Information Technology Aligned» Information Technology Aligned – Portal, Intranet, Governance, BPM and SOA

Misconceptions – Redesigns and Information Architecture

John Brunswick — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 06:29:55 +0000

In the world of web site management and development, the term “redesign” may at first seem harmless, but can have far reaching implications as to what will be done to deliver a successful project. I recently worked with a customer who was interested in redesigning various internal and external web sites for their organization. It quickly became apparent by observing their discussion that they were asking for something much broader than an exclusively aesthetic redesign. The word “redesign” is often generically used to refer to an updated look of a public web site, intranet or extranet. Unfortunately the expression “redesign” can be misleading about the actual work that will be needed to deliver a finished project and should alert anyone involved in the project that a much deeper understanding of the project needs much be gathered. This dangerous vagueness can been seen as the equivalent of someone telling you that you must pack for a trip, without knowing anything about the duration or destination.

Most major update efforts to a web site generally involve substantial work around “information architecture” that is combined with a visual “redesign” to meet the overall project goals. To complicate matters further there is also the possibility that the overall business messaging of one of more portions of the site may change. For the purposes of this discussion, we will only focus on the differences with design and information architecture from an implementation standpoint. This will help us to introduce formal, industry standard terms that will specify what is required to deliver a project.

To explain the various disciplines that go into a “redesign” it helps to think of a visitor’s experience at an art museum. The following aspects of a museum will help to map the analogy to the industry specific terms of User Experience (UX), Information Architecture (IA) and User Interface (UI).

Attributes of an Art Museum

Wings – analogous to major, top-level navigation on the site
Exhibits – can represent minor navigation that is dependant on what site area a user is in
Pieces of Art – content / applications that a user may interact with
Visitors – users

User Experience (UX)
The Information Architecture and User Interface disciplines both fall under the umbrella of User Experience (UX). Think of UX as how a museum visitor has perceived, learned and used the museum – or more simply – their overall experience. Visitors may not remember specific exhibits within a museum, but may recall that it was a pleasant experience. Within that pleasant experience there were a series of objective elements created that perception. Those elements are Information Architecture and User Interface.

In the world of corporate web site UX this equates to a site that is at its most fundamental level easily navigable, aesthetically pleasing and allows a user to achieve their goal of their site visit with minimal interference. In order to achieve this a solid information architecture and user interface must exist. When the word “redesign” is used for a project it will almost certainly involve both of these elements.

Information Architecture (IA)
Information Architecture dictates how the various wings of the museum are laid out and where various pieces of art are displayed within the wings. IA helps visitors to arrive at various focal points throughout the museum by way of a logical paths. To create logic paths, many museums lay out their exhibits by geography or time period. This helps visitors to enjoy some level of continuity throughout their visit.

IA helps connect users to content and or applications that they require based on their needs. IA can be simple or complex in relation to the diversity of content and actions that a user will experience during their site visit. IA is by its very nature organic and will change over time to continue to try to meet the needs of an organization’s constituents.

IA is like a blueprint of the museum or an upside down tree diagram that attempts to group exhibits and their contents in some logical manner, helping people easily locate them. Somewhat unlike the physical world, sites can allow visitors to arrive at one particular content item or application from a variety of paths.

User Interface (UI)
As visitors locate their areas of interest within the museum and walk through various exhibits they will constantly interact with singange. Museum signs can come in a variety of styles, are potentially highlighted by lighting and can be placed at a wide variety of places throughout the rooms. Rooms can also be painted different colors and contain many types of molding and flooring. Perhaps some exhibits allow visitors to press levers or buttons to engage audio recordings about various works.

UI allows users to interact with and consume underlying content and applications (art / audio) that are grouped together based on the IA that was addressed in the prior section. The UI sets the visual tone for the site – colors, fonts, positioning of various content and or application on the page. A good UI supports maximizing the value from IA underneath it. A visitor to a museum is going to most likely want to visit a specific set of works and be exposed to reference materials around each one of them. The optimal UI will help the visitor to maneuver and consume this with ease.

