Digital Workplace and Intranet Employee Benchmarking

The WIC's most valuable intranets of 2014

The Worldwide Intranet Challenge (WIC)* results for 2014 have been tabulated and we can announce that from the 51 organisations who participated last year, the WIC’s top 3 intranets of 2014 - according to feedback from their own intranet end users - are:

1. Esurance (USA),
2. IAG (Australia) and
3. The Melbourne Exhibition and Convention Centre (Australia). 

 

* 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. If you want to participate in this year's WIC, all you need to do is register for the Worldwide Intranet Challenge. You could have a benchmark report on your desk in 2 weeks,

Details of the highly rated intranets are below. 

 

1. Esurance

Esurance provides auto, homeowners, motorcycle, and renters insurance direct to consumers online, over the phone, and through select agents, including sister company, Answer Financial.

 

WIC Question Rankings
#1 Complete common work tasks, #1 Access to business applications, #2 Understanding values and culture, #2 Menus, #2 Repository of re-usable documents, #2 Customer information, #2 Reports or dashboards, #2 Training material, #2 Access to external websites, #2 Information for new starters, #2 Page loading speed, #3 Home page, #3 Policies & procedures).

 

Quotes from Esurance intranet users

“I love it! It keeps me informed!"

"The Intranet has been critical in helping me find, understand and utilize the applications used here. It has also been a great source of information regarding benefits."

"I like the articles - they provide a little fun in a hectic day. If I have a minute or 2 I might go in just to see if there is anything new that day. A good way to take a little break w/out leaving your desk. Keep up the good work!"

 

Esurance intranet home page



 

 

2. IAG

Insurance Australia Group Limited (IAG) is the parent company of a general insurance group with controlled operations in Australia, New Zealand, Thailand and Vietnam, employing around 13,500 people. 

 

WIC Question Rankings
#2 Templates, #2 Access to business applications, #3 Menus, #3 Staff details, #3 Information about products/services, #3 Access to external web sites

 

3. Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre

MCEC is the place to connect people and ideas. The multi-functional Plenary, 52 meeting rooms and 30,000 square metres of pillar-less exhibition space are just the beginning. 

 

 

WIC Question Rankings
#1 Home Page, #1 Finding information, #1 intranet menus, #1 Provide feedback or comments about intranet content, #1 News, #1 Online forms, #1 Re-usable documents, #1 Policies and procedures, #1 Information about products and services, #1 Information for new starters, #1 Intranet maintenance, #1 page loading speed, #1 Overall value, #2 Upload or download documents, #2 Calendars, #3 Online forms, #3 Mobile access 

To read more about the MCEC intranet, see MCEC's employee intranet ranked seventh in the world.

 

Overall value of the intranet

The following three intranets rated most highly for the question about overall intranet value. WIC research has shown that increased use of the intranet has a relatively strong correlation with overall intranet value. For more information, see Intranet user adoption: why it's confusing.

The value of the intranet can also be increased in the intranet supports one or more of the 3 compelling reasons for having an intranet.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Highly rated organizations by category

 

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Interactivity/content contribution

This category looks at how interactive the intranet is.  This includes questions about publishing content to the intranet, online discussions, uploading documents and providing feedback about intranet content.

Making your intranet more interactive and getting employees to contribute content is one of the keys to providing a more valuable intranet. For supporting research, see If employees spend more time on the intranet, does this mean it's more valuable?. For information about how to get employees to contribute more content, see 10 lessons intranets can learn from Wikipedia. 

#1 Publish content, #1 Discuss work topics	#1 Upload or download documents, #2 Publish content	#2 Upload or download documents, #3 Publish content
#2 Intranet feedback	#3 Upload/download documents	#3 Discuss work topics

 

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 Finding information 

This category covers how easy it is to find information on the intranet using either search or menus.

#1 Find information, #1 Intranet menus	#2 Finding information, #3 Search	#1 Intranet hierarchy
#2 Search, #3 Finding information	#1 Search	#2 Intranet menus, #2 Intranet hierarchy

 

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Task completion 

This section looks at how the intranet helps employees complete work tasks. It includes questions about completing tasks online and the use of online forms.

#1 Instructions for completing work tasks, #2 Online forms	#1 Online forms	#1 Complete work tasks
#2 Complete work tasks	#2 Instructions for completing work tasks	#3 Complete work tasks
#3 Online forms	#3 Instructions for completing work tasks

 

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Content

This category reviews the quality of intranet content.  This includes questions about staff details, news, templates, policies and procedures, re-usable documents, customer and product information, training, access to internal applications and websites.

