| |
By Patrick Walsh
 In the first of this series of three articles I talked about intranet zero; so called as it offers virtually zero benefit to users and their organizations. This is how Gerry McGovern describes it - ‘No organization would allow its physical factories to be managed with the level of messiness, carelessness, confusion, waste content, and general untidiness that occurs daily on most intranets' (see Note 1).
The prevalence of intranet zero is confirmed by Toby Ward of Prescient when commenting on the Global Intranet Trends 2009 Report - ‘The study finds that only 14% of the respondent intranets consider the intranet as "business critical' (see Note 2).
Altogether quite a damning indictment on the current state of intranets. However, I also realise that some intranets are better than others - they might be categorised as say 0.5 rather than zero. But I have not yet heard of an intranet approach that, in my opinion, will lead to a truly robust intranet 1.0.
I won't argue that there may be many equally valid definitions of what a good intranet 1.0 might be and, perhaps, many different paths to achieving robustness. In this second article, I am suggesting just one approach that I feel might give intranet teams a chance of achieving a robust, sustainable intranet 1.0 - the Lean Intranet.
What is ‘lean'?
The concept of ‘leanness' comes from Toyota and automotive manufacturing (see Note 3). ‘Lean manufacturing' occurs when an organization has cut out all waste and non-essential activity leaving only value-adding activities. Only truly ‘lean' automotive organizations can fully support the ‘just in time' delivery of goods and services and allow for the flexibility of supplying in a ‘pull' environment, building only what the customer needs when she needs it.
In the seminal book Lean Thinking (see Note 4) five ‘lean' principles are identified. I've given some thought to how these might be applied to intranets.
1. Specify what creates value from the customer's point of view
Any user from the CEO to the receptionist should be able to point to content in an intranet that they find valuable. In order to achieve this, you need to understand what content your users really need to create value within your organization. Once you've done this then remove everything that doesn't add value from the intranet. This can be hard as a lot of people get attached to their stuff, but you need to be ruthless. More content means more ‘information fog' making it harder for the users to find the content that they really need.
2. Identify all of the steps across the value stream
Identify and document how the intranet works in terms of what needs to be done, who should do it, when should they do it, how they do should do it and where it goes once they've done it.
Once the process is fully understood and documented it now becomes possible to continually improve it. In really good organizations this will be done for all value adding activities, not just the intranet, and this information will, of course, form a vital part of the intranet content.
3. Make those actions which create value flow
Remove obstacles, constraints and eliminate gaps between discrete activities. This requires a holistic, organization-wide approach and sometimes this can be hard to achieve, especially when dealing with people who are used to working in silos. But, if a smooth flow between activities can be achieved, significant improvements will definitely accrue. This is especially important for those activities that assist knowledge/content creation and information flows.
4. Only make what is pulled by the customer just-in-time
New technologies make it possible for all users to call up information and create their own unique dynamic pages rather than just passively viewing information supplied on static web pages. The use of RSS, for instance, means that information can come to the user rather than the user having to go out and look for it. One of the key activities in the ‘Lean Intranet' will be to ensure that relevant information is delivered to specific users when and where needed in formats of the user's choice.
5. Strive for perfection by constantly removing layers of waste
Constantly examine your intranet's processes, continually reduce all non-value adding activities and remove all low value content.
Waste comes in many forms. In the ‘Toyota Way' (see Note 5) Jeffrey Liker identifies eight types of waste (‘muda' in Japanese). I've identified below how these wastes might apply in intranets.
- Overproduction - producing more content to cover a topic than is needed by the user
- Waiting - time wasted by users trying to find content and time wasted waiting for responses to queries from the intranet team
- Unnecessary transport - can the content be brought to the user (e.g. by RSS feeds) rather than the user having to come to the content?
- Overprocessing - ‘Gold plating' or ‘gilding the lily'. Overprocessing does little more than setting up further barriers between the user and the content they need to access
- Excess inventory - simply too much content; especially obsolete, poor and irrelevant content
- Unnecessary movement - making the user take longer journeys to access content that is strictly necessary
- Defects - poor or missing metadata, broken links, typos, poor grammar
- Unused employee creativity - not considering and utilising the ideas of the intranet team and all users.
All of the above imply that an intranet needs to be minimalist with all of the barriers between the user and target content either removed or minimised.
What would be really different in the ‘lean intranet'?
