The Worldwide Intranet Challenge (WIC) is a free web based survey that allows organisations to obtain feedback about their intranets from the people that matter the most - their intranet end users. The WIC team then benchmarks the feedback from all participating organisations, enabling a comparative score and rank for each survey question to be given.
In 2013, 61 organisations from 9 different countries participated in the WIC, bringing the total number of organisations who have participated to 179.
Note: Total surveys completed = 193. Some organisations have completed the WIC twice.
This article lists those organisations from 2013 who received the highest rankings in a range of categories, based on feedback from their own staff (you may also wish to view 2012's top ranked intranets).
2013 top ranked intranet - Milan Chamber of Commerce (Italy)
For 2013, the overall top ranked intranet was from the Milan Chamber of Commerce (Italy). The Chamber of Commerce supports and promotes the general interests of local businesses and markets through in-house functions or others delegated to it by the national or regional governments or deriving from international conventions.
The Milan Chamber of Commerce also ranked #1 in many of the survey questions including: Value, Look and feel, Home Page, Understanding culture and values, Finding information, Search, Managing documents, Re-usable documents, Policies and procedures, and Reports and/or dashboards.
See the case study - Leading intranets - Milan Chamber of Commerce.
Milan Chamber of Commerce Home page
2nd ranked intranet - QIC (Australia)
The second ranked intranet was from QIC. Established in 1991 by the Queensland Government to manage its long-term investments, QIC has grown to be one of the largest institutional investment managers in Australia, with more than 90 local and international clients and $70.1 billion in funds under management as at 30 June 2013.
QIC rated well in the following questions: #1 in Australia, #2 home page, information easy to read, publishing content, managing documents, policies and procedures, content, reports and/or dashboards, and #3 value of the intranet, look and feel. access to business applications,
Sample comments from staff about the intranet:
We have seen dramatic improvements in the intranet over the last year - the intranet is much more user friendly. I see benefit in the continued development of this channel as a place for employee interaction, toolkit for resources, information and how to guidance and to promote 'connective' stories that promote QIC values and culture.
Being a new starter to the business, I have found the intranet to be great in helping me with every-day tasks. It is very easy to find your way around and provides me with the information required.
Keep up the good work. A huge improvement. Everything should always be a work in progress, most things can always be improved upon.
QIC Intranet Home Page
3rd ranked intranet - Prophet (USA)
Prophet is the third ranked intranet for 2013. Prophet is a strategic brand and marketing consultancy with offices around the globe. Clients include BMW, Cisco, GE, Johnson and Johnson, Kellogg’s, McDonald’s, The Cosmopolitan, Visa, and Zurich Financial.
Prophet rated well in the following questions: #1 online discussions, staff details, access to business applications, #1 in the United States, #2 value of the intranet, look and feel, re-usable documents, providing feedback, notification of changes to intranet content, #3 finding information, publishing content, provision of intranet training.
Prophet home page
Sample comments from staff:
I think the team has done an awesome job with the redesign -- the broader thing to tackle is our culture of sharing knowledge - really getting people to dig in with this -- we are all responsible for this -- but in the end the team has done an outstanding job of giving us an environment to do this well
The recent changes to our intranet, especially the elements of gamification, make engagement with the company, content and culture almost second-nature. The photos and personal profiles add an excellent element of social media.
I LOVE THE INTRANET. It's super collaborative, and I really like the ability to talk to colleagues across different offices. The visibility on the pipeline is brilliant, as are the staff profiles.
Prophet was also a gold winner in the 2009 intranet innovation awards.