#1 Access to business applications, #2 Understanding values and culture, #2 Repository of re-usable documents, #2 Customer information, #2 Reports or dashboards, #2 Training material, #2 Access to external websites, #2 Information for new starters, #3 Policies & procedures).	#1 News, #1 Re-usable documents, #1 Policies and procedures, #1 Information about products and services, #1 Information for new starters, #2 Calendars, #3 Understand values and culture	#2 Templates, #2 Access to business applications, #3 Staff details, #3 Information about products/services, #3 Access to external web sites
#2 Policies and procedures, #2 Product and service information, #3 Forms, #3 Calendars, #3 New starter information	#1 Staff details, #1 Calendar, #3 News, #3 Reports, #3 Access to business applications	#1 Information about our customers, #1 Reports or dashboards, #2 Forms, #3 Training
#1 Templates	#1 Understanding values & culture, #2 Staff details, #3 Repository of re-usable documents	#2 News
#3 Templates	#3 Customer information

  

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Collaboration

This category looks at how employees use the intranet to collaborate. As the amount of online collaboration increases, it becomes important to be able to convert this informal and unstructured content into useful and findable information. See Intranets: the signal and the noise and the need for a 'content miner'.

#1 Collaborate with other staff

#2 Collaborate with other staff

#3 Collaborate with other staff

 

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Mobile and off-site access 

This category looks at mobile and off-site access to the intranet.

#1 Mobile access, #2 Off-site access	#2 Mobile access	#3 Off-site access
# 1 Offsite access	#3 Mobile access

 

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Personalisation

This category looks at the ability of employees to personalise the intranet.

#1 I can personalise the intranet

#2 I can personalise the intranet

#3 I can personalise the intranet

 

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Intranet maintenance

This category is about how well the intranet is maintained, whether it is being improved, how effectively staff are aware of new content and changes to the intranet, and whether training about the intranet has been provided.

#1 Content accuracy, #1 Content up-to-date, #1 Intranet being improved, #1 Can see what's new or changed	#1 Receive alerts, emails or RSS feeds when content on the intranet changes, #2 Intranet training	#2 Content accuracy
#2 Content up-to-date	#1 I have received training on using the intranet	#2 Can see what’s new or changed
#3 Change notifications	#3 Content accuracy

 

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Performance

This category reviews the availability and speed of the intranet.

#1 Availability	#2 Availability, #3 Page load speed	#3 Availability
#1 Page load speed	#2 Page load speed

 

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Look and feel/visual design

This category is about how the intranet looks. It includes questions about the home page, the overall look and feel and labeling of content.

#1 Home Page, #1 Intranet look & feel, #1 Consistent page layout	#2 Homepage, #2 Intranet look & feel, #2 Information on the intranet is easy to read , #1 Content is labelled with an owner	#3 Homepage, #3 Intranet look & feel
#1 Information on the intranet is easy to read, #2 Consistent page layout,

 

 Demographics of the 51 participating organizations

• Locations
• 10 from Asia/Pacific
• 10 from the USA & Canada
• 5 from the UK
• 26 from continental Europe
• Size (employees)
• 101 - 1000  = 19
• 1001 - 10,000 = 26
• 10,001 - 50,000 = 6

 

Related articles

Worldwide Intranet Challenge (WIC): If employees spend more time on the intranet, does this mean it's more valuable?

3 compelling business reasons for having an intranet

The WIC's most valuable intranets of 2013 (based on end user feedback)

Why it takes guts to ask for feedback about your intranet

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Intranet user adoption: why it's confusing

by Andrew Wright

The term 'intranet user adoption' has the potential to cause confusion to senior management and other intranet stakeholders. This is because the words 'intranet', 'user' and 'adoption' are all wide open to interpretation. This makes it difficult to determine success. This article provides a more detailed description of what is meant exactly by intranet user adoption and suggests an alternative approach to measuring adoption success.

 

A couple of years ago, Deloitte published a report about the value of social software in the workplace - Social Software for Business Performance. When talking about the success of social software in the workplace, the report said:

“Focussing on adoption as a success metric will likely lead to failure because it engenders resistance…. As long as adoption is the primary measure of success, resistance, at all levels, can block successful social software deployment”

This is interesting because it flies in the face of what many people believe - adoption is the key to the success of social software in the workplace (ie. social intranets). For example, Michael Sampson in his book, User Adoption Strategies, says: 

“There is growing agreement among multiple groups of people involved with collaboration technology - the vendors, the consultants, the internal evangelists, the end-user organisations - that an intentional focus on user adoption is essential. I’d go as far as saying that many are coming to the view that this is the main game”

And the following articles are just a small sample of the many that talk about the importance of user adoption:

• 3 Steps to Sustainable SharePoint User Adoption Success  - Dux Raymond Sy

• Low Intranet User Adoption: Address It Once and For All - Alexis Rodrigo

• Loving the intranet: re-thinking employee adoption - Sam Marshall

 

So what are Deloittes on about?

