Ask the Guest Expert: Michael Rudnick
Q: What's your interpretation of Jakob Nielsen's 10 Best Intranets of 2009?
A: This year’s winners offer some interesting observations. The biggest, by far, and a trend that Watson Wyatt experienced hands-on in 2008 – is that Microsoft SharePoint is becoming the intranet platform of choice. More on SharePoint later.
Other key points to make about the Nielsen list:
- Governance and executive involvement. Time and again, we see companies undertaking basic graphic redesigns or technology overhaul projects that simply lack sufficient senior level support or sufficient business objectives. We agree with Nielsen that most intranet teams won’t report directly to the CEO, but we do find that the move to SharePoint has had the affect of bringing technology and communication/content people much closer together. We do think companies are going to find that “SharePoint Anarchy” – a term coined by Gartner Group – is a very real concern for organizations without strong, defined and operationally feasible (but not necessarily centralized) governance.
The move to SharePoint has had the affect of bringing technology and communication/content people much closer together.
- Collaboration. The report mentioned collaboration features as being key components for the intranets. The features referred to are exactly the direction companies have been going that have viewed their intranets as “read/write” instead of "read only". This trend in handing over the content ownership keys to employees shows that companies are genuinely getting value from these components. Interestingly, the report doesn’t touch heavily on issues that intranet leadership often faces – fear and push back from the legal department about the risks – the vast majority of which we have found, first hand, to be overblown and far outweighed by the benefits to the organization.
- Facebook behind the firewall. “Facebook-like” collaboration and employee profile functionality is by far the most frequent request we get from our clients. This appears to be similar to what Nielsen has observed. My colleague Adam Wootton feels that this type of people-centric collaboration is going to be the most important key to success for intranets in the coming years as the tools will fundamentally transform the way that people do business – in much the same way that the same tools have transformed the way that the web works as well. Nielsen’s note that 3 of the top intranets were from services firms would validate Adam’s view.
- Analytics. SharePoint has already vastly raised the bar, and eased the chore of managing intranets by the numbers – user behavior via log analysis. We see the biggest barrier not in the technology, but in the lack of time and interest on the part of organizations to mine the rich trove of data that is captured by tools such as WebTrends.
- Platforms. When it comes to technology, we agree the growth in SharePoint is nothing short of remarkable. Nielsen’s reference to intranet platforms is spot on. However we don’t believe products like Autonomy and Google search, which are mentioned in the report, are intranet “platforms” and should be compared to SharePoint or other portal platforms. As my colleague Susan Sanders often says, the real question facing organizations looking to transform their old intranets is whether to use a single, integrated portal platform (Gartner counts only 12 intranet vendors on its latest portal magic quadrant, with IBM and SharePoint being at the top) or build using tools that provide identify management, search, content management, social media, log analysis and so on. Our experience has been that the best intranets are developed when organizations have robust IT skills and a willingness to dedicate those resources to the intranet. For the most part, we’ve seen very few IT departments willing to commit such a large effort. Far more common is the use of an integrated platform, such as SharePoint, that needs far less in-house IT expertise for initial launch, but more importantly, less support for ongoing operations, expansion and growth.
Best-of-breed only works when organizations that have robust IT skills and a willingness to dedicate those resources to the intranet.
- Team size. This is area in which corporations are continually trying to associate a size with total employee population, much as IT or HR has a recognized ration of IT or HR professionals to employees. We find the numbers regarding intranet management to be very suspect – because they're not "normalized", nor account for the vast discrepancy in the way different organizations count full time employees. For example, staff size is highly dependent on many factors – organizational structure, geographic reach of the company, industry and so on. Most companies have a central staff that manages the corporate homepage and core technology infrastructure. But that team usually touches only fraction of the content, and often provides little field support. Beyond this “HQ team”, the level of decentralization is usually vast – and has dramatically increased thanks in part to platforms like SharePoint that encourage/enable easy-to-use content management tools.
- Personalization and Customization. Probably one of the most misunderstood terms around – our clients often use them interchangeably. Clearly SharePoint is driving the vast move to a highly tailored user experience. This, combined with robust search, is having a profound effect on underlying usability components such as the core information architecture. Interestingly, the Nielsen report focuses on multilingual and customized links, and doesn’t address the fact that most users don't surf through a hierarchy of menus to find information, but go directly to search (on intranets that have a decent search engine, that is). In fact, our lead Information Architect, Laurie Cisto, has found that companies need more focus on optimizing their search engines, than tweaking their navigation in an effort to make the perfect information architecture.
SharePoint issues
In terms of SharePoint, the report highlights a number of key points:
- Companies are finally starting to use their investments in the licensing.
- People are gaining confidence in the platform.
- People are recognizing the potential of SharePoint as a platform, not just an application or website tool.
Having worked with SharePoint since its inception back in 2001, we know that MOSS (SharePoint 2007) is very extensible from a framework perspective. It appears others are coming to this conclusion as well.
Our lead SharePoint architect, Rich Finn, believes that SharePoint will be a key component of the .net framework in the future (beginning with the next version, SharePoint 14, due out in 2010), so more and more applications will be developed for it.
Companies need more focus on optimizing their search engines, than tweaking their navigation in an effort to make the perfect information architecture.
Looking into the crystal ball at the new additions coming in the next version, SharePoint is only going to be getting better and more powerful. We’re expecting it will have even better search, more caching and data types, which will expand the possibilities for applications which we haven’t even thought of yet that leveraging the new SharePoint 14 technologies.
Have your say
Would you agree with Laurie Cisto that "companies need more focus on optimizing their search engines, than tweaking their navigation in an effort to make the perfect information architecture"?
In your experience, what tweaks make the most quantifiable difference to employees' use of the intranet? Share your thoughts with us below.
Michael Rudnick, Global Intranet & Portal Practice Leader of Watson Wyatt Worldwide is an industry pioneer who developed the first intranet for Xerox in the early 1990s. Since then, he has assisted many other clients create, upgrade, overhaul and redesign their intranets and enterprise portals, including such leading corporations such as American Express, Disney, Northrup Grumman, PepsiCo, Tyco Electronics, Wyeth and more.
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