Other highly ranked organisations
The following organisations also ranked in the top 3 (top 5%) in one or more of the survey questions or categories:
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AmBank Group (M) Bhd (Malaysia), #2 for completing work tasks
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Beaver Street Fisheries (United States), #2 for online forms
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British Gas, (UK) #1 UK intranet, #1 10,000+ employees, #3 online discussions
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Socialministeriet (Denmark), #1 for completing work tasks
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Department of Transport (Australia), #3 information for new starters
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Endress+Hauser (Switzerland), #2 information about products/services, #2 search
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ERM (UK), #1 off-site access, #3 personalisation
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Home Assistance UK Ltd (UK), #3 intranet availability
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JT International (Switzerland), #3 understanding values & culture
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Køge Kommune (Denmark), #3 ease of reading information
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Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre (Australia), #2 new starter information, #2 content accuracy, #2 understand culture and values, #2 finding information, #3 home page, #3 news, #3 policies and procedures, #3 product/service information, #3 feedback about intranet, #3 mobile access
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Nestlé (Switzerland), #2 collaboration
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NNE Pharmaplan (Denmark), #2 personalisation, #1 1000 - 10,000 employees
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PinnacleHealth System (USA), #2 complete work tasks
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Queensland Country Credit Union (Australia), #1 online forms, #3 managing documents, #2 intranet training
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State of Indiana Bureau of Motor Vehicles (USA), #2 work instructions
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Simpson Grierson (New Zealand), #3 content, #3 change notification, #2 intranet availability, #3 staff details, #2 news
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SNL Financial (USA), #3 collaboration, #3 reports & dashboards
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St Barbara (Australia), #3 search, #3 re-usable documents
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Swisscom AG (Switzerland), #1 collaboration, #1 mobile access, #1 content easy to read, #3 content accuracy, #3 off-site access
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Tiscali Spa (Italy), #3 work instructions
Characteristics of highly ranked intranets
The following characteristics were common among the leading WIC intranets.
Staff spend more time using them
Staff from the top 6 most valuable intranets (ie. the top 10%) spent an average of 43.1 minutes each day on the intranet. While staff from the bottom 6 organisations spent on average just 18.1 minutes - less than half.
This is consistent with WIC research from last year which shows that the more time staff spend using the intranet, the more valuable they perceive it to be.
The challenge for intranet professionals then is to deliver content and services that will keep staff coming back.
They are more interactive
While intranets in the top 10% out-scored those in the bottom 10% in all survey questions, for some questions there was a larger discrepancy than others. This would suggest that, as the highest priority, the biggest opportunity for improving intranets lies in these areas.
The biggest discrepancies were in the four questions (from a total of 50) shown in the chart below.
These questions all relate to making the intranet more interactive and convincing staff to contribute content. For more information about this, see 10 lessons intranets can learn from Wikipedia.
They support clear business objectives
There are many articles about intranet strategy that discuss the importance of aligning the intranet with business objectives. After speaking with many of the managers of the leading WIC intranets listed in this article, it appears that most of the business objectives supported by their intranets can generally be placed into three broad categories:
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Innovation and continuous improvement: This includes the ability of intranets to identify and support new ideas, forums for discussing new ideas and for looking at ways to improve things, project & team sites for implementing these ideas, serendipitous connections for fostering innovative & collaborative work environments, and communications to inform people about process changes resulting from the implementation of new ideas
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Operations: This includes the ability of intranets to support call centres and front line staff, to improve customer satisfaction by delivering products and services more quickly, effectively and efficiently, to ensure processes and tasks are completed consistently throughout the organisation and to automate manual processes where possible.
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Employee engagement: This includes the ability of the intranet to provide staff with access to the information and tools they need to their jobs from anywhere at anytime on any device, allowing them greater freedom and flexibility to control their own work more effectively.
For more information about these objectives, including additional examples of how intranets can help, see 3 compelling business reasons for having an intranet.
They ‘mine’ their social content
While enterprise social networks (or social intranets, social software, enterprise 2.0) have been getting a lot of attention lately (partly because of the difficulty in gaining traction), research from Deloitte and McKinsey suggests that this attention is warranted and that those organisations that ‘get it right’ will gain a significant advantage over the competition.