‘Lean' is an approach not a defined book of rules. However its emphasis on value adding, eliminating waste and giving the customer exactly what they want when they want it, in my opinion, implies that:
From custodians of intranet infrastructure to information service providers
Every organization in the world is swimming in a sea of information. Some are waving but others are definitely drowning. In order to ensure that their organizations get the maximum value from their activities, intranet teams must expand their scope towards managing all forms of information transactions within their organization. I call this the Enterprise-wide Information System (EIS) (see end of article). The intranet will normally form a large part of an EIS but only a part. The holistic management of intranets, feeds, internal data, knowledge creation and the discovery of relevant external content will deliver many benefits.
In my opinion, intranet teams will need to move from being mainly IT-oriented professionals to becoming information service professionals. We might call such professionals information/knowledge specialists (INKS). In my vision of the future, these INKS will interact closely with all staff both at the level of discrete user groups and on an individual basis. Their main aim will be to build group and personal information resources for their users thus helping all staff to attain their maximum potential within the workplace. These INKS will, in effect, be trying to manage the whole information environment within their organizations.
The dis-integrated intranet becomes possible
If indeed the emphasis for intranet teams moves from managing the intranet as a single entity to becoming information service providers, this makes the dis-integration of the monolithic intranet possible.
This does not mean that you need to blow up your intranet! Rather, there will be a need to analyse the different information strands and decide whether all users need to see, or even be aware of the existence of, all strands. From the intranet team's point of view, they will be managing each strand as a service for a discrete set of users. From the user's point of view it should look like a bespoke set of information services tailored to enable the user to perform at the optimum level.
Content is assessed and holistically managed
Content is what adds value within an intranet, but obsolete, poor and irrelevant content adds no value whatsoever. In fact, this type of content might be better termed ‘toxic' content, as it will inevitably poison users' trust in all content held in an intranet.
Toxic content proliferates in many intranets due to the prevalent philosophy that the responsibility for managing content should be fragmented with many content owners having a finger in the pie. This approach inevitably leads to duplication of content, dislocation and disorganization. For many content owners, the intranet is not a priority because they have a day job and a boss to please.
If organizations want to take intranets seriously then they have to take content seriously. While staff may ‘own' content, the formatting, managing and assessment of content must be done by a central team. Keeping content quality high and content volume low must be one of the priorities for the central team. This can be achieved by using tools such as Content Value Analysis (CVA) (see end of article).
For mature intranets it may be necessary to divide content into a roughly 80/20 split. The ‘lean' intranet, the one the user sees, will contain the high quality, high usage content while the larger part is consigned to the ‘unseen' intranet. The ‘unseen' intranet, however, is not an information dumping ground but an archive curated by the intranet team.
Good metadata schemes will need to be applied to all content but especially to the ‘unseen' component as the intranet team may need to retrieve ‘unseen' content in a timely way when requested by a user. One benefit of limiting access in this way to ‘unseen' content is that the navigation and structure of this content only needs to reflect the needs of a single user group - the intranet team itself.
Where content is successfully minimised in this way, the traditional problems surrounding search, navigation and categories will also be minimised and, in many cases, may evaporate completely.
Barriers to accessing information are either removed or minimised
Barriers come in many forms amongst which low grade content, sub-optimal search, poor categorisation, badly thought-out navigation schemes and the ‘toys for boys' approach stand out. We've already talked about content but here's how the other barriers might be addressed.
- Sub-optimal search - James Robertson (see Note 6) makes the telling point that search should be owned not by IT, which all too often is the case, but by the intranet team. James identifies that regular maintenance activities are required to sustain and continually improve search. For me, where search falls down most often is when inadequate or sloppy metadata is applied. Intranet teams will need to train at least some of their members into becoming metadata experts. Good metadata schemes, using the natural language of its users, and also taking into account acronyms, synonyms and probable mis-spellings, will improve findability and reduce your user's frustration levels greatly.
- Poor categorisation - If categories make little sense to users, then they will quickly become disoriented and frustrated when trying to navigate through content. Categories need to be logical to users and in language they can understand. User research, and especially the carrying out of card sorts, can help generate categories that users find logical
- Navigation schemes - All too often the nice, logical navigation structure we start out with becomes lop sided and eventually unusable as we add more and more content. Minimising content will help simplify navigation but, in order to manage navigation, you need to map it (see Note 7). Mapping all your major pages and links will ensure that the navigation structure can be constantly assessed and the effect of any changes can be thought through before implementation takes place
- ‘Toys for boys' a.k.a. ‘Wouldn't it be nice if we could .... ?'. These are words that freeze the marrow in my bones. Organizations need to discuss and decide what their intranet is really for. Write this up one side of a page of A4, frame it and hang it on the wall in front of your desk as a reminder and stick to it. A really effective way of making your intranet less usable and less useful is by filling it up with applications and gizmos that some people think are cool but which are not relevant to the majority of users or to the core purposes of the intranet. When someone says ‘Wouldn't it be nice if we could...' show them the door - quickly!
