my role as Intranet Consultant I come across many intranets that contain masses of fragmented information which is difficult to manage. Users find it increasingly difficult to locate what they are looking for, or are not even aware of its existence, leading to duplication of effort and frequently ‘re-inventing the wheel’. This is unproductive and inefficient and leads to frustration and a lack of trust in the intranet. I strongly believe that the future of successful intranets lies in their ability to eradicate these information silos in order for them to evolve into strategic, collaborative business tools providing better knowledge sharing, easier access to best practice and the ability for improved internal networking – ‘intelligent’ intranets.
But how will this be achieved? We are frequently guilty of expecting intranet users to fend for themselves when trying to find information and this needs to change. It isn’t just a simple case of getting the navigation right, intranets need to be proactive in getting the right information to the right people by understanding a user and promoting relevant content to them.

Typically, the onus lies with content providers to ensure the visibility of their content – this usually means manually linking content to other related content – not only can this result in highly subjective decisions, but it is not practical or reliable as it is time consuming and difficult (if not impossible) to find all other related content. My experience in working with companies to improve their intranets over the last five years led me to the conclusion that the best way to overcome this challenge was that intranets needed to liberate content providers from the constraints of author-generated links to other information. Intelligent intranets should automatically find 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.

Intranet content is an all-encompassing body of information and knowledge that has some very specific elements. It is a collection of information; of articles, best practice and events, a communication database for a who’s who, discussions and blogs. Whilst these are separate items they are not isolated. Connections exist between each and every one. These connections should be identified, created and promoted.

This happens every day on some very popular websites - consider a visit to Amazon, it welcomes you back and it recommends things to you; why? because it wants you to spend money, and how? because it has identified previous behaviour and has an intelligence to recommend something it thinks you will like.

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.

With these features in mind we set about developing the first ‘intelligent’ intranet, Interact 4.0, launched a year ago. At its heart is an intelligence store which works in much the same way as these sites; recommendations and suggestions are automatically generated from the intranet’s intelligence store. This intelligence store logs information such as browsing routes, search entries, documents ratings and hits and uses this information to promote content to users. It knows who you are, what department / teams you are a member of etc. and will automatically create links to other information such as articles, discussions, events and people so that each piece of information is not isolated, but is part of a greater whole – the intranet information store. The more the intranet is used and the more content is added the more powerful and effective it becomes.

Intelligent intranets that seek out relevant content and actively promote it to users will revolutionise internal communication and knowledge sharing by making it easier to tap into the collective intelligence of the workforce. Intelligent intranets know what users want and need before users do. They learn and adapt and push relevant content to users and they make life easy for those providing content by automatically creating links to other related information. The more they are used and the more content is added results in a more powerful and efficient intranet. They 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.

------------------

Nigel Danson is a specialist Intranet consultant and MD at Odyssey, suppliers of Interact Intranet software. He has successfully delivered over 150 intranets to the public and private sector to help with communication, collaboration, knowledge management and business processes.

by Steven Osborne, Odyssey Interactive Ltd

Intranets exist to help people do ‘things’, they are a key business tool assisting people to find information and facilitating the completion of a task. Does your intranet help users to find what they want, or are they left floundering?

An intranet should be structured, and populated with content that can be found. Traditionally Intranets have leant towards a departmental taxonomy; the evolution of Intranets has seen a move towards a task based structure. Users come to an intranet with an “action” the intranet should help them meet their requirements with efficiency and ease.

Intranet users arrive seeking something - the majority of these users will then use a search function as their first step. Making content findable and also allowing users to contribute to improving the structure is a key requirement of an effective intranet

Content Editors can improve findability by tagging content with popular keywords, and keywords that are in a user’s vocabulary. Using a relevant vocabulary can be achieved by encouraging users to suggest keywords to tag content with, so creating a folksonomy that will help content be found

It needn’t be one or the other. A taxonomy and folksonomy can co-exist in order to improve the structure of an intranet over time. An existing taxonomy will have undergone investment and consideration, it gives an ordered structure. Combine this with the benefits of tagging; improved connection between content editors and users, and creating an environment where collaboration is encouraged to deliver a user-friendly system.

by Steven Osborne, Odyssey Interactive Ltd

When designing an Intranet site a key consideration is to bear in mind the people that will share the space and be the users of the Intranet.  If end users are involved in the design process then you are far more likely to end up with a design and structure that users not only like, but one that they know how to use intuitively and therefore will use effectively.

When choosing those to involve it is important to get a representative sample of end users, from across the organisation; teams and functions, as well as from those that will contribute content as well as 'consume' it.  (You should also include those who you might suspect as being Intranet phobes.)

Recently I asked one such group how they would group content that they knew to be on an existing intranet as well as content that they would like to be on new intranet.  This exercise had two benefits.  Firstly it provided useful information with regard to how users would group information and secondly it provided clues to the "missing content" that an end user would expect an intranet to contain.

Studying how users grouped content revealed a high level of consistency in the number of groups and the content of these groups.  How they grouped content then enabled those responsible for the design of the structure to define the global navigation and pleasingly the 'group' names suggested by the user group were adopted as the 'tags' for the global navigation.

This process does take time, but the fact that you are taking time to involve users from the outset means that you save time in the post launch phase as well as reducing possible dissatisfaction and confusion.

by Steven Osborne, Odyssey Interactive Ltd

Having been able to get in the garden with the recent good weather (although this weekend it reset to typical Bank Holiday mode) I was contemplating the similarities between Intranet Management and horticulture.