Leading WIC intranets have recognised that greater staff participation and interactivity with the intranet is not only inevitable but is critical to raising the value of the intranet. However with this greater level of input from staff comes a greater need to recognise the ‘signal’ from the ‘noise’. So just as big data has created the need for a data miner, increased online social interactions has created the need for a ‘content miner’ - someone to analyse and identify key nuggets of information and include them in a formal organisational wide information repository.
For more about this topic, see Intranets: the signal and the noise and the need for a 'content miner'
Participate in the WIC in 2014
If you would like to participate in the Worldwide Intranet Challenge (WIC) this year you just need to complete the WIC registration page (or if you are from Denmark, view the Danish WIC site). It takes just a couple of minutes and you could have the benchmark results on your desk within two weeks, for free.
While it can be a little daunting and takes a lot of courage to ask for feedback from your end users, deep down you probably know that it's the first step you need to take to provide a better intranet experience. Without this concrete feedback, you are relying largely on intuition and guesswork to identify improvement activities. In addition to this, past experience has shown that benchmarking your intranet will help improve it.
Nearly 200 organisations from around the world have already benefited from participation and many have provided recommendations for the WIC.
The survey is currently available in 13 languages with others being added as requested. The WIC is also supported by a network of partners from around the world.
Other articles you may like
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The WIC's most valuable intranets of 2012 (based on end user feedback)
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If employees spend more time on the intranet, does this mean it's more valuable?
December 12, 2013
3 compelling business reasons for having an intranet
What is the purpose of an intranet? How can it contribute to an organisation’s bottom line? What does it take to ‘sell’ the idea of an intranet?
These are questions that many intranet professionals have grappled with over the last few years.
Some answers given so far include: to manage organisational knowledge, to publish content, to be a communication tool, to enable collaboration, to build culture, to improve knowledge sharing, to support decision making, to better manage content…
While these are all valid and useful functions that an intranet can provide, they are more ‘steak’ than ‘sizzle’.
Saying the purpose of an intranet is for publishing content and collaboration is like saying the purpose of a car is for steering and driving. While it’s certainly true, a car is also for exploring unknown and remote territories, for bringing families & friends together, for going on holidays, for impressing a date (a shallow one at least), for saving time and for safely transporting valuable cargo.
So what is the ‘sizzle’ that an intranet can bring to an organisation? What is the ultimate purpose of all this content development, collaboration, communication and knowledge sharing? How can these activities help an organisation survive and thrive in these globally competitive times?
Analysing the feedback from the 160 organisations that have participated in the Worldwide Intranet Challenge (WIC) online benchmark service, it seems there are essentially three critical and equally important business drivers relevant to all organisations that can be supported by an intranet. These are:
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Innovation: Improving and developing products, services and business processes
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Operations: Producing and delivering current services and products
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Engagement: Enabling team members to perform at their best
This article looks at why these three business drivers are critical to an organisation’s survival and how intranets can play an integral role in supporting them.
Innovation
Just 10 years ago, with 8,000 stores and $3 billion in annual revenue, Blockbuster was easily the planet's biggest video chain. Today, after bankruptcy and massive closures, it's limping along with 500 stores. And their days seem numbered.
What happened? Netflix happened. Redbox happened. Streaming video happened. The world and the technology surrounding how people like to watch stuff changed. Blockbuster didn’t. And there are many other examples of big brands who faced the same fate.
These days, if organisations are not continually innovating and improving, they risk being quickly overtaken by their competitors.
In fact, continuous innovation and improvement may be the most important factors to a modern company’s ongoing survival. In Baruch Lev’s book about the impact and value of intangibles - “Intangibles Management, Measurement, and Reporting” - he says that the way companies generate value has changed dramatically changed since the early 1980’s.
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“Because of the intensified competition brought on by globalization of trade, deregulation in key economic sectors and technological change, companies had to fundamentally change to survive. Companies now place a premium on rapid innovation, and intensive use of information technology.” |
Half of the biggest American companies of 1980 have now disappeared by takeover or bankruptcy. And half of today’s biggest companies did not even exist in 1980 (Micklethwait, J. and Wooldridge, A. 2003. The Company. Weidenfeld). Innovation, or lack of innovation, are major contributors to these surprising statistics.