Continual improvement and continual waste minimisation
This is a core activity in the Lean Intranet. A culture must be inculcated in the intranet team to ensure that it constantly reduces waste. The best approach I have come across in achieving this is kaizen (see end of article). Kaizen as an approach is all about the continuous improvement of the intranet through both structured improvements (projects) and unstructured improvements (small improvements made by the intranet team over time).
Kaizen provides a sustainable solution as it does not rely on one big effort, such as a re-design, to solve problems. Inevitably big projects such as re-designs will be somewhat hit or miss. Instead the kaizen approach relies on iterative passes at problem areas allowing the lessons learnt from previous passes to be implemented and alternative approaches to be investigated over time.
Knowledge creation becomes an integrated activity
It has always been a puzzle to me that in much of the commentary on intranets (James Robertson aside) knowledge creation is an activity that is rarely considered to be something with which intranet teams should get involved. To me it has the potential to drive internal innovation within an organization leading to real competitive advantage.
Don't get knowledge creation mixed up with ‘knowledge management', a term now largely stolen by IT, which is an oxymoron anyway. If knowledge only exists in people's heads you can't ‘manage' it. What you can do is create explicit information based on leveraging the knowledge inside people's heads - knowledge creation.
Many organizations depend routinely upon their people's knowledge to make their processes work. The only problem is that when key staff leave they often take vital knowledge with them. This can have a hugely adverse impact on some organizations.
Knowledge creation can also tap into people's creativity and I really believe that everyone has at least one good idea. Unfortunately, not many organizations make use of this wealth of untapped innovation. The crucial role of Information/Knowledge Specialists (INKS) will be to combine information gained through knowledge creation with other information, internal and external, so that a positive information synergy can be achieved. Only in this way will the full benefit of information-based activities be realised.
Putting customers first
I have mainly used the term ‘users' in this article so far to describe an intranet's customer base. Over the years I heard various terms used by intranet teams for their customers - ‘our staff', ‘them', the ‘faceless mob' and many that are unprintable. However, my preferred term is ‘customer'. In the automotive sector, the customer is king. A ‘customer' is not just the end user but can also be the next person processing the part you are working on and ‘customers' are identified all through the value chain. The philosophy has been termed ‘putting customers first'.
Intranet teams need to define customer groups, as they will have different needs and wants. But the most important thing is to change the culture so that intranet teams also become customer -focused in their thinking. When a customer makes demands on an intranet team the reaction must not be to either ignore them or patronise them by thinking that they know better. If a customer says ‘Jump' the only correct response is to ask ‘How high?'.
So, there you have it. Basically, in the Lean Intranet, information professionals will be removing barriers, minimising and assessing content and continually improving their intranet using a customer-focused approach. Hard to achieve? I won't say that the transition to a lean approach in intranets will be without problems but I know it's possible. I've seen ‘lean' working for many years in the automotive sector helping to produce better cars through more efficient processes. Why not better, more efficient intranets?
In the next, and last, ‘Lean Intranet' article I will be looking at ‘Intranet 2.0 and beyond...'. Where I give my view on what might the future might hold for collaborative approaches and intranets in general.
If you want to know more about Content Value Analysis (CVA), kaizen, Enterprise-wide Information Systems and other intranet approaches see my blog at www.patrickcwalsh.wordpress.com
References
1 Gerry McGovern, The Giraffe Forum, How to manage an intranet, http://giraffeforum.com/wordpress/2008/12/14/how-to-manage-an-intranet/, 14th December 2008
2 Toby Ward, Intranet Blog, Selling an Intranet Redesign, 5th January 2009, http://intranetblog.blogware.com/blog
3 The Manufacturing Institute, http://www.manufacturinginstitute.co.uk/text.asp?PageId=89
4 Lean Thinking: Banish Waste and Create Wealth in Your Corporation, Womack and Jones, ISBN 978-0743231640
5 The Toyota Way, au. Jeffrey Liker, Mc Graw-Hill, ISBN 978-0071392310
6 James Robertson, Step Two, Who owns intranet search?, 18th December 2008, http://www.steptwo.com.au/papers/cmb_searchownership/index.html
7 A Map Based Approach to a Content Inventory, Patrick C. Walsh, Boxes and Arrows, http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/a-map-based-approach
View Part 3 of this article » View Part 1 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 »
![[Get Copyright Permissions]](http://license.icopyright.net/images/icopy-w.gif "[Get Copyright Permissions]")
Click here for copyright permissions!
Copyright 2010 Free Pint Limited
Related articles:
You may also be interested in:
|