So how can Deloittes say that focussing on adoption as a success metric will lead to failure when many other people believe the opposite? Well also in the report is their definition of ‘adoption’. It goes like this: 

“The number of users who have accessed social software… Adoption does not measure frequency or sustained use”.

In my view, this definition of adoption is not widely recognised among intranet and digital workplace professionals. Adoption should include frequency and sustained use as well.

However, what the article highlights is the need for a clear definition of what exactly is meant by ‘intranet user adoption’.

Without this clear definition we cannot define success. If we want users to adopt the intranet we must know what is meant by ‘adoption’, what is meant by ‘intranet’ and what is meant by ‘user’. Using these terms in broad and ambiguous ways is confusing and makes it difficult to determine whether adoption is desirable and whether it’s actually happening.

 

What is user adoption?

Everett Rogers in his famous 1962 book, Diffusion of innovations talks extensively about adoption and how this applies to innovations (in this case we can think of intranets + new social tools as innovations). An innovation is ‘adopted’ when a decision is made to make full use of the innovation as the best course of action available.

In the book he categorises people into 5 groups using terms that have become mainstream today: innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards. He assigns a percentage of the target population to a bell curve that belong to each group (as shown below). Different strategies can be used for encouraging each different type of adopter.

 
An innovation must be widely adopted before it becomes self-sustaining. At this point the innovation has passed a tipping point and reached critical mass ie. it’s adopted. A tipping point occurs when there is a rapid increase in the rate of adoption of a particular innovation. In Rogers’ diagram, this typically occurs after 15-20% of the target population have adopted the innovation (the innovators and early adopters).  A self-sustaining innovation is one where an increased rate of adoption means that little or no further intervention is required to ensure the innovation continues.

 

What is an intranet?

One of the difficulties of using the term ‘intranet user adoption’ is that the term ‘intranet’ means different things to different people and may encompass various digital tools. A clear agreed definition of an intranet is highly debatable.  

For example, is instant messaging considered to part of the intranet? How about video calls? Or a document management system? File servers? Team sites or project sites? What about Yammer or Skype? Are these considered to be part of the intranet or are they stand alone applications? Even email? What about enterprise social networks, the digital workplace, social intranets or enterprise 2.0? What do these all mean? Are the same thing or different? And does it matter?

Despite many attempts, there is no clear demarcation of what functions comprise an intranet and what functions are part of a larger digital workplace or something else. One organisation may have an integrated chat feature as part of the intranet while a different organisation may have a stand alone chat application.

This confusion in defining an intranet has also led to a myriad of discussions and articles about whether the intranet is dead or not.

 

What is an intranet end user?

It’s also crucial when talking about intranet user adoption not to confuse different types of end user activity. For example, measuring how many people view the intranet home page is a completely different level of adoption to measuring how many people publish articles each week.

In fact it can be helpful to identify the following three broad intranet user types (and within each of these types, it’s possible to include Rogers’ five types of adopters as well. So a total of 15 possible categories of intranet end users):

• Passive - an employee that ‘lurks’, someone that simply views content and doesn’t contribute.

• Active - a contributor of content

• Administrative - a power user, someone that sets up and maintains the intranet structure and architecture

The third user type is really a specialist role. For the purposes of this article, we’ll exclude administrative type people from the general  target population.

The important point to note here is the importance of the Active user in relation to the Passive user (sometimes known as a lurker).

To deliver a valuable intranet, it is imperative to increase the percentage of active contributors and the level of content contribution.

 

Why are ‘active’ intranet users important?

Research from the Worldwide Intranet Challenge (WIC) has shown that the more people interact with the intranet - ie. publish content, upload/download documents, contribute to discussion forums, provide status updates, use project spaces and team sites - the more valuable they perceive it to be.

Whether this perceived value translates into business value is a complicated question and one that cannot be easily answered. However, if we make the assumption that most employees are adults who use tools and technologies that will help them to be as productive as possible, then a good case can be made that there is a correlation between the use of a technology and value to the organisation. Especially if the intranet is designed to support one or more of the three compelling business reasons for having an intranet.

