thinkIntranet Strategic Intranet Management

If I had a dime for every Website launch that got off to a rocky start … This Monday morning I was greeted by an exciting new email in my inbox. It seems that the J&J HR function has been busy transforming itself, and part of that transformation is a new Website. The new site is called… “OurSource.biz” … I thought for a second I had received a joke email - OurSource.biz? What does that have to do with HR and J&J? Consumed with curiosity, I faithfully followed the link, to be presented with a log in page. Now, J&J does a pretty good job with common authentication. There is not true “single sign on” yet, but most applications rely common identifiers to log in. Which is great. So on this page, I was asked to use my existing worldwide ID to sign in.

Only, hold on, a bold note at the top was telling me that I could only sign in if I had changed my password since August 22. If I hadn’t, click here to change. OK, well, I hadn’t planned on doing that until I absolutely have to (at 90 days out) but sure, non problem. I change my password, and then notice that an additional note advises me to wait 15 minutes until trying to log in. Okay, totally understandable. All good so far!

I wait two hours, then try again - still quite curious about oursource.biz. No luck with the log in. So, I call the help desk, and several days later am still waiting for an answer. Apparently this is a known issue. It’s not business critical for me, and as far as I can tell this is a limited launch (although it seemed possibly to be to all NA users - I am not sure). But I think in this experience there are a few best practices to sum up:

1. Never, ever launch a website with a blast email that arrives first thing Monday morning. Bad idea! Friday afternoon, maybe? Ramping up slowly is key (and maybe that’s what they did, but the email I go was sent Monday morning)
2. Try not to ask your users to do something funky with their common ID right off the bat. It makes people feel a little bit nervous.
3. If you really need to use a different kind of URL - a little explanation might go a long way. Although maybe most J&J folks won’t mind about the bizarre URL - there is a ton of fragmentation of URLs going on all over the Intranet landscape - so this might just appear normal. To me, it’s very odd - so I want to find out more.

On top of that - I was intrigued to find no related material promoting the launch on any internal J&J news site - even poking around to find out if others were having any issue was hard, since, um, collaborative and discussion tools are not prevalent. Well, there is a nice opportunity for discussion as part of the Global ENN employee news netowrk, but it is sadly underused and sort of remote. Plus, I could not find an article about said new HR site to discuss about it. Oh well!