How valuable is your intranet?

How much does your organisation benefit from your intranet?  Could you put a figure on the value it provides if asked?  Probably not………..

BT’s intranet is nearly 14 years old.  We measured the benefits of moving from paper to online information; the saving in accommodation costs and not having rows of cupboards with duplicated versions of policies; even the productivity savings by being able to do things quicker like looking up a phone no.

But that was over 10 years ago and the figures are not relevant now.  Apart from traditional methods like return on investment, how can you measure the overall value an intranet gives? 

In BT we all know our intranet gives great value.  It is a business critical system.  Without our intranet BT would quickly start to grind to a halt or slow to a pace of working completely unacceptable to our customers.  But what value can be used to justify future investment decisions?

While some new applications and ways of communicating can start small, be beta tested, then investment justified on the benefits found, it won’t work with major infrastructure projects like content management systems, federated search engines, etc.

If anyone has the answer out there, please end your silence and tell everyone!  However I suspect no one does know………..yet.

BT is working with the Intranet Benchmarking Forum (we’re a global member) to try to do just that.  IBF have identified 200 business functions that can rely on intranets to be effective.  BT has chosen around 20 that have the biggest impact on our organisation.

The business function owners will be interviewed over the next few weeks and the data given will be evaluated to give a figure for the overall value of our intranet that is robust and stands up to scrutiny when a business case is made for investment.

I have no idea if this will succeed but if it does, it will fill a big gap in justifying more precisely how valuable our intranet is to BT.

I’ll keep you posted on progress and the outcome if you’re interested.

My contact details

Several people have shown that much interest in my blog (Wow!) to ask in a roundabout way if any knows my contact details.

Well, I’m very happy if you post a comment on my blog.  My RSS will automatically let me know if you do so I will reply.

If you prefer you can email me at mark.morrell@bt.com.

Do your intranet standards work?

I’ve come across many intranet managers for different sizes and types of organisations.  One thing which is constant with all their intranets is the need for some form of intranet standards.  Some have many, some have a few or none even.

Why have intranet standards? 

Well, it can be for legal, regulatory, business, technical or users’ needs and can be all or some of these.  It will depend on the type of organisation and its culture for what standards are needed to support it.

What are intranet standards?

These can be legal reasons with web accessibility; business needs for information retention; user needs like print and feedback features; or regulatory like with BT’s need to keep customer information separated from some parts of BT.  Whatever they are, you need to know they are being met but how?

BT’s intranet standards tools

BT underpins its intranet standards with tools that check web content for certain words, code or features.  If they are/are not found (depending what is being checked!) the owner of the content is asked to review the content and either update or remove it.  If no action is taken the web content is automatically removed so users don’t make business decisions based on poor content.

What do BT’s intranet tools check?

Page owner and review date so users have someone to contact for enquiries and know the content is current and can be relied upon.

Web accessibility up to W3C AA standard so any person with impairment has the same or similar experience as anyone else.

Security markings so any confidential information is properly protected and not found when checked for.

We will be expanding to also check for:

Names - if a person leaves BT, we can quickly identify the pages and change the name.

Readability - BT will try to use the Flesch index to calculate how readable content is for users.

Code - if site owners are not using the right code, say to download the correct version of our global navigation bar, BT can find out and remind the site owner.

So, do intranet standards work? 

Yes, if you are sensible and don’t create so many it is a barrier to publishing.  Make sure standards can be checked for compliance.  If you can’t is it worth having the standard?  Test out with users if they do improve their experience and enocurage them to use your intranet more.

Lastly, with content extending into social media, you need to think about how you apply standards for more formal types of content appropriately.  We’re thinking how to do this in BT which will be covered in a future posting!

Make money from your intranet

Following on from my demonstration of BT’s intranet at IBF24 last week (see my posting ’How easy can it be to use an intranet?’) it always causes a great deal of comment when I say BT makes money from its intranet.