To further elaborate on this - leaving our museum analogy for a moment – it helps to think of the variety of MP3 players on the market. The Apple iPod is arguably the premier device on the market for variety of reasons, one of the strongest being its very easy to use UI. The iPod lets music listeners quickly and elegantly access their music.

Closing Thoughts
The next time that someone talks about doing a site “redesign” stop to contemplate what is really being requested. Most often a redesign is not purely aesthetic. As organizations change and grow it is essential that they continue to make their online efforts as effective as possible in supporting their businesses. This means that the User Experience will need to be supported by great Information Architecture and User Interface implementations.

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Business Value – Minimal Investment, Maximum Impact

John Brunswick — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 04:24:25 +0000

Looking at web technology it is easy to feel that great business value and user productivity can be gained from creating deep, complex integrations presented through elegant user interfaces. This could be the truth, but it is often far from it.

As I have written many times on Infotechaligned – the only thing that matters is the ultimate business value that an application is delivering. The most value can be gained from even the most mundane technical solution.

How does one define a great technical solution? The best technical solutions solve a business problem with the least amount of technical effort. This includes effort from a full lifecycle standpoint – design, development, implementation, education, operation, maintenance and decommissioning of the solution. A few years ago I worked with a company that demonstrated this point so clearly that I had to highlight it in this post.

This particular organization lends money to low income families at below market rates to aid them in home purchases. For a few years they had been using portal technology that from a development standpoint was focused on business users. This technology required little programming to allow them to further develop their extranet and intranet environments that connected their customers on the lending and purchasing sides of their business.

A need arose within the organization to provide executives with a summary of call activity from their sales team to judge the effectiveness of various calling campaigns.

The IT team spent time deliberating over what course of action to take to solve the business problem. It was decided that the executives could be best served via a dashboard that would roll up various pieces of performance data around these calls made by the sales team and surface the information via their existing intranet.

The following two options were arrived at assuming that the requirements gathering for the solution was already complete, irrespective of the technical solution

Solution 1

Extend their base CRM system to support tracking this data and develop an integration to aggregate and present the data. This solution would require the following development efforts

Extend the data model of the base system to account for the new reporting needs
Develop a presentation layer to gather the relevant information for the business users based on this data model
Create a presentation layer to allow executives to view and sort the information
Integrate the presentation layer into their intranet
Complete a quality assurance cycle on the solution and resolve any issues found with the technological implementation

Solution 2

Use an out of the box – MS Access like – portal component that is already available to capture and present the information. This solution would require the following development effort

Configure the data model and forms relevant for the data collection around the business needs
Configure the presentation layer for the end users to expose the required reports

The above comparison might be deemed biased, but it is important to note that in the 2nd solution data would now be entered into two distinct systems by the sales team and the organization will not have complete control over the presentation format beyond a series of basic, caned reports.

After lengthy deliberation the IT team was strongly in favor of using the first solution due to it giving them full control and confining all sales team activity to the CRM system, but estimated the time to completion at around four months of effort. This effort would detract from having their developers work on core offerings within their extranet to drive business leads to the sales team. The development and QA time, not to mention possible adjustments that may be needed after an upgrade of the underlying system also added to the overall “cost” of the integration.

The first solution would require around 8 hours of effort to configure and 10 minutes from the sales team each week to summarize their call activity, which would be required regardless of the technical solution selected. It would be created on top of an out-of-the-box technology and require almost no quality assurance testing, but require the sales team to end their day outside of their CRM system and leverage the intranet for summation of their calls.

In a perfect world we would have the deep integration of the first solution, married with the ease of development within the second solution. Unfortunately that was not feasible and the business team was requesting a solution as soon as possible from IT.

Ultimately the IT team went with the second option. If more complex needs arose that the configuration based solution could not meet they would have to revisit the solution, but for now they were able to meet 100% of the business needs with this stop-gap effort in a very short time span. Given the limited effort and accuracy in addressing the problem, this had tremendous positive impact with the business.

This example of success is perhaps one of the most powerful, pragmatic solutions that I have come across in my enterprise software work. This is an extreme example, but hopefully there might be a space within your organization that allows you to provide this same level of success with minimal effort. Using simple, configuration-based approaches to development whenever possible is an outstanding way to provide value. They may at first seem too lightweight and due to their technical ease may be overlooked at first pass by a development staff, but never count them out for their ability to provide a big win for your business teams.