As Ryan Holmes, CEO of Hootsuite points out “When some companies stop innovating, it can literally kill them.”
How can intranets support innovation?
The article, From innovation to operation: the role of the intranet, lists a number of ways an intranet can help organisations move more quickly through the lifecycle of identifying an innovation, through to implementation. This includes the ability of intranets to facilitate collaboration and build informal networks within organisations. These networks are key to an innovative organisation.
In his book, The science of serendipity: how to unlock the promise of innovation, Matt Kingdon observes that “The best innovation environments are not created through traditional management channels but are self-organised”. An effective, up-to-date intranet can help facilitate self-organised environments through updated employee profiles, micro-blogging and community sites that connect people with common interests.
Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, said in a recent interview “it is my deep belief that collaboration is essential for innovation—and I didn’t just start believing that. I’ve always believed that. It’s always been a core belief at Apple. Steve very deeply believed this.”
But perhaps the biggest contribution an intranet can make to innovation is through change management. That is, an intranet has the unique ability to ensure organisational changes and improvements are implemented more quickly and that the roles & responsibilities impacted by the changes are clearly defined. This allows organisations to be more responsive and adaptable to the inevitable change.
Operations
To make a profit, an organisation needs to be able to create a product or deliver a service at less cost than a customer is willing to pay for it. It also needs to do this more effectively and at the same or better quality than its competition.
Wal-Mart in the 1990s is the classic example of an organisation gaining a significant competitive advantage by operating more effectively than its competitors. Through efficient ordering, ruthless negotiating, hyper-punctual time keeping, merciless cost control and ingenious responses to customers’ preferences, Wal-Mart was able to gain a 40% efficiency advantage over its competitors in the early 1990s.
In fact, according to a McKinsey Report, the burst of productivity that the US and the UK unexpectedly experienced in the 1990s was largely due to logistical changes in business. That is businesses, particularly in the retail sector, were able to improve the way they operated. This accounted for around a quarter of all productivity growth in the US.
How can intranets support better operations?
Intranets can contribute to operational efficiencies through:
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Communicating consistent business processes throughout the organisation: the McDonald’s template approach to business
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Clarifying roles & responsibilities: the right tasks performed at the right time by the right people.
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Consolidated lists: single, organisational wide lists of customers, products, staff, services, suppliers, contractors, forms, processes, applications, etc.
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Automated processes, online forms and workflows: Common tasks are automated. Eg. Submit an invoice, claim travel expenses, suggest a new idea, obtain customer feedback
Employee Engagement
Employee engagement is "a heightened emotional connection that an employee feels for his or her organization, that influences him or her to exert greater discretionary effort to his or her work".
There is clear evidence that high levels of employee engagement correlates to individual, group and corporate performance in areas such as retention, turnover, productivity, customer service and loyalty. While differences varied from study to study, highly engaged employees outperform their disengaged counterparts by a huge 20 – 28 percentage points.
More than 100 studies have confirmed the connection between employee engagement and performance. But the Towers Watson 2012 Global Workforce Study — 32,000 employees across 30 countries — makes the most powerful, bottom line case yet for the connection between how we feel at work and how we perform.
The research concludes that "organizations must create policies and practices that make it possible for employees to better manage their workload, live more balanced lives and exercise greater autonomy around how, when, and where they get their work done. Policies focused on flexibility and working remotely contribute to a more energized workplace".
And Alex Edmans, MIT Sloan School of Management, agrees with these findings. He analyzed the financial performance of a portfolio of stocks selected by Fortune magazine as the “Best Companies to Work for in America” from 1998 -2005. By the end of 2005, these stocks “earned average annual returns of 14 percent by the end of 2005, over double market return”.
How can intranets support employee engagement?
Employee engagement is influenced by many different factors, such as employees’ relationship with their direct manager, the perceived meaning and importance of their work, career growth opportunities and performance of the company.
