The survey closes September 1st. You still have more than one week to participate!

We’ve looked at the data available as of August 20th, based on the participation of 300 organizations worldwide, and here are some early indicators coming from preliminary data.

5 Trends: what’s happening and what is not

• Mobile optimization is not happening very fast. There has been no evolution since last year’s survey: Only 7% say their intranet is optimized for mobile access, 24% are running pilots or are in the planning stages. This is identical to last year.
• Social media is advancing inside. It is implemented to some extent in 70 % of the organizations, up 10 % points from last year.  Out of these, 20 % have had social media for less than one year, and over 25% have had it for 3 or more years.
• Enterprises are looking outwards…. 40% say “We create official, branded spaces on external networking platforms such as Facebook.” But most are still being cautious….and only 11% say “We encourage employees to blog on the internet.”
• Collaboration is now “self-service” for some. Out of 276 organizations with blogs, wikis and/or collaborative spaces, approximately 40% provide a self-service solution where people can do it themselves with no or minimal help desk support. However, from 45 to 55% say that only IT can open these spaces.
• Are prediction markets emerging? 10 % of the participating organizations already have them. Another 7 % are in the pilot or planning stages. Last year, the highest we had were 3% who were testing prediction markets.

These topics and many more are investigated in the 2010 survey and will be developed in detail with analysis and charts in the final report.

Sign-up and get your free copy.

Get in touch if you have any questions.

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It’s not the early adopters we need to worry about: it’s all the others.

The subtitle of the book says it all: “Shifting second wave people to new collaboration technology”.

I am currently looking at the preliminary data from the current Global Intranet Strategies Survey,  of which social media is a large part. Here is a preliminary statistic:

• Out of over 200 responding organizations who have some degree of social media in place internally, nearly 40 % express ‘moderate concern’ about user adoption and just over 15% express ’strong concern’. (Choices were “not a concern”, “low”, “moderate”, “strong” or “very strong”.)

I know from personal experience with my clients that user adoption is a concern for intranets in general, unless they have reached Stage 3 in maturity. In this case they are the “way of working” for the organization and have been fully “adopted”!  Most have not yet reached that stage, thus the interest in Michael’s topic.

Michael talks about the “levers for change”: “pain”, “social pressure”, “perceived deviance from the norm”, “better defaults”, “getting pleasure” and “linkage to a higher goal”. This is an intriguing list, and well worth the price of the book to read what he has to say about these levers. (as of page 68)

Another gem is his thoughts on why the “what’s in it for me” concept may be a bad way to think of user adoption. (page 77.)

Michael takes us through the model he propose in detail, with lost of examples.  His model is based on 4 stages:

• Winning attention
• Cultivating basic concepts
• Enlivening applicability (my favorite stage!)
• Making it real

The tongue twister “enlivening applicability” simply means you bring alive how the application can be relevant and useful for the person.

“User Adoption Strategies” makes very interesting reading, let alone the fact that you will never see “user adoption” in exactly the same way after finishing this book. At 39 US$, this book is a very good deal.

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Note that the on-going, 5th annual Global Intranet Strategies Survey is  open until September 1st. You still have plenty of time to sign up and get a free copy of “Global Intranet Trends for 2011″ (commercial value 750 USD, 550 euros).

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From Barb Mosher, CMSWire:

“McConnell states it best when she says that the “intranet is a process, not a one-time project”. You can’t build it and walk away. It is always going to a be a work in progress, growing and adapting to the needs of your organization…. “

“Intranet Trends for 2010: How Far We Have and Haven’t Come“, published 6 August.

I published what must be my most famous slide “Intranet is a process“  2006, and have since seen it posted in people’s offices and referred to in many places since, including the September 2010 JBoye London workshop “Intranets at Work“.  (By the way, I highly recommend this one-day event based on the speaker line-up: 2 of my clients and several of my well-respected virtual colleagues. Using the code “jmc” when you sign up will give you a 20 % reduction.)

Why just one step ahead?

The intranet can enable new ways of working but it cannot create them.

I have two examples from recent client engagements:

1. A case where new business lines are being implemented and intended to gradually replace the current company-based organization.
2. A second case where senior management behavior is in conflict with the global processes around which collaboration spaces are being built.

New (theoretical) business lines in a global enterprise

The dilemma: An enterprise in the process of “going global” is re-organizing into 5 new business lines. The internal discussion for the new enterprise intranet is: Should our global navigation bar be defined with direct paths to individual companies (previous and current organization) or should we take advantage of doing a new intranet and make the primary navigation based on business lines?