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Intranet Page Usability – Like a Good Dinner Party

John Brunswick — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 05:39:59 +0000

A great web page is structured like a good dinner party – not everyone can be the center of attention at the same time. To maximize effective participation it is best to have small pockets of focus exist throughout the dinner that people can engage with. In order for those pockets of focus to stand out in the crowd, there needs to be space for people to differentiate themselves. For this same reason not everything on a web page can scream for attention if the guest is to have a good experience.

If everyone at a dinner party were to be shouting over each other, they would be be drowned out in the crowd and create a confusing, noisy, chaotic, user experience for any visitors. Contrast needs to exist to help people to quickly decide what information or discussion they would like to engage in. Thinking about a web page like a dinner party can help to guide how many things on a page can speak to the users and a particular volume.

This analogy has helped me to highlight the importance of establishing focus on pages to non-ux oriented business analysts. In order to make the most of all of their hard work gathering business requirements and forming a solution, we need to ensure that the party we host is enjoyable for our guests. To take our analogy a bit further we can view a site (our dinner party) as simplistically having two parts – an “arrival” (a home or departmental landing page) and a “joining a discussion” (detail page) portion.

This generic framework helps us to establish some guidelines that can be extrapolated out further as needed.

Arrival – Critical to have Effective Contrast
When arriving at a good dinner party there are small groups of people, perhaps three to five clusters, that are carrying on individual discussions. From quickly surveying the room a guest is able to get a sense of who is involved in each discussion and the topics of conversation in each. In each conversation there is generally one person that at any given time is the main participant in the discussion, allowing the guest to discern the composition of each discussion.

This is exactly how we want our guest to experience our site upon arrival to a home or departmental page. This allows users to quickly understand the content and or actions that are available to them without having to arduously examine the page. It is critical that only a few messages on the page can have high contrast – all other supporting material must be displayed at a lower “volume”. This is just as with a series of dinner party discussions – there needs to be contrast, it cannot be a noisy room if the guests are to comfortably navigate the page.

As illustrated above, the top layer of the above pyramid accommodates a few main points that represent the discussion groups within the room. The supporting materials take a back seat to the main focal points and provide further detail to help the user understand if the content or action pertains to them. Any unrelated material should only have briefly detailed links for more detail.

A good example of this might be a page that supplies information about travel and expenses to users within an intranet. The page would have guidelines on meals, corporate credit card sign-up, automobile rentals, and an application that will let users submit expenses as well as contact information for accounts payable employees.

To demonstrate polar opposite examples of a poorly structured landing page vs a well structured one please reference the following examples.

I am not singling out Microsoft due to beliefs around their platform, but from a user experience standpoint Microsoft has done a very poor job of structuring their home page. I would guess that they have ended up designing the site by “committee” and the poor user experience is not due to lack of design experience within their organization.

In sharp contrast, SAP also has many products and services, but does a much better job of giving users a clear understanding of where they should look and interact for more information. They closely follow the Arrival Volume Pyramid methodology.

Group Discussion – Tight Focus with Relevant Material and Depth

Once within a discussion it is even more important to constrain the volume of each participant if the discussion is going to be effective. There should be one message and all supporting materials shoudl directly support the main message.

For the purposes of relating the dinner party group discussion to an intranet page, we can continue our example from the “arrival” scenario described above and think of this as a detail page describing expense policies for automobile rentals that was accessed from a page outlining all expenses policies.

The pyramid above illustrates the increased focus that is needed to make a detail type of page effective for the guests. The supporting information on the page only supports the main point. Any of the other material generally does not have more detail than a nagivational link to another section of the site.

I hope that the above explanation can help people to convey the importance of contrast in their designs in order to make a guest’s experience as efficient as possible. For information around prioritizing, organizing content and messaging on a page take a look at Intranet User Experience Design.