Spring gives you the time to review the garden, to reflect on how it fared and the show it produced over the last year and to make plans for the seasons ahead.  What worked well, what combinations of colour and foliage worked, was there constant interest or were there times when the garden was merely functional not interesting?  What plants struggled to achieve their potential, could they be revived by moving them, or would their replacement by a more suitable plant be the answer?   Some plants will need replacing, so that a valuable spot in the garden produces a worthy display, others may benefit from some care or attention; pruning or fertilising in order for them to achieve their best.

Similar considerations can be given to the Intranet.  What sections have done well, what sections are looking tired and straggly.  Can it be refreshed through some judicious pruning, replanting, or is more radical surgery required.  Does the homepage look interesting and lively, or is some content past it best.  Do the paths signposted by your global navigation leads to areas of the intranet worth visiting or do they lead to long forgotten and abandoned sections, which if refreshed or replaced with more suitable content could make the intranet a more informative and productive place.

However, like with gardening, don't look for work.  Don’t look to do it all at once, and don’t just plan for one season.  Take the long term view, but do pay attention to those areas that detract from the overall objective.  The garden should be an interesting, productive, social space, so should the Intranet.

So take some time to look around, see what needs to be done and make plans and sow seeds for future success.

by Steven Osborne, Odyssey Interactive Ltd

Achieving Engagement and Enthusiasm.

The differences between a good intranet and a great intranet might be subtle, but it is measurable as all 'great' intranets will share key characteristics and features.

When it comes to delivering Employee Engagement a great intranet will exceed its objectives because it has involved it's audience.

These are three things you can do to help your intranet perform to its optimum.

1) Seek feedback – regularly

Schedule frequent employee (user) surveys, but don’t restrict it to an electronic, intranet based survey.  (If you have someone who doesn't use the intranet they won’t see the survey, so there’s small chance of them completing it.)  Get out and have face to face meetings with the audience; individuals, user groups, departments, locations.

Be specific in the feedback you want, don't ask a general question such as "What do you think of the Intranet."  Define your questions so that they are specific ~ you'll then get quality feedback that you can do something with.  Ask questions like "What do you think of the design", "What do you think to the layout?", "How would you change the structure?", "Describe a time when you struggled to find what you needed."

But – don’t ask too many questions at the same time.  See if you can pick 5 key questions.

2) Conduct Usability Testing - regularly.

Don’t assume it’s all going smoothly or because it works for you it works for all. If you designed it and structured it then you will know your way around it.  Increase the objectivity of the exercise by involving others.  For instance, if a new starter joins, sit with them to see how they use it and how it performs. Such an opportunity to see through fresh eyes and get a different perspective is invaluable.  As far as is practically possible test new additions or enhancements amongst a control group before things go live to a wider audience.  Spring clean your Intranet – fix or clean up dead links, edit jargon, check labels and tags are user friendly – understandable and useful.  

3) Act on the feedback you got and the testing performed.  Simple.

by Steven Osborne, Odyssey Interactive Ltd

To a greater or lesser extent all intranets aim to solve the same problem; how to make a company's internal information and applications easily available to employees.

But what if the problem is that people just aren’t using the intranet, instead they are reverting to old ways; gathering information and communicating outside of the intranet. They might have used the intranet initially but at some point they couldn’t find the information they wanted either at all, or quickly enough, or when they found something it wasn’t what they were looking for or they doubted its accuracy. A seed of doubt was sown and it grew.

So having discovered that people don’t use the Intranet your next step is to find out why. Talk to the reluctant users and compare their experiences and expectations with those who are using the intranet. You should expect to hear as much in the way of emotional opinion as factual reasons for the lack of enthusiasm, but it is important that you listen to both. Through chatting to the users you will hopefully begin to uncover why they are reluctant and what ‘blocks’- real or imagined are in their way.

Perceptual – They might have never used an intranet before, or they have used something similarly ‘technical’ and it went wrong, crashed and they lost information or confidence.  The experiences of the past affect their thinking today.  An intranet may also be a change of culture, a change in practice and a new way of doing things that they weren’t expecting.  Not everyone will embrace change, some will, some won’t, they may have the belief of “If it’s not broke why fix it?” In their eyes there was nothing wrong with the old system of shared drives, “OK, it wasn’t perfect but it worked...”

Emotional – users might truly not “like” the intranet.  There doesn’t need to be a valid reason for this - it might do things they don’t like, or fail to offer things they expect. They might not like the style, the colours, or the name.  They might be anti-intranet because they don’t feel involved in it; maybe, previously no-one asked them for their input or ideas.  Giving them the chance to express their opinion might be the first step in turning them around.

Intellectual – lack of familiarity or ‘web awareness’ may be an issue and rather than asking for help or guidance they have chosen not to use it.  Their reluctance could have a technical basis, they haven’t used an intranet before, therefore don’t know how it is structured and how to find information.  They may benefit from an introductory session, set at their pace, where they can explore the intranet and ask all the questions they have without fear of seeming to be a technophobe.

Take the time to talk to the people that the Intranet is there for. From this you will find out why they don’t use it.

Knowing why they don’t use it will lead onto what you can do to take those blocks away and therefore get them using it

Knowing where to start tackling this problem is not easy, but a good rule of thumb would be to start wherever you can make some progress. See what you can do to update it or remove it.  If users don’t know how to find things, is it because they don’t know how to navigate around the site (solution - hold an orientation session) or is it because content is poorly structured and labelled, (solution – review the structure)

Look to see where you can start the upward spiral.