I’ve been having more and more conversations with folks around J&J who are interested in Intranet Management for the company as a whole. I recently attended a meeting of communications professionals where two J&J senior executives had a very engaging discussion about how J&J is a company of opposing forces: A Family of Companies looking to converge, standardize and connect across the collective, and a decentralized stable of individual brand and company identities, retaining the agility and speed characteristic of small companies. It is these opposing forces, they suggested, that keep the company in motion, but which at the same time present an ongoing challenge when considering employee engagement, process standardization, corporate identity, and culture.
So what does this mean for Intranet management? I think it means lots. Initiatives to connect people and processes across the J&J Family of Companies inevitably play out in the digital workplace. This space, what I refer to as the Workplace Experience, is largely undefined for J&J.
One might suppose that the J&J brand identity itself would be used to identify a common experience that transcends the operating company and group company level. However, because of the careful protection of the J&J brand, the J&J logo itself, with all its feel-good brand attributes, may not be associated with any cross-functional initiatives.
The effect of this protective stance is that efforts to unify employees around processes and work, in places like IT, Operations, and in my own area - Global Procurement, remain disconnected from any consistent identity of the J&J collective. On most J&J Intranet sites, if you blindfold the URL - a user would have no idea they were even on a J&J company page. Each and every one of the growing number of cross-functional, “convergence” experiences is uniquely branded and designed for its own purpose.
So, as employees are increasingly asked to self-identify with the “whole,” they have no consistent experience of what that Family of Companies space looks like. There is simply no digital expression of the collective values and attributes of the Johnson & Johnson Family of Companies. What’s worse, there is an additional gap at J&J in that there is essentially no main “home” or starting point for every employee’s Workplace Experience. So while there are a host of very well designed and managed Intranets for individual Operating Companies, when an employee’s role or responsibility extend beyond that operating company, they start to lose a place to call home. I’ve heard this from end users who say they are not really sure where “home” is for their work at the company.
To me, this lack of grounding in the digital workplace is akin to working out of your car - you can pile a bunch of stuff in it, but it really doesn’t feel like home, and you’re probably not going to be very effective.
Beyond the lack of “home” and the lack of cultural identity, the other effect of not identifying a Workplace Experience at J&J is that a huge amount of money is being spend on with design agencies on expensive, one-off branded spaces. Along with those fancy designs, comes expensive custom SharePoint implementations - at a time when good SharePoint skills are at a premium in the company.
At J&J, any mention of “one Intranet” is quickly countered with the notion that there is no appetite for such a monster. But an effectively managed Workplace Experience does not mean one huge boil-the-ocean Portal. What it can, and should mean, is an experience that reflects the culture and values of the company.
I’ll be blogging again soon about why identity and experience matter for enterprise 2.0 and collaboration. And, on a related thread, I’ll be talking about how the promise of the MySite location as a grounding point for the cross-functional, converged exeprience at J&J, won’t be effective without a more sophisticated approach to deploying this part of the SharePoint platform.
