E-MAIL | PRINT | SAVE | LICENSE   

By Patrick Walsh

There is an elephant in the intranet living room. In all that has been written about intranets, very few commentators ever mention the fact that intranets don't work. In my opinion, the current paradigm for intranets has never worked. I call the current state ‘Intranet Zero' because popular approaches offer virtually zero benefit to intranet users and their organizations, while giving zero chance of breaking out of the spiral of uselessness, poor user perception and even poorer usability.

So what's to be done? Shall we just switch off all our intranets and find something more productive to do with our time? I think that the very fact that many organizations still persist with their intranets shows that they know deep down that, if they could only be made to work, intranets could be an incredible asset and a source of competitive advantage. What's needed is a radically different approach.

In the 1950s, the majority of cars were mass produced but there were major problems inherent in the mass production paradigm including: 

• Overproduction of parts and cars leading to massive inefficiencies
• Poor quality
• Workforces with very narrow skill bases leading to boredom and lack of motivation
• Lack of flexibility in manufacturing methods leading to many years between new models
• Stifled innovation.

Due to the constraints of doing business in post-war Japan, the Toyota Motor Company found it could not compete with Western mass production so it changed the rules of the game and invented a radical new approach - lean manufacturing. This change of approach relied on a one-piece work flow, continuous improvement and the continual reduction of wasted materials, movement and human resources at all levels. This meant that for Toyota:

• It only produced what it needed, when it needed it - efficiency was vastly improved
• Product quality became the top priority
• The workforce became very flexible and skilful in many areas leading to better motivation and job satisfaction
• The time between new models was drastically reduced compared to Western companies.
• Innovation was encouraged.

Through this approach, also known as the Toyota Production System (TPS), the company gained a reputation for quality and innovation giving it a competitive advantage that lasts to this day.

So, what's this got to do with intranets? A similar approach based on ‘lean' principles is needed for intranets. Something radical that emphasises the over-riding need for constantly improving the quality of content and reducing waste whilst encouraging innovation and a holistic strategy for managing intranet issues - the Lean Intranet.

First, let's have a closer look at intranet zero.

So what does intranet zero look like?

At its simplest, an intranet is all about transactions and information. It either allows a user to carry out a transaction, such as booking holidays using an online form, or it provides information such as contact lists, procedures and guidance documents. So let's consider these two areas.

Transactions

The transactional area of an intranet usually receives the most visits. Why? Why do people do anything? Because they get something out of it. People give money to charity because it makes them feel good, they put up with queues in stores because at the end of the process they will get something they want or need, people put up with traffic jams because they need to get to work, so they can get paid, so they can queue in stores and so on.

There is always a quid pro quo - something for something in any transaction. Staff book holidays because they want time off work and they compile timesheets because they want to get paid. However, even this is not always made easy for them. In some intranets, the transactional side may work well but, for many others, the forms and processes are not thought-through or tested with real users.

If the user experience of transactions is one of frustration because she can't locate the form, the process is illogical, there are dead ends or the process forces users to endlessly enter the same information in different forms, then it might be better to refer to such intranets as Intranet Sub-Zero as they really have no redeeming features.

Information

The true hallmark of the intranet zero is the state of its information content.

See if your intranet demonstrates any of these aspects below:

• Obsolete content visible to the user
• Content that you think might be obsolete but you can't be sure
• Content not reviewed on its due date
• Duplicated content - the wheel being re-invented again and again
• Poor content
• Irrelevant content
• Lots of typographical errors
• Too much content

Although all of the above are bad, the last one is the real doozy. Where an intranet has many different staff contributing content, it inevitably leads to a situation where there is too much content and most of it will be of low value - I call this ‘intranet inflation'. It seems to paralyse intranet teams because they have no tools to deal with it. The only perceived way out is to devise more and more tortuous navigation schemes meaning that good content gets more and more lost in the information fog of poor and mediocre content.

I've seen one instance where there were four separate navigational areas on one page and some of these contained more than one level. How is the poor user, who has limited time, supposed to find stuff quickly when they need it?

The structures of such intranets closely resemble a large bowl of spaghetti.

If you're not convinced that intranet zero exists in your organisation, carry out some simple user research. Every time you have a conversation with a different colleague, just ask them if they ever use the intranet. If they answer ‘yes', ask what they mainly use it for. From my own experience I'll guarantee that the majority of answers you get will be along the lines of ‘Just time sheets and holidays and things like that'. So what about all of that other ‘stuff' in the intranet? For larger organizations, there will be thousands of pages of ‘stuff'. What's it doing there if nobody looks at it?

Gerry McGovern in The Giraffe Forum (see Note 1) in commenting on the Global Intranet & Portal Strategies Survey, published in late 2007, states that ‘distributing information' is perceived as the primary role of an intranet and goes on to say: 

‘When senior managers I speak to hear about "distributing information", they think of uncontrolled, unmanaged, badly organized, out-of-date information dumps. They think of vanity publishing by units and departments throwing increasing quantities of irrelevant and useless information at staff who have no time and absolutely no interest in reading it. They see the intranet as a giant, bulging waste of time.'

Why should this be? In my opinion, the situation is mostly due to a few basic misconceptions that seem to be incredibly persistent:

One size fits all - One approach, one look, one series of templates, one way of doing things - a recipe for one way of failing. It's like a shoe company stating that it is now only going to produce size seven shoes because, on average, they should fit everyone. Organizations are not made up of homogenous units but of different types of people doing different things. You need to mould your intranet to suit your users, not the other way around. To do this, you need to really know what your users need, when they need it and how they need it. It might even be necessary to dis-integrate your intranet, that is, break it up into smaller parts that might make more sense to your users and the business.

