The organic intranet

       

by Andrew Wright

I read a good quote on Twitter last week posted by Pauli Kongas (@pkongas). He said "Intranets are not built - they are grown. More like plants, not like buildings".

I like this quote because it gave me the answer to something that has been nagging at me since I read the NNG annual 10 best intranets report article earlier this month.

In this report, one of the conclusions is that "Great intranets require years to create". The report goes on to say that "Since 2001 , we’ve tracked the length of time it takes to create a great intranet from inception to launch. On average, the process lasts for 42 months—or about 3.5 years . This year, the average was 27 months, or about 2.3 years to create the winning designs."

Something about this conclusion didn't seem quite right to me (and was also slightly depressing!).

There was a discussion on LinkedIn about whether 3.5 years to create a great intranet was right. Maybe the answer was here? Some people felt that great intranets can be developed more quickly than that, others questioned exactly what was meant by a great intranet, while a few more people felt that user adoption and change management was the time consuming part and could possibly justify this lengthy time frame.

 

The organic intranet is an intranet that grows and evolves

I posted a comment to the discussion where I mentioned that the #1 ranked Worldwide Intranet Challenge intranet - Weston Solutions only took 12 months to develop their award winning intranet. However, I have since looked at the case study again and realised that in fact the Weston Solutions intranet had existed since the late 1990's. So in fact from 'inception to launch' - which is how the NNG report defines the time frame - it has really taken around 15 years to build a great intranet (not the 12 month SharePoint upgrade project that is the topic of the case study). 

But what is interesting is that the Weston Solution's intranet greatness wasn't a linear path where it gradually went from inception, to good and then to great. It was more of a sine wave.

They did in fact already have a great, award winning intranet in the early 2000's. However, over time the intranet was neglected, technology moved on, end user expectations changed and the quality of the intranet declined until they launched a project to re-build the intranet in 2011. 

 

The answer!

I then realised what had been nagging me about the NNG article - the implicit notion of the intranet as a big 'project'.

A project where there is a start date, a launch date, some activities in between, a time frame for achieving an end result and then the intranet is 'finished'. Done! 

Intranets are not like this - they are organic, like the Weston Solutions intranet. They ebb and flow. Intranets are more like children or plants than buildings or projects. They need plenty of attention and maintenance. Without this constant attention, the quality of an intranet can decline pretty quickly - just as the Weston Solutions intranet did in the mid 2000s.

So putting a time frame to create a great intranet is like saying it takes 3.5 years to raise a great kid. 

As Chris Wright comments in his recent CMS Wire article - 3 Steps to a Great SharePoint Intranet - "Don't ever finish your SharePoint intranet project. If you disband the project team once your Intranet is built, your project will ultimately fail. If you ever even consider an Intranet finished, you might have well not have bothered in the first place."

 

The long wow

Luke Mepham also makes the  point in his excellent article, Big Bang Theory for Intranets, that a big bang approach to delivering intranets is not advisable. He says "A long period without any improvement means the perception of the intranet is poor and getting worse. Every week that passes people become more disillusioned."

He goes on to say that "It seems that a big part of the problem with big bang is that the size of the change is too high, and the frequency too low. The obvious alternative is small frequent change. An approach known as ‘the long wow’ is about implementing changes more regularly. This approach is popular with many highly successful and admired brands. Nike+, Google and Apple are all renowned for their regular,incremental upgrades or feature releases."

 

Eric Ries and the Lean Startup movement

Eric Ries, author of the best selling book - The Lean Startup: How Constant Innovation Creates Radically Successful Businesses - and now leader of the Lean Startup global movement, is also an advocate of the 'long wow'. I have written before about intranet lessons that can be learnt from successful web startups and I believe many of the ideas in Eric's book can be also applied to intranets.

In his book, Ries argues that many startups (and this also applies to intranet owners) waste time and energy implementing ideas and features that people don't want (for intranets, this could be content that never gets read or online discussion forums that no-one uses). And that there is a better - leaner- approach to decide what should be implemented and what should be discarded.

Three of the basic principles of the Lean Startup are below:

• Minimum viable product (MVP) - what is the maximum amount of validated feedback you can obtain from your customers (staff) with the least amount of effort.
• Continuous deployment - updates and changes should be continuously implemented - the long wow. Facebook, Google, LinkedIn - many successful websites continuously implement new features. This approach would bring many benefits to intranets.
• Split testing - offer different versions of a feature or product to staff at the same time to determine which one is most effective.

You can read about other techniques at The Lean Startup Movement web page.

 

Conclusion

The important thing to emphasise when delivering successful intranets is not a pre-occupation with a long-term project mentality. Instead, it is more important is to focus on ensuring effective systems and processes are in place so that the right features are being continuously & quickly implemented and that your intranet is evolving & improving to meet your changing user needs.

 

You may also like to read:

• 7 Intranet Lessons to be Learned From Successful Web Startups
• Could this be the world's most effective intranet
• Big bang theory for intranets

 

 

 

Comments

[twitter.com/Risgaard]

Nice post Andrew!

One question that begs asking: Are you ever done with developing your intranet?

The day you are *done* with your intranet you either need to find a new job fast, or your company is going belly up (and you'll need to look for a new gig anyway)...

[Andrew Wright]

Thanks Martin. I would agree with your comments. 95% of an intranet is content - eg. lists, how to instructions, policies, forms, re-usable documents, articles, templates, reports, discussions, staff profiles, customer updates, collaborative content, process improvements, competition updates, etc... This content needs to be maintained as the organisation itself evolves and improves or it very quickly becomes redundant and pretty much useless.

That's why an intranet is like a living, breathing organism - because just like an organism needs food and water to survive, so do intranets need a constant supply of updated and new content. So if your intranet is ever 'finished' it means that your organisation has stopped evolving and improving as well. If this happens, then it will soon be left behind.

[Fredric Landqvist]

Technology is a word for something that doesn't work yet! I do belive that the intranet is organic, and should be cultivated as you state in this nice post. Still we get notions from either platform providers or management that it could easily be fixed. The low user adoption ratio, with yet another techie thing?

The Governance of Intranets will have to be using the notions of cultivation, care and hospitality. My research friend Cladio Ciborra ones stated the phrase: "Technology Drifting" given that most enterprise wide systems installations failed. Since the techie folks wanted to freeze the organisation and take a snapshot and add the tech remedy, whereas the social organism didn't stand still.... it moves (drifting).

This is why I think the intranet will foster learning spaces where people tinker, and make-do to get their everyday life in order with the flow of events.

[Steven Osborne]

if you take the organic analogy and think of plants, they also need pruning to encourage the plant itself to grow and also allow more space (light) to surrounding plants. If only maintenance of content was as popular as content creation!