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Intranet User Experience Design

John Brunswick — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 19:53:35 +0000

In the world of corporate web portals user experience tends to take a backseat during a project. After all – with the requirements gathering, coding, configuration and additional tasks that need to be completed, who can bother setting aside time to deal with something wildly subjective like user experience? What intranet team has a dedicated user experience person on staff? Besides – we are going to be showcasing all of the difficult integration work and sophisticated development and content that we have created, right?

User experience is an inherent part of an intranet project – whether it is consciously addressed or not. Generally intranet deployments or deployments of a project within an intranet are carried out by the technical team supporting the technology and with their existing workload it is difficult to entertain putting into place another process or piece of paperwork that stands in the way of “getting the job done” (for a better approach see an alternative, pragmatic, delegated approach to portal development). The downside of this is that great technical solutions, regardless of their brilliance could have only a fraction of their value ultimately realized by the end user community. Your production line may have produced the Mercedes of technical solutions, but it is imperative that we do not skimp on the door handles, upholstery and paint job. In the context of a corporate intranet the following items often need answers that a purely technical approach cannot address

General page structure and content placement
Button and link placement
Navigation options
Titles for buttons, links, content headings and navigation

Even though we are creating bits and bytes – we must not overlook that the end product is essentially tangible and because of this a clear direction for rudimentary user interaction will help tremendously.

The User Experience Bull’s-eye

Thankfully by employing some very lightweight user experience design fundamentals we can drastically improve user experience. A simple framework – our “Experience Bull’s-eye” – can provide a way to guide design and development of a solution, producing much higher returns on everyone’s investment of time and technology. Since this concept has such a great impact and requires a minimal investment of time, this Bull’s-eye should become part of every project’s documentation. It provides a top-down approach to the fundamental design of the project to maximize user benefit. The Experience Bull’s-eye will explicitly or effectively

Provide everyone with a shared understanding of the main goal for the project user interaction
Get buy-in from stakeholders about the priority of various goals for the project
Create a compass to guide and mediate decision making around how the project’s basic user interaction will be developed

The framework is inspired by a method that Hillman Curtis outlined in his book “Flash Wed Design – The Art of Motion Graphics” created by Roger Black. Although we are most likely not using Flash for our project – the basic idea that a user is in the middle of many daily activities during their visit and we need to harness their attention in a focused, effective manner on the task at hand. This is imperative if we hope to add value to their experience and support our intranet success.

To create an Experience Bull’s-eye that will act as a compass for any user experience design decision making throughout our project we need to

Build – conduct a brief meeting with the project sponsors / business analysts and interactively create the Experience Bull’s-eye
Use – leverage the Experience Bull’s-eye to guide design and development of our solution

Meet with Project Sponsors / Business Analysts

To construct the Experience Bull’s-eye it is important to have a meeting with the sponsor(s) of the project and other stakeholders that have a vested interest in the success of the project. During the meeting the team leader will draw 3 concentric circles on a whiteboard or flipchart. The leader should clearly state that this exercise is intended to ensure the most value possible from everyone’s hard work and the highest level of user productivity once the solution goes into production. They will then explain that the goal of the meeting is to define the main goal of the user experience in the project. There will be a primary goal for the user interaction that can exist with a series of supporting goals. The remainder of the meeting will then be spent with the leader facilitating open discussion around the main and supporting goals. In a short amount of time this should yield the development of a solid Bull’s-eye.

The guidelines for the meeting should be as follows

The leader should use three circles.
Only one goal can exist in the center – one has to be more important than the others.
Do not have more than 3 items in total – if there are over 3 items the project needs to be further defined and or decomposed into smaller projects.
The final ranking of priorities should be generally agreeable to the group. Any large gap here indicates that the purpose of the deployment should be revisited.

