Are some organizations “losing it” when it comes to their intranets?

April 19, 2011

James Robertson describes a simple, practical 3-step maturity model for intranets in his post Introducing the Essential Intranet. This is vintage James, with a vision that is fundamentally positive and encouraging.

Yet I beg to differ. I would love to think that companies move from Step 1 to gradually reach 3, even if it takes years. What bothers me is that I don’t think this happens for a fair number of organizations.

The intranet divide?

I’m looking forward to James’ closing keynote at Intranets2011 in Sydney where he’ll be talking about what makes intranets essential and how to get from 1 to 3. I’ll be giving the opening keynote, and at one point during the first day we’ll be sharing the stage for what is billed as “The Big Debate“. This may be an opportunity to debate my concern: why are some organizations falling far behind while others are leading the way? What makes the difference?

Steps 2 and 3 as James describes them are similar to Stages 2 and 3 in the model I introduced a few years ago but it’s Stage 1 that is the problem. James’ descriptions:

I quote from Introducing the Essential Intranet:

New intranets. At the outset, new intranets are focused on growth. Starting small, organisations start to understand what an intranet can do for them, and what information needs to be captured and communicated.
Useful intranets. Intranets easily grow to thousands or ten of thousands of pages in size. They provide useful information for all staff, from policies and procedures to updates and news. The primary focus is typically on content and communication, with links provided to other enterprise applications.
Essential intranets. Essential intranets underpin the day-to-day work of staff. They are also closely aligned to business priorities, and are designed to directly support service delivery and key business processes. These are business tools, and “how things are done”.

Steps/Stage 2 and 3 sync: Global Intranet Trends for 2010….

Stage 2 – the ambitious period – becoming the way of working

Business and employee life applications are becoming available through the intranet. Customization based on roles or activities has started.
The role of intranet management is becoming clearer. It is evolving from publishing to providing services for business and functional managers.
Senior management is beginning to get interested. The entry page (or pages) are becoming more visible and in many organizations, management is beginning to argue about what should be on the entry page and who should control it.

Stage 3 – the mature period – the way of working

A Stage 3 intranet has a high degree of purpose. It provides access to many if not most of the business and employee life applications in the organization.
Content management systems are in place and decentralized publishing is usually implemented.
The intranet management role is evolving towards one of a “business partner” for key stakeholders. In some organizations, the role may have evolved to facilitating collaboration and knowledge sharing.

Many intranets are stuck in Stage 1

Stage 1 in my model is what I call “the early period – disconnected from the way of working”
Quoting again from Global Intranet Trends for 2010:

There are few core business or employee life applications integrated into the Stage 1 intranet. It is not yet the entry point into the organization’s information and applications.
The intranet has out-of-date information, has no clear purpose and management does not consider it to be important for the organization. It is more of a “nice-to-have”.
The intranet management role is not clearly defined and may not even exist formally. The person “in charge of” the intranet is often the main or only content publisher. This is usually an add-on role to be done when the person has time.

It is not a question of age. Previous global intranet surveys show that the older the intranet, that’s to say the longer it has been since the last revamp, the more likely it will be in Stage 1.

Looking at the data for 2010, we see that the percentage of Stage 1 intranets have increased while Stage 3 have decreased over the past couple of years. Is this because the number of participating organizations in the survey is increasing, and now becoming more representative of the “real world”?

Is senior management to blame?

I believe it comes down primarily to senior management awareness, which then enables defining a strategy and having the resources to implement it. Today, people are becoming aware that digital-enablement is important, not just externally but also internally. So, what worries me is why so many organizations are still in Stage 1. Any ideas?

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Comments

PeterElias

April 20, 2011

I agree with you. I think the evolution fails to occur all too often. I would love to get the hospital where I work to even consider stage 1.

During the initial season of H1N1 panic, they refused to let a group of about 15 physicians use a forum on their protected intranet to work on the institution’s preparedness and response. Even though we were in different hospitals in a 45 mile radius and had huge clinical schedules, they insisted on f2f meetings and phone calls.

When they do post announcements or updates about projects, they NEVER include a link for sending feedback or suggestions.

Almost nothing allows subscription.

In attempt to control information and communication, they will drive it off-campus and marginalize themselves. That’s fine and not my problem – but the harm that does to institutions is immense.

My personal opinion is that the management profession is facing a sea change not unlike that faced by scribes after the printing press and movable type arrived. (Shirky talks about this.) Instead of being necessary to assure communication, the flow of information, and resource availability, they are slower and less capable than the tools now available and need to change their role. Perhaps to keeping the communication, information management and collaboration tools available and operational?

Peter

Samuel Driessen

April 20, 2011

Interesting post, Jane. I commented on this based on your last report. I too am surprised about so little progress in the intranet field. I don’t think this is limited to this field though. One big issue I see with lots of IT is that it’s hardly related to the business processes of organizations. Or, more importantly, the way an organization works (which doesn’t always map onto processes…). This also goes for social media, by the way. Another issue is the fact that not many organizations (or decision makers in orgs) see how important it is to support information and communications processes. To be it is the lifeblood of the company, but when I say this to (some) managers I usually get blank stares…

Jed

April 20, 2011

Jane

It would interesting to see if you could somehow phrase a question in this years survey, so we could study the responses.

I feel organizations are stuck in phase 1 because they have no vision, hence no strategy to achieve it, nor any KPI’s to measure it.

The have no vision of the utility of the intranet, nor the digital workplace in general because they have no idea about “information management” in general, and here I side squarely with Bob Boiko; the senior management is let down by a CIO who has no idea about the “I” and is usually a “Director of Technology”. Thus the intranet ends up in the lap of ‘Corporate Communications’ who may have some idea about how tehy can use it to meet their own objectives, but it remains “unsexy”, unmanaged and under-funded.

Jane McConnell

April 20, 2011

Samuel – You suggested in Linkedin that I ask the top 3 reasons why people feel stuck with their intranets. I bet a lot comes back to the decision makers, as you say.

Jed – Agree 100 % with you. I need to find clear ways to formulate the reasons so that survey respondents can tick yes or no, in order to get some quantitative readings in addition to an open question. Vision + strategy + KPIs (that are meaningful, and not just numbers). That’s the challenge.

Peter – Thanks for your very relevant examples, straight from the trenches!

Stephan Schillerwein

April 27, 2011

It might also be interesting to see whether the stage 1 population is largely made up of the same companies every year or whether it’s mainly “newcomers” falling into that category.

What we see time and again is this: many organizations – including large international corporations – are really just “discovering” the intranet. Of course, most of them had some form of intranet already, but never really looked after them until these days. Now with some form of responsibility assigned to them they start showing up in the statistics, as the new intranet managers discover that there is lots of valuable stuff out there and for instance participate in your intranet survey for the 1st time.

Martin White

May 1, 2011

I think that the key question might be “Does your organisation see information as an asset?” The reason why I have introduced my Information Charter http://www.intranetfocus.com/about/information-charter is that I have found it difficult to describe what I mean by ‘information management’. I might even go as far as saying that if a company cannot commit to this charter then there is no chance the intranet will get the support it needs to move beyond the initial stages of development.

Sadly most business schools pay very little attention to information management. So it’s no wonder that both MBAs and also senior managers who go on short courses at these business schools have little or no understanding of the value of information.

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