My view: It is essential to provide both. In a large, global organization, the business lines will take shape at different speeds. Content will be migrated progressively. The new enterprise intranet must “lead” people in the direction of the business lines but not push them off the edge of the map if their business line-based content is not yet ready (read: revised, cleaned up, tagged).

Behavior in contradiction with the new business processes

The dilemma: A global organization is currently defining global processes. This involves getting the sales and marketing teams to share experiences and lessons learned across the enterprise. This type of sharing has taken place within the divisions in the past, but not across the divisions. Even within the divisions, it has been limited to email and personal contacts. Today, the new collaborative spaces set up for global sharing are not being used.

My view: It quickly became obvious after a few questions that internal recognition and rewards were based on individual performance.  The global marketing director made a keynote speech every year where the best performers were recognized, and the division with the most winners became the “division of the year”. In this case, the global collaborative spaces were light years ahead of the organization!

Is your intranet one step ahead of your organization?

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In fact, vanity pages are an important part of intranets. They are one way to get people involved in the intranet. People want and should be able to tell others about themselves and their work.

The problem comes when the so called “vanity page” are reinforcing the enterprise silos. They hide essential information from others, reinforce the blinder syndrome and create major findability issues.

This post offers 3 tips for how to transform vanity pages into a starting point for a user-logical structure for the intranet.

Three tips leveraging vanity pages into a user-logical

I recommend following a few simple rules:

1. Separate 3 types of content

When you have a team or department who wants “our page”, find out what they really want to do:

1. Share on-going work documents among themselves
2. Propose services and provide information to other employees
3. Present themselves and “make their existence known”!

Type 1 belongs in a team place, restricted or not.

Type 2 should appear in an “Employee Services” or similar section, organized by type of service, not by who is providing it.

Type 3  is what we might call “vanity” but which in fact can be transformed into a very useful section of the intranets: the “About” section.

2. Create an “About Our Company” section

Every intranet needs an “About” section. It should be mandatory that all divisions, business units, support functions, departments and so on be present. The content may be written by communicators, by the people themselves, or, ideally, a combination of both.

There should be a minimum required, based on a template that everyone uses. There should be room for people to add more content as they wish.

The “About” section needs an owner. It is usually the communications department who owns it.

3. Identify the owners of each page in the “About” section

Make sure there is a name and contact information for each page in this section. “For more information, contact …”

Breaking the enterprise silos

The above may sound simple, but it’s not easy in global companies or in organizations where the intranet is not yet the way of working and suffers from internal power politics.

Dealing with Type 2 is the hardest

The hardest to achieve is Type 2 as described above. It is a major challenge to take information and services provided to employees by many support functions in the organization, and group them into user-logical categories.

If you encounter resistance, try some card-sorting. I did this in a enterprise where we were having difficulty getting the HR manager to understand that an “HR” category was not the best way to organize her services. We listed all the chunks of information and services from her department and others on individual cards, asked a group of “normal users” to sort them into categories. We invited her to observe the group work. To her credit, she got the message and became one of the “user-logic advocates” in the company.

Your experience?

Does anyone have some good stories about “vanity pages”? Any examples to share?

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It was inspired and started by a group of Paris-based intranet managers (thanks Willem!) who participate in the NetJMC  working breakfasts.

The  5 most recent members are from Maine (US), Denmark, Geneva,  Ohio (US) and Ireland.

On-going discussions are on:

• Has anyone found a way to convince senior management to invest more money and resources in the intranet?
• Automated translation tools in your intranet?
• Intranet Manager Job Description Help
  How to represent “an Intranet” graphically?
• Separation of Intranet and public website team – Does your organisation have separate teams for both the Intranet and your public website?

If you’re an intranet manager or strongly involved in your organization’s intranet, consider joining us.

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• the enterprise,
• the business,
• and the individual person.

When I work with global organizations to help them define the business objectives of the intranet, we do it from these 3 angles. The problem is when we push each dimension to its logical conclusion, we end up with a technology dilemma.

What tool or combination of tools can support all 3 dimensions?

Software solutions tend to favor one dimension more than the others. Each dimension has its own fundamental logic.

This post talks about how the traditional CMS favors the enterprise, collaborative software the business angle, and social networking the individual person. This raises fundamental questions about the entry point for the individual user and the governance for the intranet.

The traditional CMS favors the enterprise.

Authorized content publishers are designated throughout the enterprise and trained to use the publishing tool. Even when the publishing approach is highly decentralized, there is a limited number of people who do it.

People are authorized to publish in specific places on the intranet, and must follow enterprise guidelines and CMS tool restrictions/requirements (such as meta data, format, etc.). The org chart of content publishers looks like the pyramid org chart of the enterprise.