  

A different way of looking at intranet user adoption

As I mentioned earlier, part of the difficulty in defining and measuring intranet user adoption is the broad array of functions that can potentially fall under the banner of ‘intranet’.

So perhaps rather than talking about ‘intranet adoption’, we may be better off looking at each of the following functions independently and then assessing the degree of adoption for each function and user type.

• Content - procedures, news, documents, reports/dashboards, video, bookmarks, online training, staff profiles, blogs, lists (customers, products, services), ‘Likes’, tagging

• Document management - version control, collaborative authoring, collecting feedback, reviews, approvals, archiving

• Collaboration spaces  - project spaces, team spaces, calendars, tasks/schedule

• Discussion forums - questions and answers, online communities, subscriptions

• Online processes - online forms, workflows, approvals

• Advanced communication tools - video conferencing, messaging, activity feeds

• Portal to enterprise data and apps – integration with existing ERP, CRM systems

It’s possible, and in fact probable, that many organisational intranets will have a combination of one or more of the above. This means not all functions will be relevant to all organisations. It’s also possible that some organisations may have a high adoption rate of some functions but not others. Or they could have a high rate of passive user adoption but a low rate of active user adoption.

This is why the all encompassing term of ‘intranet user adoption' can be confusing - there are many nuances and variables to consider.

It may be more meaningful to manage your intranet user adoption efforts at a more micro level. For example, foccusing on Employee Profiles views (passive users) and updates (active users).

 

What is user adoption success then?

Of course, deciding the target goal for adoption  - what is good? what is bad? - can be a subjective, arbitrary and difficult task in itself. Particularly without the benefit of any comparative or benchmark data or a broader business context available.

However it’s handy to keep in mind the tipping point rule of thumb that says when an innovation is adopted by 15 to 20% of the target audience, an acceleration in the adoption of the innovation is likely to occur.  This doesn’t mean that user adoption strategies should stop. This should only be considered when the innovation - self-updating of employee profiles for example - reaches critical mass (remembering that that critical mass is the point at which an innovation is self-sustaining).

 

Measuring user adoption

A possible starting point for organisations wishing to get a handle on what is a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ level of user adoption is the Worldwide Intranet Challenge (WIC). Regular readers of this blog will know that the WIC is an online benchmark service that allows you to compare the level of intranet user adoption and satisfaction with 190 other organisations that have already participated.

For example, the chart below shows the average level of adoption for the benchmark questions related to publishing of content (as you can see, the bar is pretty low at the moment!). 

 

Summary

The term ‘user adoption’ gets thrown around quite often these days. It sometimes seen as the panacea for an organisation's challenges in implementing collaborative software.

While it’s certainly a worthwhile goal to get more employees engaged with the various functions that can fall under the banner of intranet user adoption, people responsible for ensuring organisations make the most of their intranet investment should think more deeply about what ‘intranet user adoption’ really means, how it is defined and how to determine it's success.

Related articles

10 lessons intranets can learn from Wikipedia

The organic intranet

Delivering an interactive intranet: case study from #1 ranked interactive intranet: nSynergy

If employees spend more time on the intranet, does this mean it is more valuable?

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May 7, 2014 3:01:04 PM | Intranet Measurement, Intranet Trends

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by Andrew Wright

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:

• AmBank Group (M) Bhd (Malaysia), #2 for completing work tasks

• Beaver Street Fisheries (United States), #2 for online forms

• British Gas, (UK) #1 UK intranet, #1 10,000+ employees, #3 online discussions

• Socialministeriet (Denmark), #1 for completing work tasks

• Department of Transport (Australia), #3 information for new starters

• Endress+Hauser (Switzerland), #2 information about products/services, #2 search

• ERM (UK), #1 off-site access, #3 personalisation

• Home Assistance UK Ltd (UK), #3 intranet availability

• JT International (Switzerland), #3 understanding values & culture

• Køge Kommune (Denmark), #3 ease of reading information

• 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

• Nestlé (Switzerland), #2 collaboration

• NNE Pharmaplan (Denmark), #2 personalisation, #1 1000 - 10,000 employees

• PinnacleHealth System (USA), #2 complete work tasks

• Queensland Country Credit Union (Australia), #1 online forms, #3 managing documents, #2 intranet training

• State of Indiana Bureau of Motor Vehicles (USA), #2 work instructions

• Simpson Grierson (New Zealand), #3 content, #3 change notification, #2 intranet availability, #3 staff details, #2 news

• SNL Financial (USA), #3 collaboration, #3 reports & dashboards

• St Barbara (Australia), #3 search, #3 re-usable documents

• Swisscom AG (Switzerland), #1 collaboration, #1 mobile access, #1 content easy to read, #3 content accuracy, #3 off-site access

• 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:

• 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

• 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.

