thinkIntranet Strategic Intranet Management

I recently joined the Intranet Benchmarking Forum as an evaluator and strategist, and just posted my first blog entry on the IBF blog. I’ll be blogging there regularly, and also writing some briefing papers for IBF as well.

I couldn’t agree more with this take by Gerry McGovern on the current state of Intranet personalization. While at IBM I saw an immense amount of effort going into this concept of delivering the perfectly useful and customized experience for each employee. Even with teams of content authors pushing content into the Portal, use and overall satisfaction really remained sort of stagnant. I’ve found that most Intranet and Portal efforts fail to fully appreciate the amount of work and change required to support a truly valuable Portal experience. And, most companies will be pitched a Portal as the latest and greatest thing, without a word from the sales team about how to manage not only implementing the Portal experience appropriately, but how to mange the governance and management of content authoring into the Portal to make the experience relevant and useful.

Just read a take on the age-old problem of conveying business value of good Intranet Management to senior leadership. Gerry McGovern’s article is a good, straightforward reminder of the importance of proving value to Senior Management.

I find that the challenge of proving the aggregated value of improved productivity is often hampered by the location of the management team involved. That is to say, unless you get to the very very top, it’s hard to get someone with a completely objective, cross-enterprise view of the value of Intranet management. Managers in lines of business will be happy to fund initiatives to solve their problems, but not necessarily those of the rest of the business.

This problem of silo’d financial thinking is a tough nut to crack, even as organizations talk about cross-functional collaboration and organic networking and teamwork. At the end of the day, the problem remains the same: Work goes where the money goes.

Every time I speak to a company about the state of their Intranet, all issues seem to link back to one missing element - a robust and executable Intranet roadmap. I emphasize executable because so many roadmap and strategy documents contain such “blue sky” scenarios that they are largely useless to those stuck in reality. I’ve found that when these high-minded approaches are pitched to business units and groups within a company, one of two things happens: Those listening who don’t fully understand the implications of Intranet and information management are wonderstruck and veryexcited about the vision. Then, of course, they are disapointed, and the result is the Intranet management team loses both credibility and support across the business. Or, those listening do understand the implications of Intranet management, and know that that some of the scenarios described would take huge feats of re-engineering and information structure to achieve.

Nearly two years ago, I sat up with interest as Jared Spool spoke about UE Governance at the UI East 10 conference in Cambridge, MA. I found his breakdown of UE governance models so simple and obvious that I’ve used it again and again as I have pushed for governance change at IBM. I thought I should reiterate it again here with due appreciation to Mr. Spool:
How is good Experience Design facilitated throughout a company?

1. A consultative approach, where a design team handles a small number of projects and consults directly.
2. A review and approve approach – establishes order and prevents “wild wild west,” eventually creates a compliance process bottleneck, a “policing” mentality, and can prevent progress.
3. An educate and administrate approach, where the entire organization focuses on the principles behind successful experience design.