In theory, users’ “starting point” is the enterprise home page, which they often click through without really seeing!

Collaborative software favors the business angle.

How many times have we heard stories where business goes straight to IT to provide a solution for their teams. The global intranet team never even hears about it. It is usually discovered (read “uncovered”) when an enterprise intranet project starts.

Why did business go straight to IT? Because the intranet team was either too distant (physically or mentally) or had other things to do (such as managing content publishing on the CMS!).

People’s “starting point” is their own team page, and they rarely or never see what’s published on the enterprise intranet home page.

Social networking software favors the individual person.

The first thing you do is set up your personal page.  You can then connect to others, build your network, join other networks. These solutions are often promoted loudly and strongly by evangelists inside the organization, believers in individual choice, personalization to an extreme.

Individuals are is their own starting points. They then click out to what is relevant to them. Or they may follow or subscribe to what they find useful.

The organization trying to meet all three needs is faced with mixed situations.

1. The user entry points are different. This impacts what and how content is pushed, pulled, customized, commoditized.
2. The governance required for each is different. This impacts ownership, quality standards, life cycle requirements.

How do you get the right balance?

All three perspectives are essential. The challenge is how to balance them against each other when selecting software solutions.
My question to technology strategies:

• How do you bring these complementary but frequently conflicting perspectives together in a way that makes sense for the users?

Food for thought:

Tony Byrne, founder of RealStory Group (previously CMS Watch) ) wrote a low key but hard-hitting post: When infrastructure vendors use niche products for Enterprise 2.0

Michael Sampson, collaboration strategist, author of User Adoption Strategies
is investigating what organizations are doing with Sharepoint: (participate in his survey; it only takes a few minutes)

So, what is your experience? Have you found ways to meet the needs of all three dimensions?

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If you’re involved in your intranet, consider signing up. You’ll get a free copy of “Global Intranet Trends for 2011″ (commercial value: 750 US$, 500 euros). See table of contents 2010. Read intranet manager reviews. The survey is open until the end of August.

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“Once again another excellent survey. Participating in this survey and specifically some of the questions asked has prompted me to investigate some future Intranet enhancements currently not available in my organisation. Great job as usual Jane and I look forward to reading the report.”

NetJMC: Thanks – one of the purposes of the survey is to stimulate thought.

“I would suggest to have a section regarding the search engine of the Intranet.
I think it will become the next “homepage” of the Intranet, just as a “Google like” Intranet, with news, but the search box really visible.
The quality of the results, the capabilities to refine and find information will become the more important part of the Intranet Managers as the path to “all on the Intranet” is here.”

NetJMC: I totally agree. Search is the big weakness in nearly every intranet I have ever seen.

“The term “Intranet” needs to be abandoned… It refers to old technology.”

NetJMC: Absolutely. See this  post.

“Thank you again! Your thorough questions again enlighten me as to how far behind we are as an organization. We have a long way to go, but so do many others, probably, and this research helps us all find the way.”

NetJMC: Thank you.

“Thank you again for the survey, always very thought-provoking and has helped me form some opinons on my own work, particularly the digital collaboration project I am currently masterminding! Thanks Jane.”

NetJMC: Digital collaboration? A big question currently. Should it be inside or outside the “intranet”?

“Either my competence at answering this survey has improved or this is the clearest and easiest to understand one I’ve taken part in. I don’t recall thinking “I’m not sure” or “it depends” at any point – these points usually act as barriers which force me to “come back later” while I “have a think” (ie. ignore it). A great achievement – can’t wait to read the results.”

NetJMC: I tried to make the survey more fluid than past years. Maybe I have succeeded?

NetJMC: Many thanks to those who made very specific suggestions. They have all been noted for next year.

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A participant in one of my global intranet workshops recently said, “There’s no point in saying we have mandatory global content that everyone must see. It’s not by putting it on the home page that will make them read it. They’re either interested or they aren’t.”

The person speaking is in charge of internal communication in a large global company. The company in question is in the early stages of a socially-driven intranet. When I say “early”, I mean they have a CEO blog, allow comments on all news items and articles  and have just officially launched a social platform where numerous groups and teams are beginning to set up  their tents!

My concern is that without a minimum of overall strategy, it’s the users who will suffer. They will not know where to find what. There are risks of redundancies.

But does that matter? Will the best “places” win? The ones where the most users congregate? The ones that offer the most value? Will the marketplace sort itself out?

What are your views on intranets morphing into user-driven spaces where people are completely free to pick and choose what they see and where and how they work on line?