Retail Chain Store Project

ABC Retail Chain Franchises relies on a central corporate intranet to connect their various locations to central information. Headquarters has been struggling to provide their franchises with better information and guidance so they can be successful with their operations and respond quickly to changing market conditions. Currently ABC Retail Chain keeps inventory levels in their mainframe system and wants to make this available to the stores to help them gauge their stocking needs and allow customers to understand when an item might be arriving if it is out of stock. This information will also help the stores to plan when and how they will stock their shelves. Further examples of this guidance might include changing end caps to highlight top selling products or posting advertisements in the store tied to a particular promotion. Headquarters would also like to make sure that instead of holding many management to employee meetings throughout the week that they can maximize their communications using a single delivery channel where information is stored, so that it does not need to be repeated. Based on feedback from one franchise that created their own web forum for employees, ABC Retail Chain has learned that allowing peers to asyncronously ask questions with each other was very helpful to quick problem solving and increasing productivity amongst workers. In a similar vein – a staff directory of names, phone numbers and email addresses has been very popular in helping employees to connect and resolve issues and has been photocopied and sent to each franchise. There have been problems keeping this book up to date though, as the stores frequently have employee turnover due to seasonality.

ABC Retail Chain’s IT department was put in charge of the project and knew that they could aggregate all of the data requested and create an intranet for the franchises. What they struggled with was how to place it all together for the end user.

Tom the IT project leader was responsible for delivering the project under tight deadlines and was getting a bit lost with how his team was going to be able to cobble everything together in some cohesive manner for the users. He pulled his technical team into a meeting and after a few hours they had hashed together the following diagram of the portal that they were comfortable in delivering.

After the meeting the design still did not seem correct, but Tom did not have an expert on his team to tackle User Experience and was short on time. Desperate for some guidance he began to search the web about corporate intranets and struck upon an article on the User Experience Bull’s-eye. Fortunately Tom is collocated at headquarters and he was able to quickly pull together a meeting with his project sponsors and a few local franchise owners and within a hour had created the following Bull’s-eye.

Using the User Experience Bull’s-eye

Now that an Experience Bull’s-eye has been constructed it can act as a compass for any user experience related needs. When designing a page or portion of an end user experience we can now use the Experience Bull’s-eye as a guide.

Now, clear decisions can be made rapidly around the placement of items, labels on buttons and links and other components of a project. Best of all – because the Experience Bull’s-eye was collaboratively developed by the project sponsors and other stakeholders, there is little debate about what the most important part of the experience should be. This will let the technical team focus more on development and no longer have to deal with getting marred down in discussions that detract from their development, integration and deployment time.

Let’s now revisit the ABC Retail Chain Store Project with the Bull’s-eye that Tom has just created. Based on the Bull’s-eye the team decided to

Deletions from the Initial Design

Remove “Human Resources” from the navigation area. It seemed like a good idea to add, but given the priorities in the Bull’s-eye no longer makes sense.
Remove “Rewards” from the navigation area. It seemed like a good idea to add, but given the priorities in the Bull’s-eye no longer makes sense.
Remove “Stock Ticker” from the page body. The tech team loved this idea because they had the data and it looked interesting to have it scrolling along the page. Given the direction from the Bull’s-eye it is obvious that this does not contribute to any of the goals for the project and should be removed.
Remove “Interoffice Personal Buy and Sell”. This seemed like an interesting feature that the tech team liked, letting store employees buy and sell goods with each other. As above – this is technically possible, but does not contribute to the bottom line and should be removed.

Updates to the Design

Move “Stock Levels” navigation item information to actual data within the “My Store” page. The “Stock Levels / Shelf Management” data is the most critical on the basis of the Bull’s-eye that was designed and should be front and center for the employees to best do their jobs.
Rename “Stores” to “My Store” in the navigation. It is important to personalize data and user experience given that the franchises will not care about other franchise owner’s stores – only their own.
“Corporate Announcements” and “Store Announcements” are displayed on the right in order to criticality based on the Bull’s-eye. Management wants a way to communicate with their store owners and managers within the store need to be able to communicate with their employees.

Conclusion

In a project tight on time and short on resources taking a quick pass at understanding how to create a better user experience is critical to creating a portal that is an effective vehicle for communications and data to aid decision making. A small upfront investment will yield significant gains from the result of a more focused user experience. With the Bull’s-eye User Experience approach a minimal amount of time is needed to create a compass that will act as the source of truth throughout a project and lay the foundation for an impactful user experience that directly addresses the purpose of the project, adding the most business value possible.

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Intranet Content Maintenance Tips

John Brunswick — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 16:35:38 +0000

Anyone familiar with intranets knows the pain of not applying best practices to content maintenance strategies upfront in an initial deployment. As part of a governance plan (link here) it is essential to design the maintenance strategy early on in a deployment.

