Thursday, November 26, 2009 ISSUE 44   HOME The intranet gets serious: part 2 -- if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. Gerry McGovern, gerry@gerrymcgovern.com There is a view in some organizations that an intranet is only for staff, so you can publish what you want. Quality content matters as much on an intranet as on a public website. Get your content right to begin with. Keep it right by removing out-of-date content. Spring cleaning Your intranet is not a dump. It is not about the volume. It's not 'have gigabytes must fill'. View your content as an asset, not a cost. It's not a document management challenge, so don't see the problem from a storage point of view. It's publishing. It's about finding that small set of content that drives productive actions from staff and management. Do you have a process whereby every single piece of content on your intranet gets read at least once a year? Those organizations that can't do this are admitting that their intranet is unmanageable. Tetra Pak, a global leader in packaging systems, is not one of them. The Tetra Pak approach Mats G. Johansson is responsible for web content management in the Tetra Pak technical service area. The readership is approximately 4,500 people. In 2002, Tetra Pak decided to get serious about content. First off, a style guide was created, covering such things as: style and tone, length of summaries, a description of how the content should be laid out, treatment of pictures, etc. (A style guide is an essential first step in achieving consistent content quality.) Next, the 70 administrators (editors) were trained in professional publishing techniques. Quality, up-to-date content was stressed. A typical question that was posed was: "Would you hand out your business card with the wrong telephone number? Then, why is the number not correct on your webpage?" Professional publishing processes take time to develop. Many staff are simply not used to publishing quality content on a regular basis. They need training and ongoing support. And that's exactly what they got from Mats and his team. Control what you deliver Crucially, the intranet is measured on an ongoing basis. "We now review all pages on a three-month basis," Mats states. "It requires less and less effort to correct things as the administrators learn how to maintain their content and they know that they will be reviewed regularly." There is an important point here. In the past, I've heard it said that it is neither right nor possible to control content on the intranet. That argument might have made some sense during the pioneering phase of web development. Pioneers are full of enthusiasm, love to take risks and hate being measured or trained. There is a very different breed of person involved in the intranet today. This person just wants to get the job done as quickly and efficiently as possible. Tetra Pak found that staff were glad that a systematic approach was being taken. There are now ongoing requests for more training. People are eager to learn how to get better at publishing. Of course, the biggest fans of a well run intranet are the staff who read it. Not surprisingly, Tetra Pak is getting very good feedback from its staff who are delighted that the content is up-to-date and correct. Your content is a valuable asset. Manage this asset by publishing only quality content and removing out-of-date content. To do this, you need to train, motivate, reward and measure your publishing team. Create a single approach Intranets don't self-organize. Without planned, centralized information architectures and clearly defined published processes, they become unproductive. Intranets often have applications that either don't work properly, are too difficult to learn, or have no clear business benefit. Applications, like content, must be able to establish a clear return on investment. IBM used to have some 7,000 intranets. Annually, IBM surveys staff to find out where they get the information they need to do their jobs from. Historically, the number one source has been other colleagues. When the intranet arrived in the mid-Nineties, it went to the bottom of the list. When IBM had 7,000 intranets, it was hard to find anything. Lots of content was out-of-date. IBM went to a single intranet architecture, and introduced much more formal publishing control. The following year's survey found staff rating the intranet as their number one source. Keep your killer app up to date What is the intranet's killer app? It's the staff directory. And what is the number one problem with the staff directory? It's out-of-date. We need to start thinking like publishers. Publishers are focused on getting the right content to the right person at the right time at the right cost. Publishers keep staff directories up-to-date. Be very wary of personalization. I know it would be a really exciting thing to implement. But how about making sure your staff directory, as well as all your other content, is correct first. Take a crawl, walk, run approach. Measure what you deliver While many intranets have indeed improved over the last five years, there is still one area where very little progress has been made: measurement of the return on investment (ROI). According to a study published in November 2003 by Prescient Digital, intranet ROI remains guesswork at most organizations. In his report entitled 'Ten best intranets of 2003', Jakob Nielsen writes that, "There continues to be a paucity of detailed usability metrics for intranets. Most teams focus on doing a good job, not on justifying their existence." There is an old saying in management: If you can't measure it, you can't manage it. The average intranet is not being measured. Therefore, it is not being professionally managed. Some people don't know how many pages they have on their intranet. Some don't even know how many intranets they have. As more and more senior managers do get engaged, they start asking tougher questions about the value of the intranet. If you're managing an intranet today, you need to develop ROI models. Ask yourself these questions: If your intranet was shut down tomorrow, would your organization become less productive? Would your organization become more productive? Achieving best practice will be a slow process. That's okay. It will require a five-year plan, not a series of 3-6 months tactical initiatives. The intranet changes how an organization communicates. That's a big change. As Tetra Pak and others have found, successful intranet management begins with successful people management. Article originally published in New Thinking, December 1,8, 2003 V.8 n.46-7. http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/nt/2003/nt_2003_12_01_intranet_3.htm http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/nt/2003/nt_2003_12_08_intranet_4.htm [PRINTER FRIENDLY VERSION] There are no letters available. [POST]

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