While the intranet cannot claim to be the only answer to a highly engaged workforce, it can certainly make a significant contribution by:
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Enabling employees more flexibility and control over their working lives by providing them with remote access to the information and tools they need to do their jobs
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Providing on-going company and job performance feedback through dashboards and other measures
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Providing online training and career opportunities
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Enabling employees to build relationships with colleagues based on common interests and skills
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Sharing stories about the organisation’s successes, values and culture
Summary of how an intranet can support these 3 critical business drivers
While intranets can’t do it alone in ensuring an organisation’s staff are highly engaged, improvements are being continuously implemented and operations are as efficient as possible, they can make a real and significant contribution to a business if implemented with the clear goal of supporting one or more of these imperatives.
The following diagram summarises the ways intranets can assist. Note that there is often overlap between the three business drivers as well as the functions provided by an intranet. For example online training provided by an intranet may well mean better operations and innovation as well as more engaged employees.
More information?
If you are interested in discussing how your intranet can support your organisation more effectively, feel free to contact the Worldwide Intranet Challenge.
November 12, 2013
Leading intranets: intranet education & networking event in Melbourne
Back due to popular demand…
In August 2012, around 50 people attended the Melbourne event: Leading intranets: case studies from the Worldwide Intranet Challenge (WIC). The event included a mixture of presentations from leading intranets as well as food & drinks and plenty of time for networking.
This year, this popular event is on again. Details are:
Leading intranets: case studies from the Worldwide Intranet Challenge (WIC)
Young & Jacksons Hotel (upstairs), Melbourne
Corner of Swanston and Flinders Streets
Opposite Flinders Street Station
Tuesday, December 3, 2013 from 3:45 PM to 6:00 PM
Reserve your ticket
This event will be interactive and includes 3 short 10 -15 minute presentations where questions and comments are encouraged. The cost of the event is reasonable to enable organisations to send a number of staff members if they wish. Register for this event.
The agenda is as follows:
3.45 - 4.15 - Drinks/Finger Food (Mystery ice breaker exercise)
4.15 - 4.40 - A successful intranet, no matter what budget
Peter Lyon - Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre’s (MCEC) launch of its intranet, The Hive in March 2012 and results from the Worldwide Intranet Challenge (WIC) is a great example of how a medium-sized company can develop a successful intranet no matter what budget. Ranked overall in the top 5% of all intranets, Peter Lyons, Internal Communications Coordinator from MCEC will talk about reasons for The Hive’s success in the WIC with a focus on employee engagement.
4.40 - 5.05 Intranets, the 'signal' and the 'noise'.. delivering the 'signal'
Jillian Hiscock - Department of Transport - Latest research from the WIC suggests that while online collaboration and the social possibilities offered by modern-day intranets are important, the value of well structured and ‘qualified’ content such as procedures and work instructions, is even more important. The Department of Transport completed the Worldwide Intranet Challenge (WIC) in April this year and ranked in the top 15% for the topics: overall value, completing common work tasks, policies & procedures and information for new starters (ranked #8). Jillian Hiscock, Intranet Manager, will show the DOT intranet and explain how they did it!
5.05 - 5.30 - The contextual intranet: the future of intranets
Andrew Wright - Worldwide Intranet Challenge - Just as Amazon provides a 'Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought' list of suggestions based on a customer's previous purchases, so too should intranets deliver content to staff based on their unique profiles and preferences. In this session, Andrew will take you through a new approach to intranets, showing how this can be done and how it will increase the use of your intranet.
5.30 - 6.00 - Drinks/Finger Food/Networking
Who Should attend?
Anyone involved in designing, building, maintaining or managing an intranet. This includes intranet owners and managers, internal communicators, enterprise social media professionals, content professionals, knowledge managers, business process professionals & analysts, IT managers and people working with SharePoint & other intranet software.
Numbers are limited to 50. Nearly 20 people have already registered (as 12 November) so if you would like to join them, please register now for this event.