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Will it devolve? Will the tasks and responsibilities be passed on to business managers and users in the organization? I like this definition of devolve:  “to delegate something to someone else; to be inherited by someone; a slow degradation”. (Wiktionary)

The Global Intranet Strategies Survey has looked at the intranet manager role for the last 3 years. We have seen that the career path is ambiguous as are many job titles. We have questioned whether intranet managers have the right priorities in terms of knowledge they need. In this year’s survey (year 5) we are asking specific questions about how the role is evolving professionally.

Ambiguous career paths and job titles

I wrote about this in No Career Path for the Intranet Manager in November 2006.

In 2007 I posted:  To all intranet managers: Things are getting better, aren’t they? and Does your job title reflect the strategy and vision behind your role?

The right knowledge priorities?

Based on the 2008 survey, I wrote about the knowledge areas intranet managers feel are most important for their roles in the post “Talk money in order to get money.”

The knowledge areas as rated by the 2008 survey participants: (from high to low)

1. User-centered approach, design
2. Information architecture (structuring information)
3. Organizational dynamics
4. Business and business processes
5. Tools: e.g. search, content management systems
6. Technology trends
7. Needs analysis techniques
8. Business cases
9. Finances, return on investment analysis

You can access all the blog posts around the intranet manager theme in the blog archives.

What professional evolution?

The 5th annual 2010 Global Intranet Strategies survey explores the professional evolution of the intranet management role. (Sign up for the 2010 survey. Requirements here. The Trends for 2011 report will be published in October.)

Specifically, we are asking these questions to all the intranet managers “in the trenches”:

1. How do you think the intranet manager role will evolve in your organization?

Multiple answers possible:

• Become integrated into “business as usual” and disappear as a specific role.
• Evolve to a knowledge-sharing role.
• Expand to cover all online activities, internal & external.
• Become more strategic.
• Become more operational, less strategic.
• Remain as is.

2. How specialized do you think intranet management roles will become?

Answers from strongly agree to strongly disagree:

• Roles will be more specialized vertically: Search engine expert, information architect, user experience specialist, etc.
• Roles will be more specialized horizontally: Broader, more general communication or business  responsibilities.

3. How formalized do you think intranet management roles will become?

Answers from strongly agree to strongly disagree:

• Formal performance management including objectives, evaluation, accountability will be the norm.
• It will be possible to get education and degrees in intranet management.

4. Open questions: What impact do social media have on your career or your profession in general?

It will be interesting to see how people answer this question. Survey participants come from communication, IT, HR and business areas of their organizations, and I’m expected the answers to vary.

Take note: New Linkedin group dedicated to the career path of intranet managers

Mark Morrell, intranet manager at BT, has opened Intranet Career Path group on Linkedin where discussions have started on the role and career of the intranet manager.

Participate in the 5th annual Global Intranet Strategies Survey

The Global Intranet Trends for 2011 will be published in October 2010 and you’ll be able to read about the trends around the questions listed above and many others. The survey is open from June through August. If you are in the intranet management role and would like to participate, you will get a free copy of the report. More information about signing up here.

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The 5th edition of the Global Intranet Strategies Survey has just opened. If you signed up and have not received your personalized link by email, get in touch.

What’s new in year 5?

A broader scope

We  start by looking briefly at  new enterprise business models. This is essential if we want to understand where the enterprise is going and what business value the intranet should and will be providing.

The internal-external blend

We also explore how the internal and external worlds interact. Today  intranet managers can no longer limit their job scope to the internal world: our survey can no longer treat the intranet as a purely internal tool.

Strategy and scope of the intranet

Intranets are becoming more mature, more business-oriented, more user-friendly. But there are still many challenges left. We explore the different “pieces” that make up the intranet, how they fit together, overall strategy drivers, entry page strategies, team and community spaces and more.

Social media strategies and maturity

We’re taking a snapshot of how organizations are moving on social media. We have investigated this for 3 years and are asking some tough questions this time around. We look at whether social media strategies are top-down, bottom-up or both. We explore how social media is embedded in processes and how user adoption is encouraged. We will be able to see how early adopters’ approaches compare to enterprises with less experience.

Emphasis on business value

Measurement and business value have traditionally been the weak points in intranet management and communication. That’s one of the reasons  senior management are not sufficiently on board. A number of question deal with business value from different angles. I’m expecting to get  valuable insights and examples from leading companies around the world.

Governance and management

We look at ownership, roles and responsibilities for the overall workplace web. Intranet managers can no longer limit their scope to the traditional intranet. The collaboration and social media aspects are all part of the user experience. The governance and management of these dimensions need to fit together.

Participate and get a free copy of Global Intranet Trends for 2011

You can read the requirements and sign up procedure here.

Here is what previous participants have to say about the survey and report.

I hope to hear from you!

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