• 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

• The WIC's most valuable intranets of 2012 (based on end user feedback)

• If employees spend more time on the intranet, does this mean it's more valuable?

• 50 ways to a better intranet

• Are intranets becoming more collaborative and accessible?

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Feb 5, 2014 11:10:55 PM | Competitions, Intranet Case Studies, Intranet Leading Practices, Intranet Measurement, WIC Updates

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by Andrew Wright

“You can’t improve what you don’t measure” goes the old saying by I’m not sure who. This is certainly true in the case of the Worldwide Intranet Challenge (WIC) free online intranet benchmarking service.

Eleven organisations from the 150 organisations who have participated in the WIC have now completed the WIC survey twice. So what are the results? Have these organisations been able to improve their intranets the second time around?

It seems they have.

Every question in the online survey, on average, received a higher score for the second benchmark. The chart below shows the average score for each survey question - sorted in order of % improvement - for both the first benchmark and the second benchmark. Some interesting things to note:

• The average response for each question has improved by about 10% the second time around. Meaning that it would be reasonable to say that these intranets overall have improved on average by 10%.
• The average ranking for each question the first time the organisation completed the survey was 87.1 (from 170 surveys). The second time around this ranking improved dramatically to more than 20 places to 65.9 (from 170 surveys)
• The average time between the first and second survey is 539 days (nearly 1.5 years)
• The chart below:
  • Ranks the questions in order from biggest improvement (Collaboration 30.2%) to least improvement (Speed 1.7%)
  • Shows the average score for each question for both the first and second surveys
• Interesting to note that the question "Collaborate with other staff (eg. using online work spaces or team rooms)" has improved the most (30.2%). This perhaps indicates that the 'social intranet' is a priority for improving intranets 
• Also interesting to note that Mobile access has improved by almost 20% - indicating another priority area of improvement (though off-site access improved only 11.1%)
• So does it pay to benchmark? It would seem so. One of the big benefits that organisations mention when they participate in the WIC is that it helps focus the intranet team on measurable objectives. The fact that there are goals that can be measured is enough to focus and inspire teams to work towards these goals
• Interested in participating? Register for the Worldwide Intranet Challenge.

 

by Andrew Wright

This article argues that there are five core measures that organisations should be tracking (and benchmarking if possible) over time to determine the effectiveness of their intranets:

• Average time spent on the intranet per employee

• # of page views per employee

• % and frequency of employees that view content

• % and frequency of employees that contribute or update content

• Level of employee satisfaction with the intranet

Combined together and in conjunction with some kind of comparative data, these 5 measures can provide a valuable snapshot of intranet success.

However, not everyone necessarily agrees with this approach. There is a view that traffic, page views and the like are too simplistic and superficial as ‘real’ measures and don’t give an accurate or deep understanding of the underlying business value of an intranet. 

Approaches to intranet measurement

For example, Nigel Williams in his article Judging your intranet by hits alone is really a miss, says that “if you are judging your intranet by hits, stop!” He then provides a list of more than 20 other variables that intranet managers should also consider tracking (check out this interesting LinkedIn discussion about the article).

Gerry McGovern says in his article How to measure the success of your intranet”, “intranet teams are measuring the wrong things, like traffic, hits and page views. Is more traffic a good thing? Why?”. He goes on to say “Focus on your employees’ time. Be relentless in seeking to save it. If you do you will create a great intranet.” (The logical conclusion being that measuring time-saved is a better measure of intranet success than traffic).

In It’s not about the outputs, it’s about the outcomes, Jonathan Phillips says “Outputs such as page views, or time per visit, are interesting numbers but don’t get to the heart of the matter. It’s the outcomes, or the results of intranet activity, that’s most important.” He then says, “These numbers are much harder to generate and report, but do provide better clarity of return on investment and of purpose of your intranet.“

And Anna Rydne says in Why Miserable Intranet Stats May Indicate Success “effective communication means keeping the employees informed in the shortest period of time. And that’s why high click rate and a lot of time spent on the intranet doesn’t necessarily mean success.”

Is it worth looking beyond the raw data?

So it seems to really measure true intranet success, you need to look beyond just the raw numbers. You also need to look at business performance and outcomes.

I don’t necessarily disagree with the general intent of these articles but it does seem like a lot of hard work (as Jonathan points out). And is it overcomplicating something to the extent that it discourages organisations from even attempting to measure intranet value? Why bother measuring page views, usage and traffic at all if this data can be interpreted in different ways.  