The pain generally becomes apparent when trying to figure out why old content exists within the intranet or how to restructure content after reorganization. I have had the luxury of being part of many corporate intranet developments and privy to the management teams and activities behind them. Based on what I have seen there are a few quick and easy gems that help to reduce the management overhead of running an intranet. Please see below for the series of tips that collectively can free the time of an IT staff to focus on more pressing needs.

Tip #1

Content Owner – always include a link to contact information of the content owner, their manager and department on the pages that they have created.

Why?

Inevitably your intranet will grow over the course of many years. Over this period of time employees will leave, change departments, etc. It is guaranteed that people will periodically wonder why certain content may be out of date or if it still belongs within the intranet. You now have a simple fix.

Tip #2

Empowerment – an IT department is not allowed to post content for the business.

Why?

Due to the maturity of content management systems it is counterproductive to have IT posting business content. Their time can be much better spent looking at ways to automate process for the business or reduce the amount of time it takes to access and use certain systems.

*** link here to various articles that I have done about this ***

Tip #3

Peer Education – if someone wants to post content on the intranet they are required to take a quick course on the basics of how it is done. Once a member of a department or project has been taught – they are now responsible for empowering others in the group who wish to use the technology.

Why?

Just like tip #2 an intranet is going to be most successful when the content maintainers are empowered to manage their own content. By supporting bad habits and shortcutting the proper process the reliance on IT for these tasks will be reinforced.

*** link to article here ***

Tip #4

Search – add metadata to content to provide clean search results.

Why?

Tending to Metadata might sound impractical and create a high level of overhead for content contributors – but it is an essential part of making sure searching for data within the intranet is painless. This is especially true when then same keywords can produce a result set with irrelevant information. A good example might be people that work with products and or services that have various version numbers. Chances are that when you run a search the result set will contain very old data, in addition to the new data that you are looking for. This can be frustrating as we potentially can only search on relevancy or date, not both at once so by adding some simple metadata to indicate the version of the product or service that we are searching for.

*** link to governance article here ***

Tip #5

Feedback – make it easy for users to send their feedback to content owners (see Tip 1 above)

Why?

If there is an issue with the content or a request about it, the owner can be quickly reached. This saves time for people trying to connect with various parts of their organization needed to complete their job and generally enhances the quality of the content within the intranet on the basis of feedback.

Tip #6

Insight – if your intranet platform has available search logs check them periodically

Why?

This provides a wealth of information about what is important to your users and indicates how the intranet and business teams might be able to better help them. If people are searching for various topics that do not have corresponding content within the intranet, it can potentially increase the value of the intranet for the end users by including content around what they were searching for, but could not find.

I hope that this list has been helpful and uncovered one of more items that have not been considered for your intranet deployment. Do you have any tips that you would like to share? Please feel free to drop me a line with your thoughts.

Anyone familiar with intranets knows the pain of not applying best practices to content maintenance strategies upfront in an initial deployment. As part of a governance plan it is essential to design the maintenance strategy early on in a deployment.

Tip #1
Content Owner – always include a link to contact information of the content owner, their manager and department on the pages that they have created.

Why?
Inevitably your intranet will grow over the course of many years. Over this period of time employees will leave, change departments, etc. It is guaranteed that people will periodically wonder why certain content may be out of date or if it still belongs within the intranet. You now have a simple fix.

Tip #2
Empowerment – an IT department is not allowed to post content for the business.

Why?
Due to the maturity of content management systems it is counterproductive to have IT posting business content. Their time can be much better spent looking at ways to automate process for the business or reduce the amount of time it takes to access and use certain systems. Learn more about how business and IT can collaborate to maximize value.

Tip #3
Peer Education – if someone wants to post content on the intranet they are required to take a quick course on the basics of how it is done. Once a member of a department or project has been taught – they are now responsible for empowering others in the group who wish to use the technology.

Why?
Just like tip #2 an intranet is going to be most successful when the content maintainers are empowered to manage their own content. By supporting bad habits and shortcutting the proper process the reliance on IT for these tasks will be reinforced. Learn more about Maximizing Portal ROI – Education, Production Capacity and Stewardship Delegation.

