The Tube: An intranet that empowers employees
In 2009, international design firm IDEO won an Intranet Innovation Award for its intranet, The Tube. In this case study from the awards, the IDEO team highlights what they see as critical factors not just to build a social intranet, but also to enable and empower employees to work in new, more rewarding ways.
The Tube combines social networking tools such as blogs, wikis, and real-time screen sharing, with legacy business systems such as HR databases, asset management systems and email. The system has created ways for individuals to reveal passions and expertise, for teams to learn from each other, for offices to feel better connected, and for the company to build on shared themes and directions.
In addition to hardware and software technologies, the Tube design team considered how IDEO’s culture encourages collaboration and sharing, and what incentives could lead to the adoption of new tools and methods.
The unique success of the Tube comes from the insight that effective knowledge sharing is a social activity that is enabled by technology, rather than a technological solution bolted onto an existing work culture. This led to the design of systems that people actually want to use.
Blogs and wikis have proliferated widely. After a history of failed wiki systems, IDEO’s new tool has seen over 14,000 pages created in the first 18 months of use. In addition to each employee’s individual blog, there are more than 40 blogs addressing a wide variety of subjects with an average of over 100 posts each month. These include company-specific issues, such as career growth and office updates, to more general-interest topics such as sustainability, and health and wellness projects.
People and projects
The crown jewels of IDEO’s intranet system, however, is its interlinked people and project pages. More than 1,000 project pages were created in the first six months following that feature’s launch, and 97 percent of employees have voluntarily taken ownership of their personal pages.
Multiple software platforms
Software languages used on the Tube include Ruby, MySQL, .NET, PHP, SOLR, Perl, and Flash (AS2/3). Existing collaborative platforms integrated include Moveable Type Enterprise Edition, ThoughtFarmer, LiveLOOK, Google Search Appliance and IDAM.
By reducing the need for training to almost zero and targeting real user needs, adoption of the Tube has been quick and thorough and led to:
- 1,000 Project Pages created in the six months since that feature’s launch.
- 14,000 wiki pages in the first 18 months.
- 97 percent of employees voluntarily taken personal ownership of their personal pages.
- Over 40 group blogs addressing a wide variety of subjects (for example, company-specific issues such as career growth and office updates; general interest topics, such as social impact, sustainability, and health-and-wellness projects) with more than 100 new posts per month and companywide readership.
Collaboration questions: is your organization ready and willing?
“Effective knowledge sharing is a social activity that’s enabled by technology”. This key insight, and its reverse (“Technology alone will not increase knowledge sharing”) guided the design team throughout the implementation phase of the project. The result:
- Leads to tools that people actually want to use themselves, rather than ones that required coercing in order to create content.
- Builds pointers to people, helping facilitate collaboration and conversation, rather than providing warehouses of valuable managed information.
A bigger organizational picture and bright, collaborative future
IDEO’s interlinked people and project systems bring together all known information about employees and previous work. In turn, the system can be used to make transparent and bring to life previously opaque knowledge about an individual’s passion, expertise and experience. This has transformed the organization’s ability to identify and leverage employees based on interest and skill set match rather than proximity or prior knowledge.
People visualization, or “mapping” tools, provide big-picture views of the organization as a whole in terms of talent and skill level, as well as the opportunity to offer feedback on that organization and the place of individuals within it. IDEO’s wiki system has become an essential piece of infrastructure for the organization. Flourishing groups have emerged around shared interest and expertise that have no physical “home” and otherwise would have no way to exist.
The “Feedmail” service automatically watches an easily customizable subscription of blogs on the user’s behalf and delivers daily digests of new content to his or her inbox. This closes the loop on blogs: people write them because they know their content will be read, people read them because the content comes to them.
Five principles for designing effective collaboration software
From its experience developing the Tube, the IDEO team established five principles it believes are essential to design collaborative software people will actually use:
1. Build pointers to people
Rather than attempt to capture everything in a database with the hope that others will tap into it, we strive to identify the key elements of information that help you understand who someone is in terms of expertise and experience, so that you have the best experience possible.
2. Reward individual participation
Systems that require altruism to succeed fail. Systems that mandate compliance fail to win hearts and minds. We attempt to design systems that simultaneously meet the goals of the organization while motivating individual participation.
3. Demand intuitive interfaces
To enable viral adoption, ease of use is essential in social software. To go from a consumer to a contributor without training requires intuitive interfaces and as little extra work as possible. Similarly, disparate tools should be avoided in favor of a single, consistent user experience.
4. Go where people already are
No matter how amazing your tools are, if people have to go out of their way to use them you will always have an uphill battle on your hands. Wherever possible we try to integrate into existing workflows, support the tools people are already using, and generally get into their world instead of asking them to come to ours.
5. Build adaptive systems
Prototype early and with the people/culture that will actually use it. Understand that your system is always a sort of prototype – it will constantly change and grow.
In short, create adaptive, intuitive, people-centric systems that reward individual participation and integrate into existing workflows.
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