In fact, many organisations don’t do any intranet measurement so asking them to commit time and effort in applying sophisticated techniques that measure business value of an intranet is a big expectation. Wouldn’t it be better to use some fundamental measures where the data is relatively easy to obtain, than nothing at all?

But does increased intranet activity necessarily = success?

From my research into effective intranets I have found that a good case can be made that tracking the 5 measures above - which is a relatively simple and straightforward task -  provides a reliable indicator that the intranet is also delivering business value. More reliable than perhaps the articles above acknowledge.

In the article, If employees spend more time on the intranet, does this mean it's more valuable? I reveal some interesting statistics that show that the more time staff spend on the intranet - both as viewers and contributors - the greater it's value.

While the statistics can't show whether there is any correlation between intranet value and business outcomes (the ideal measure of success) it's fair to say that an intranet that is perceived as being valuable by employees will most likely result in positive business outcomes.

It's similar to determining the success of a book. Lets say there are two books about SharePoint 2013 - one sells 10,000 copies and the other sells 100 copies. Which one is judged to be more successful? Which one has provided better business outcomes to the SharePoint community? You could possibly argue that the 100 copy book could potentially add more value. Maybe a single company that followed the advice in the second book was able save more money than all the companies combined that read the first book (almost impossible to measure). But I would say that, on balance, the chances are that the more popular book would also provide the most value (I know which one I would prefer to author).

Or compare two coffee shops - one is always busy the other has only a few people. Again, it could be argued that the one with the fewer people is making a bigger profit and is more successful. Perhaps they charge $50 for a cappucino. Again, I would argue this is unlikely and that the chances are that the busy shop is more successful.

Wright’s Rule for Intranet Success  

Based on this research, I’ve come up with a highly scientific formula that is a guide to intranet success. I’ve imaginatively called it: Wright’s Rule for Intranet Success.

The key word in this formula is ‘more’. What is more? More in comparison to what?  For this formula to work, the measures need to be compared to something. A baseline or benchmark. This could be past measures within your organisation or measures against competitors or against industry standards. As Nigel rightly points out in his article, statements such as  “I have a great intranet because we have 100,000 hits a month” are meaningless.

What is wrong is not so much the fact that it’s measuring hits but that the hits are not being compared to anything. A better measure might be something like number of page views per employee per month for the last 12 months. An even better measure would be average page views per month per employee against an industry benchmark. The ultimate measure would be to correlate these intranet measures with key organisational performance indicators such as profit/loss, revenue, market share, growth, research & development, and employee engagement (register for the Worldwide Intranet Challenge if you would like to benchmark the level of end user satisfaction with your intranet).

There may be certain situations where a case can be made that increased traffic or an increase in the number of users is a negative thing or a decrease is positive (read Anna’s article), but I would argue that these cases are not common and Wright’s Rule is a fairly solid guide.

Time spent as indicator of success

Time spent as an indicator of success is not a new idea. I was interested to see the following Tweet recently from Rupert Murdoch about one of the indicators the signalled the decline of MySpace.


Could the same 'hours spent' indicator be used for intranets?

And then there is this interesting interview with Jeff Weiner, the CEO of LinkedIn:

Interviewer: Are you succeeding in getting people to stay on LinkedIn longer during the course of the day, and is that a goal?

Jeff Weiner: Time spent has never been the primary objective. As we like to say, LinkedIn is not a service that enables you to pass the time, it's a service that enables you to save time. And that goes back to our mission, which is to connect the world's professionals to make them more productive and successful.

So, ultimately would we like our membership to become more engaged [ie. spend more time, click more things], yes, as a proxy for the value that we're delivering to them on a daily basis, and that's why we're introducing products like LinkedIn Today, that's why we have over a million groups now servicing LinkedIn members within a professional context.

What does it all mean?

While it’s a noble and worthwhile goal to look for more meaningful ways to measure and improve the effectiveness of your intranet, it’s important not to overlook or undersell the above 5 core measures as important, valid and legitimate. This is even more important for organisations that don’t measure anything.

So the big challenge for intranet professionals is to provide content and tools that employees need to be more productive and do their work more effectively. As Weiner notes, ‘time spent’ should not be a goal in itself but as “a proxy for the value that we're delivering to them on a daily basis”.

You may also like

• If employees spend more time on the intranet, does this mean it's more valuable?

• Are intranets becoming more collaborative and accessible?

Would you like to compare the level of staff satisfaction with your intranet?

If you are interested in benchmarking your intranet against 150 other organisations, why not register for participation in the Worldwide Intranet Challenge (WIC) free online benchmarking service. Read what participating organisations say about the WIC or find out more on the WIC FAQ page.