Tip #4
Search – add metadata to content to provide clean search results.

Why?
Tending to Metadata might sound impractical and create a high level of overhead for content contributors – but it is an essential part of making sure searching for data within the intranet is painless. This is especially true when then same keywords can produce a result set with irrelevant information. A good example might be people that work with products and or services that have various version numbers. Chances are that when you run a search the result set will contain very old data, in addition to the new data that you are looking for. This can be frustrating as we potentially can only search on relevancy or date, not both at once so by adding some simple metadata to indicate the version of the product or service that we are searching for. Learn more about Portal Governance.

Tip #5
Feedback – make it easy for users to send their feedback to content owners (see Tip 1 above)

Why?
If there is an issue with the content or a request about it, the owner can be quickly reached. This saves time for people trying to connect with various parts of their organization needed to complete their job and generally enhances the quality of the content within the intranet on the basis of feedback.

Tip #6
Insight – if your intranet platform has available search logs check them periodically

Why?
This provides a wealth of information about what is important to your users and indicates how the intranet and business teams might be able to better help them. If people are searching for various topics that do not have corresponding content within the intranet, it can potentially increase the value of the intranet for the end users by including content around what they were searching for, but could not find.

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Intranet Success Workbook – Winning is not a Guessing Game

John Brunswick — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 19:05:18 +0000

Launching a corporate intranet or new initiative within an existing intranet requires investment in the form of labor and capital. Before allocating time and resource to deliver a project, wouldn’t it be nice to understand if it has an opportunity to contribute positively by adding business value? Fortunately, achieving intranet project success from a business standpoint does not have to be a guessing game.

Over a series of various online community and corporate intranet deployments, heuristics have emerged as to what will make the community a “success” and provide a return on the investment. These heuristics can be used with a broad array of deployments within your corporate platform to gauge what business value is created for the end users of the platform.

These guidelines can be condensed into a workbook format to help us to understand and prioritize development activities on the basis of the value that they provide. The workbook includes a series of questions that fall into five basic categories outlined below.

Content – knowledge workers require access to various documents and materials that are analyzed and synthesized in order to perform their job functions.
Process – a task or series of related tasks that can be represented as a workflow that workers need to interact with at some frequency in order to perform their job functions.
Access – can potentially present a barrier to use if complex or redundant authentication to systems is required. Conversely, if multiple systems become available from a single authentication value in the form of time savings can exist.
Application – various line of business systems are critical to employee’s ability to perform their jobs. This category relates to these tools that are often specific to collecting and referencing data for a particular department or job function.
Time – acts as a well understood, easy to convey metric to evaluate possible savings from projects.*

*Please note that this workbook will only touch lightly on time savings. Time savings is a byproduct of various efficiencies that an intranet potentially offers users. The workbook focuses on the underpinnings of what delivers the time savings.

The workbook has a variety of line items associated with each category. Within each category there are groups of line items that need to be marked with a y or n indicating if they are applicable. For each group select only one line item can be answered. As the workbook is completed a running tally is displayed in the upper right hand corner of the sheet. If when finished the score is above zero – the project that you have outlined will provide solid business value and give your end users a compelling intranet space.

Download Intranet Success Workbook

I would be interested in feedback on the workbook, as there are many additional line items that could be added.

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Niche Cooking for Intranet Success

John Brunswick — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 00:37:49 +0000

Creating a winning recipe for an internally facing corporate portal is a daunting task. At the onset of a project there is a natural tendency to think that having a large target audience is the route to success and value. What has been found through practice though can actually be quite the opposite. Whether we are experienced with portal deployments or not, there are some fundamental dynamics that if carefully orchestrated can help to ensure a deployment’s success.

When working with powerful, versatile technology it is not uncommon to loose sight of the human element that we need to cater to for success. The “because it can” factor is tough to ignore and often initiatives tend to gravitate toward this. In order for a deployment to be successful, people need to walk away from their experience with added value. Using a restaurant analogy, this added value differentiates the quality of a portal deployment from an outstanding four star meal to an unappealingly average fast food meal.