October 03, 2013
Intranets: the signal and the noise and the need for a 'content miner'
In science and engineering, signal-to-noise is a measure that compares the level of a desired signal to the level of background noise. The term is also commonly used to describe a ratio of things that are useful (signal) to less useful (noise).
In intranets, it’s a useful analogy to describe the relationship between work-in-progress (WIP) type content such online collaboration & discussions (noise) and more formal content such as policies, procedures, work instructions, templates and forms (signal).
Signal V Noise - which is more valuable?
While online collaboration and the social possibilities offered by modern-day intranets are getting a lot of attention these days, it’s important not to forget the value that well structured and ‘qualified’ (ie. reviewed and approved) content provides to organisations.
In fact, according to the latest research data from the Worldwide Intranet Challenge (WIC)*, this qualified content is more important to the overall value of an intranet than unqualified and informal work-in-progress (WIP) type content.
The following chart shows the correlation of each WIC survey question with the overall value of the intranet. Questions at the top of the chart (eg. Mobile Access, Speed) have the weakest correlation to value while those at the bottom of the chart (eg. Time, Interactivity) have the strongest.
The arrows show the strength of the relationship between the ‘signal’ type content versus the ‘noise’ type content.
So what the chart is showing is that those questions related to collaboration and discussion (the noise), while important, are less critical to the overall value of an intranet than work instructions, policies and procedures, online forms and business applications (the signal).
When you think about it, this makes sense. The purpose of most collaboration or discussion is to either:
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Solve problems, or
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Discuss new ideas or innovations
The output from these discussions and collaboration should be new or updated processes along with supporting content such as templates, lists and/or applications.
Example
For example, let’s say a bank wants to introduce a new way to process personal loan applications. This idea may firstly be initiated and then debated & discussed through various online channels. A project site may then be set up on the intranet to implement the chosen solution. All this collaborative activity taking place is important but should ultimately result in new or updated businesses processes along with supporting content (eg. a new application or form).
The ‘signal’ and the ‘noise’ - the missing link
The following diagram shows the relationship between the different intranet content types.
It is important to note in this diagram the ‘content curation’ aspect. This is where ‘the noise’ type content is translated into the more meaningful, re-usable and findable ‘signal’ type content.
In many organisations, this function is often overlooked. This means that staff must wade through historical online discussions or conversations (the noise) to find that valuable nugget of information they need, instead of being able to find it easily in a well structured list of procedures (or other structured content).
It’s not that different to how email is used at the moment - that is, employees needing to search through past emails to find valuable information instead of it being available in a well indexed list of organisational wide content types.
What does it all mean?
What the above research suggests is that organisations need to:
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Clearly distinguish between the ‘signal’ and the ‘noise’ type content. These content types should be treated differently. ‘Noise’ type content will have less governance and should be branded in a way that staff recognise that the content is not ‘qualified’ - that is, it hasn’t been reviewed or ‘officially’ approved for widespread use within the organisation.
‘Signal’ type content on the other hand will have a greater level of governance (eg. sign-offs and approvals) and should also be clearly branded so that staff understand that this type of content is the ‘official’ and 'approved for use' within an organisation. -
Recognise that the purpose of ‘signal’ and ‘noise’ content shouldn’t be confused. In other words, collaboration spaces, such as team sites and project sites, should NOT be the place where procedures, policies, forms and reference documents such as case studies are found. This will confuse employees and has the potential for an organisation to end up with hundreds of mini intranet sites - ie. places where staff go to find the ‘official’ way of doing things. There should only be one place for ‘qualified’ content (ie. the intranet) but there can be many collaboration spaces.
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Recognise the need for a ‘content curation’ activity to take place. Just as ‘big data’ has created the need for a Data Miner to analyse, interpret and understand this data, so too does collaborative content require the need for a ‘Content Miner’ to review collaborative content and convert it into the more useful and findable ‘signal’ type content.