 

The WIC's most valuable intranets of 2013 (based on end user feedback)

by Andrew Wright

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:

• AmBank Group (M) Bhd (Malaysia), #2 for completing work tasks

• Beaver Street Fisheries (United States), #2 for online forms

• British Gas, (UK) #1 UK intranet, #1 10,000+ employees, #3 online discussions

• Socialministeriet (Denmark), #1 for completing work tasks

• Department of Transport (Australia), #3 information for new starters

• Endress+Hauser (Switzerland), #2 information about products/services, #2 search

• ERM (UK), #1 off-site access, #3 personalisation

• Home Assistance UK Ltd (UK), #3 intranet availability

• JT International (Switzerland), #3 understanding values & culture

• Køge Kommune (Denmark), #3 ease of reading information

• 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

• Nestlé (Switzerland), #2 collaboration

• NNE Pharmaplan (Denmark), #2 personalisation, #1 1000 - 10,000 employees

• PinnacleHealth System (USA), #2 complete work tasks

• Queensland Country Credit Union (Australia), #1 online forms, #3 managing documents, #2 intranet training

• State of Indiana Bureau of Motor Vehicles (USA), #2 work instructions

• Simpson Grierson (New Zealand), #3 content, #3 change notification, #2 intranet availability, #3 staff details, #2 news

• SNL Financial (USA), #3 collaboration, #3 reports & dashboards

• St Barbara (Australia), #3 search, #3 re-usable documents

• Swisscom AG (Switzerland), #1 collaboration, #1 mobile access, #1 content easy to read, #3 content accuracy, #3 off-site access

• 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:

• 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

• 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.

• 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

• The WIC's most valuable intranets of 2012 (based on end user feedback)

• If employees spend more time on the intranet, does this mean it's more valuable?

• 50 ways to a better intranet

• Are intranets becoming more collaborative and accessible?

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Feb 5, 2014 11:10:55 PM | Competitions, Intranet Case Studies, Intranet Leading Practices, Intranet Measurement, WIC Updates

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by Andrew Wright

“You can’t improve what you don’t measure” goes the old saying by I’m not sure who. This is certainly true in the case of the Worldwide Intranet Challenge (WIC) free online intranet benchmarking service.

Eleven organisations from the 150 organisations who have participated in the WIC have now completed the WIC survey twice. So what are the results? Have these organisations been able to improve their intranets the second time around?

It seems they have.

Every question in the online survey, on average, received a higher score for the second benchmark. The chart below shows the average score for each survey question - sorted in order of % improvement - for both the first benchmark and the second benchmark. Some interesting things to note:

• The average response for each question has improved by about 10% the second time around. Meaning that it would be reasonable to say that these intranets overall have improved on average by 10%.
• The average ranking for each question the first time the organisation completed the survey was 87.1 (from 170 surveys). The second time around this ranking improved dramatically to more than 20 places to 65.9 (from 170 surveys)
• The average time between the first and second survey is 539 days (nearly 1.5 years)
• The chart below:
  • Ranks the questions in order from biggest improvement (Collaboration 30.2%) to least improvement (Speed 1.7%)
  • Shows the average score for each question for both the first and second surveys
• Interesting to note that the question "Collaborate with other staff (eg. using online work spaces or team rooms)" has improved the most (30.2%). This perhaps indicates that the 'social intranet' is a priority for improving intranets 
• Also interesting to note that Mobile access has improved by almost 20% - indicating another priority area of improvement (though off-site access improved only 11.1%)
• So does it pay to benchmark? It would seem so. One of the big benefits that organisations mention when they participate in the WIC is that it helps focus the intranet team on measurable objectives. The fact that there are goals that can be measured is enough to focus and inspire teams to work towards these goals
• Interested in participating? Register for the Worldwide Intranet Challenge.

 

by Andrew Wright

This article argues that there are five core measures that organisations should be tracking (and benchmarking if possible) over time to determine the effectiveness of their intranets:

• Average time spent on the intranet per employee

• # of page views per employee

• % and frequency of employees that view content

• % and frequency of employees that contribute or update content

• Level of employee satisfaction with the intranet

Combined together and in conjunction with some kind of comparative data, these 5 measures can provide a valuable snapshot of intranet success.

However, not everyone necessarily agrees with this approach. There is a view that traffic, page views and the like are too simplistic and superficial as ‘real’ measures and don’t give an accurate or deep understanding of the underlying business value of an intranet. 