A Grand Opening
Just as with a restaurant opening, a portal deployment goes through a series of phases that ultimately will determine if the investment (servers and software licensing) is worth it.
1. Grand Opening
2. Quality Assessment
3. Reputation Establishment
4. Patronage Level Establishment
5. Patronage Fluctuation

Grand Opening
When a new restaurant opens its doors people are drawn by a mix of marketing effort and personal curiosity. In our case we are most likely going to get exposure through a corporate email or newsletter that lets people know that a new project has been deployed with the portal.

Quality Assessment
What happens next is absolutely crucial. Users visit, or in the case of our restaurant, people eat there. This might seem obvious, but when we look at a corporate portal it is easy to overlook since we have a tendency to be drawn toward and tout features over the applicability of an experience, or meal, to the individual.

Reputation Establishment
Users need to have a rewarding, compelling experience. With the ability to quickly communicate and multitask via email and other electronic means, people have tight schedules and are generally unwilling to incorporate an additional tool if it does not provide significant value. When they experience the portal deployment they will ask themselves a few simple questions: “Did this make my life easier? Cut down on my workload? Enable a process more effectively that my traditional communication and information management methods?” The portal will not grow or assist the business through its novelty, but by the outcome of this hard, black and white examination.

Based on this assessment a reputation is established about the value provided by the new service within the portal or the portal itself. This provided value is where our target audience becomes so crucial. Did we just cook generic food in an attempt to satisfy a wide range of people? Or did we cook a specialty food that directly targeted a particular group of enthusiasts? The word that spreads throughout the enterprise is based on this crucial experience. It will ultimately come down to either satisfying a small group of people who will become vocal advocates, or frustrating a large group of people with a mediocre experience and creating a stigma around the portal platform.

Patronage Level Establishment
If we were able to deliver a satisfying meal we will have done our job to establish devoted patrons. Having this group of individuals will allow us to have sustained value within our portal deployment.

If we did not provide a good meal, people will say “Yeah, I have eaten there, but it was nothing special.” This means that whatever value we provided was quickly realized and then lost, leaving our organization with an “Empty Portal” or failed project.

Patronage Fluctuation
Assuming that we did provide a good experience for our users by adding value, we will pick up positive word of mouth. This will ideally open a good dialogue between these patrons and our business and technology teams. With this communication channel we can continue to invest in shaping value for this group of users, growing out patronage. Beyond this, as more people become advocates of the platform, we can continue to develop solutions for the business members we are serving and gain even more return from our investment with additional, iterative, focused releases leveraging the portal framework.

Getting the Recipe Right – Tips for Success
Continuing with the restaurant analogy, we need to make sure that when they ask for a soufflé we serve it to them instead of crème brulee (as good as our crème brulee might be). The portal is a “top down” tool and that means the business needs to dictate the direction of development initiatives with these needs. In order to make sure that the platform can best assist in driving us toward our business goals, the following items are imperative for success:

1. Invite Food Critics – Get participation from the business unit that you are targeting. These are the people who will be eating at your establishment. This is about what they need, not the buffet of things that you can place in front of them.

2. Serve Bite Sized Pieces – Remember that small is manageable. Let your menu evolve based on the demands of the business. Do not try to pack it full of choices from the onset.

3. Time Food Preparation – Great restaurants have impeccable timing to ensure that their dishes are served in the proper order and correct temperature. Be sure to heavily weigh the benefits of any major development portion of a project. Having one piece of the project get away from you could ruin an otherwise good project as the business will be eager to complete their meal.

4. Maintain Great Ingredients – Governance is essential to maintaining value for a deployment. Just because we served up a great meal the first time does not mean that we are set and can move on. We need to put controls in place to ensure that the quality of the meals stays consistent or improves over time in order to retain patrons and grow our business.

Final Thoughts
Thinking back to how all of this applies to the overall value that we can provide, it is apparent that a large scale launch, although seemingly impressive, serves up less value in the long run if we are not focused on serving targeted, high value tools to our audience. We are sometimes tempted to do things just because we have the ingredients, but in order to build a thriving business, it is vital that we listen to and deliver the great treats that our customer base is interested in.

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