I don’t mean by selling our intranet services based on how successfully we use them within BT.  No.  I mean intranet services that people in BT use on our intranet which we get paid for.

Here are 2 examples that BT has:

1. Many organisations advertise in our corporate newsletter and our online newsdesk, BT today.  People have accepted for years that adverts appear in it as they do for may other newspapers.  We extended this to our newsdesk on BT’s intranet so it didn’t distract users from their main purpose for using the site - finding the latest news - while encouraging them to click on the adverts.  It brings in several hundred thousands of pounds each year.  Yes, you did read that correctly!  We haven’t had any complaints about the advertising and it is the only site where it is allowed on our intranet.

2. BT has a business partnership with Yahoo!  Apart from the portal and internet search option we offer customers who choose from our range of broadband packages (excellent value by the way if you’re intertested), we now offer our intranet users a BT Yahoo! internet search option.  It means Yahoo! gets more usage of its internet search than before and BT gets a % of the sponsored links people in BT click on when searching.  No one has complained about the restriction and accept the business benefit to BT if they use it.

So, not only do we provide what users want, we are able to make some money to invest in future development of our intranet.  A win-win!

How easy can it be to use an intranet?

Hopefully the answer will be “very easy”, a no-brainer.  But I know from talking with other intranet managers this isn’t always the case - not for the want of trying on their part either!

BT’s intranet can be accessed from any (well, most) devices, anywhere at any time.  And when you start to use it we have made the user experience as simple and easy as we can.

How do I know this?  Well, a recent independent survey carried out by GfK NOP showed 85% of users were satisfied with BT’s intranet and half were very satisfied.  Praise indeed!  But of course the challenge is to please the minority by improving it further without upsetting the majority - more difficult than it sounds.

You can find out more about BT’s intranet when I demonstrate it online at IBF24 on 19 June with my colleague, Richard Dennison, a social media legend in his own lunchtime!

Maybe you can join me then?

Mark

How do I find anything?

Well, no replies to my first posting but I’ll persevere for a few more posts…….

Now we’ve decided to categorise content into different types for our intranet, the challenge is to help users find the information easily, identify the different types and be able to use it appropriately.

We’re going to use Endeca.  It ticks all our boxes with a nice, easy user interface.  It can aggregate the content from all the different places the content is kept and - the real plus for me! - show it on one screen in relevancy order.  We should be able to suggest to users where other related content can also be found they may not be aware of.  A bit like when Amazon suggests other buys for you to think about that others chose like you.

What I would really like to know is has anything like this been done anywhere already?  If so, how did it go?  What should/shouldn’t I be doing now?

Am I the first?!

Mark

Extending publishing standards into new content areas

Hi everyone……….or even anyone out there!

I intend to use this blog to cover things of interest to do with my work rather than about me……..at least to start with anyway.

As the BT Intranet manager, I manage a very successful intranet developed over 14 years from user and business needs.  The development of new content areas like wikis and blogs give us a great opportunity for a workforce in different locations and time zones to collaborate more quickly and effectively using them.

Our online content breaks down into four categories:

• Formal - typically published using a content management system
• Team - using something like Sharepoint to develop plans with communities/project members
• Crowd sourced - replicating on our intranet what Wikipedia does for internet users
• Personal - blogging internal to share knowledge and views

The challenge is to develop the right governance so it doesn’t stifle creativity and innovation - vital to BT’s culture and bloodstream - while keeping it manageable and useful to people in BT who can benefit most from these new content types.

How do regulation, accessibility and usability concerns be addressed for example?  How do users recognise easily the different status of content that is ‘authoritative’ from an opinion expressed which could change again next week?

And that’s where you come in!  I’m keen to get any views from people either interested in this area generally, have all the answers and want to share them with me (I wish!) or has the same issues and thinks they can be helped more quickly by working with me.

Please feedback - even if it is just to take pity on me as a Brighton and Hove Albion supporter……..

Seagulls!