* The WIC is a web based survey that allows intranet end users to provide feedback about their own intranet. This feedback is then compared with other participating organisations. Over 45,000 intranet end users from more than 160 organisations have completed the WIC so far.
September 04, 2013
10 lessons intranets can learn from Wikipedia
Convincing employees to use the intranet is one of the biggest challenges intranet managers face. One of the main reasons is the difficulty in persuading employees to contribute good content that other employees will find useful.
Just how difficult this task can be is highlighted by feedback from the Worldwide Intranet Challenge (WIC) online benchmark survey (the survey has been completed by over 45,000 intranet end users from more than 160 organisations).
The chart below shows the breakdown of responses to the 4 questions that ask employees how often they contribute content to the intranet.
As you can see, on average more than 90% of staff are not frequent contributors (content contribution methods include discussion forums, commenting, team sites, messaging, blogging, micro-blogging, as well as publishing traditional intranet content).
That’s a huge amount of handy hints, tips, information, business intelligence, insights, best practices, ideas, innovations, solutions, answers, knowledge and good advice that is not being properly shared or managed by organisations.
This lack of involvement represents a virtual gold mine of untapped knowledge lying dormant within many organisations.
How can organisations mine this gold?
Wikipedia began in 2001 and has since grown to become the 6th most popular internet site in the world (according to the Alexa website rankings). The Wikipedia statistics for June show that there were 11,071,642 pageviews per hour for the English Wikipedia. In anyone’s language, Wikipedia is a runaway success. And all the content is provided by volunteers!
How did this happen? Why do people contribute content? And can these same lessons be applied within an organisation?
The article, Why did Wikipedia succeed while other encyclopedias failed, explains that there were seven collaborative encyclopedias that aspired to Wikipedia-like dimensions before Wikipedia itself came along.
So why did Wikipedia succeed?
Focus on content - not the technology
Wikipedia focused on content development instead of technology. Its competitors, on the other hand, saw themselves more as technologists than as content providers. Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, the two Wikipedia founders, played the role of content evangelists, seeding Wikipedia with content they solicited from contributors — which, in turn, led to more content, and more contributors.
Lower barriers to participation
Wikipedia also lowered the barriers to participation. Editing Wikipedia is easy, instant, and virtually commitment-free. It’s possible to come along and do an anonymous edit and never make a contribution again. Over time, a sentence here and a paragraph there, turned into articles, which then turned into an encyclopedia. Without this relatively low barrier to entry, the community would be difficult to sustain.
In addition, there are no professional editors that review material before it is published. Instead, it’s the people who visit the pages who are the reviewers.
Why do people contribute content?
The article Online Motivational Factors: Incentives for Participation and Contribution in Wikipedia also examines why people are motivated to contribute to Wikipedia. There are many research based references and it’s well worth reading. Some of the key findings include:
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Users will contribute more to a community if they:
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Believe that their contributions are important to the group’s performance,
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Believe that their contributions will be identifiable, and
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Like the group they are working with.
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Three conditions need to exist for this kind of peer work to perform well:
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Cost for the contributors is low - needs to be easy to do
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Tasks are ‘chunked into bite-size pieces’ - minor editing is available and boosts participation because the threshold for initial participation is low
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Low cost of quality control
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The article also notes that research has shown that a high level of both two-way and large scale community interactivity is a strong inducement to participate. There is a strong correlation between interactivity and motivation in online communities.
10 lessons that can be applied to intranets
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You may also be interested in:
- Improve your intranet by 10%: how benchmarking can help
- Why measuring page views, time spent and user activity is a worthy measure of intranet success
Interested in learning more about the WIC research?
I am giving three presentations in September where I'll be talking about some of the more interesting findings from the WIC data. I'll also be showing case studies of intranets that have succeeded in satisfying their most important stakeholder, the end user.
- 23-24 September - Utrecht - Congres SharePoint
- 25 September - London - Interaction 2013
- 26 September - Köln - IOM Summit
Andrew Wright
Director of CIBA Solutions, who manage the worldwide intranet challenge (WIC).
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