Everyone can produce and edit content - Even a few seconds' thought should be enough for most people to recognise how ridiculous this assertion is. Producing and editing good content is a skill that very few organisations recognise and in which even fewer provide training. Training, if provided at all, is all about how content can be uploaded onto the intranet, not what should, or more importantly, shouldn't be uploaded. Generally we give little thought to who should be responsible for managing and editing intranet content and, in many cases, it ends up in the hands of those who don't have the slightest talent or proficiency in the role. The art of editing and producing good content has not been respected sufficiently in the intranet zero. Why is this? Because no-one ever looks at intranet content anyway. A vicious circle is born.

Intranets will magically remove information silos - This misconception is based on the fact that, just because everyone in an organisation can technically access all of the content, all of the time, that they will. They won't. Valuable information is siloed even more effectively in Intranet Zero by being mixed in with sub-standard content. The poor user then has great difficulty finding information and, when they've finally found it, they have no idea whether it is trustworthy or not. Many users find it easier to treat all intranet content the same and not trust any of it.

All intranet information must be visible all of the time - James Robertson (see Note 2), the intranet expert, has said that much of the content is put up in the hope that ‘someone, sometime might find it useful'. A triumph of hope over experience in almost every case. A metaphor I use a lot for intranet content is fog. If each piece of content can be considered as a drop of water suspended in the air, you can see that a few drops will have little effect on visibility but, as more and more drops are added, you get a mist, when things start to get a little blurry, and finally it becomes a fog through which it is hard to see anything at all.

Content is the same. Keep it minimal and it will be visible and easily found. As more and more is added, it becomes harder and harder to find and, for too many intranets, their users become lost in the information fog and end up giving up on the whole thing. If some content does not need to be in a particular site, or at particular times, it is just adding to the fog - remove it.

The user can find stuff by herself - Imagine that you are in a large library, you don't know what the categories are and you absolutely must find some information as your job depends upon it. What do you do? Go hunting up and down the aisles hoping that you might arrive at the book you need by chance? No, you go straight to a librarian and ask for what you need. Why wouldn't you? The librarian knows what's in the library and how it's structured and categorised. For the librarian, it might only be a few minutes work to locate the required information because he/she has been trained in library science and is familiar with the information the library holds as he/she works there day in, day out. If the customer had to look, it could take days or even weeks.

Yet, we expect intranet users to fend for themselves when trying to find information contained in our intranets. Why aren't we levering the knowledge that intranet teams have gathered over time and make that knowledge work in the favour of their users? In my opinion, intranet teams in the future will need to become information service providers rather than simply maintaining the infrastructure.

Intranets are not as important as Internets - This is a true statement as the situation stands at the moment. But it shouldn't be true. If everyone can see the benefits that the Internet has bestowed in allowing people to access and share information, shouldn't those benefits be even greater within an organisation that is managed and goal-driven?

The current perception within most organizations is that intranets are of secondary of even lower priority. Yet management and staff have to make decisions daily that can affect the health of their organizations. These decisions are not always evidence-based as the evidence, if contained in an intranet, is not always readily available. An opportunity is being missed in many organizations towards improving the quality of decisions taken by not ensuring that relevant, quality information is made available when and where required.

OK so enough about Intranet Zero. Hopefully you've now got the message that something radical needs to be done to improve our intranets so that they can begin to add real value within our companies and organizations.

In the next article, I'll tell you what I think that something should be and how the ‘lean intranet' approach can assist in achieving a robust, well managed intranet 1.0.

In the third article I'll be looking at how we can build on the foundations of intranet 1.0 to achieve intranet 2.0 and beyond....

References

1 Giraffe Forum, May 10th 2008, http://giraffeforum.com/wordpress/2008/05/10/intranets-are-not-information-dumps/

2 James Robertson, Step Two, talking at the BBC, 11th September 2008

View Part 2 of this article »

By Patrick Walsh

Patrick Walsh has been involved in the automotive industry for over 30 years starting out as a lineside inspector and ending up as a Quality and Environmental Manager within a large group of companies. He became interested in intranets and information architecture through attempting to integrate the information related to several ISO standards and make it available to all staff on a shared drive.  Patrick then became a local government intranet manager and raised an intranet from scratch for a large highways department. He is now working at the BBC as an Information Architect and current projects include the semantic web, archive and, of course, intranets.

FUMSI articles by Patrick Walsh »

Click here for copyright permissions!
Copyright 2010 Free Pint Limited

Related articles:

• ISO Management Standards, Intranets and Information Architecture
• Intranet 2.0: Ten Not-So-Easy Steps
• Creating User Centred Taxonomies: Part One
• How the Semantic Web Will Change Information Management: Three Predictions
• The Lean Intranet: from Intranet Zero to Intranet 2.0 and beyond. (Part Two: Intranet 1.0)
• The Lean Intranet: from Intranet Zero to Intranet 2.0 and beyond. (Part Three: Intranet 2.0 and Intranet 3.0)

You may also be interested in:

• Subscribing to FUMSI »
  
  
• Browse the articles database for more Manage articles »
  
  
• Search the articles database for more Manage articles »
  
  
• Tools and reports for Managing Information »