Approaches to intranet measurement

For example, Nigel Williams in his article Judging your intranet by hits alone is really a miss, says that “if you are judging your intranet by hits, stop!” He then provides a list of more than 20 other variables that intranet managers should also consider tracking (check out this interesting LinkedIn discussion about the article).

Gerry McGovern says in his article How to measure the success of your intranet”, “intranet teams are measuring the wrong things, like traffic, hits and page views. Is more traffic a good thing? Why?”. He goes on to say “Focus on your employees’ time. Be relentless in seeking to save it. If you do you will create a great intranet.” (The logical conclusion being that measuring time-saved is a better measure of intranet success than traffic).

In It’s not about the outputs, it’s about the outcomes, Jonathan Phillips says “Outputs such as page views, or time per visit, are interesting numbers but don’t get to the heart of the matter. It’s the outcomes, or the results of intranet activity, that’s most important.” He then says, “These numbers are much harder to generate and report, but do provide better clarity of return on investment and of purpose of your intranet.“

And Anna Rydne says in Why Miserable Intranet Stats May Indicate Success “effective communication means keeping the employees informed in the shortest period of time. And that’s why high click rate and a lot of time spent on the intranet doesn’t necessarily mean success.”

Is it worth looking beyond the raw data?

So it seems to really measure true intranet success, you need to look beyond just the raw numbers. You also need to look at business performance and outcomes.

I don’t necessarily disagree with the general intent of these articles but it does seem like a lot of hard work (as Jonathan points out). And is it overcomplicating something to the extent that it discourages organisations from even attempting to measure intranet value? Why bother measuring page views, usage and traffic at all if this data can be interpreted in different ways.  

In fact, many organisations don’t do any intranet measurement so asking them to commit time and effort in applying sophisticated techniques that measure business value of an intranet is a big expectation. Wouldn’t it be better to use some fundamental measures where the data is relatively easy to obtain, than nothing at all?

But does increased intranet activity necessarily = success?

From my research into effective intranets I have found that a good case can be made that tracking the 5 measures above - which is a relatively simple and straightforward task -  provides a reliable indicator that the intranet is also delivering business value. More reliable than perhaps the articles above acknowledge.

In the article, If employees spend more time on the intranet, does this mean it's more valuable? I reveal some interesting statistics that show that the more time staff spend on the intranet - both as viewers and contributors - the greater it's value.

While the statistics can't show whether there is any correlation between intranet value and business outcomes (the ideal measure of success) it's fair to say that an intranet that is perceived as being valuable by employees will most likely result in positive business outcomes.

It's similar to determining the success of a book. Lets say there are two books about SharePoint 2013 - one sells 10,000 copies and the other sells 100 copies. Which one is judged to be more successful? Which one has provided better business outcomes to the SharePoint community? You could possibly argue that the 100 copy book could potentially add more value. Maybe a single company that followed the advice in the second book was able save more money than all the companies combined that read the first book (almost impossible to measure). But I would say that, on balance, the chances are that the more popular book would also provide the most value (I know which one I would prefer to author).

Or compare two coffee shops - one is always busy the other has only a few people. Again, it could be argued that the one with the fewer people is making a bigger profit and is more successful. Perhaps they charge $50 for a cappucino. Again, I would argue this is unlikely and that the chances are that the busy shop is more successful.

Wright’s Rule for Intranet Success  

Based on this research, I’ve come up with a highly scientific formula that is a guide to intranet success. I’ve imaginatively called it: Wright’s Rule for Intranet Success.

The key word in this formula is ‘more’. What is more? More in comparison to what?  For this formula to work, the measures need to be compared to something. A baseline or benchmark. This could be past measures within your organisation or measures against competitors or against industry standards. As Nigel rightly points out in his article, statements such as  “I have a great intranet because we have 100,000 hits a month” are meaningless.

What is wrong is not so much the fact that it’s measuring hits but that the hits are not being compared to anything. A better measure might be something like number of page views per employee per month for the last 12 months. An even better measure would be average page views per month per employee against an industry benchmark. The ultimate measure would be to correlate these intranet measures with key organisational performance indicators such as profit/loss, revenue, market share, growth, research & development, and employee engagement (register for the Worldwide Intranet Challenge if you would like to benchmark the level of end user satisfaction with your intranet).

There may be certain situations where a case can be made that increased traffic or an increase in the number of users is a negative thing or a decrease is positive (read Anna’s article), but I would argue that these cases are not common and Wright’s Rule is a fairly solid guide.

Time spent as indicator of success

Time spent as an indicator of success is not a new idea. I was interested to see the following Tweet recently from Rupert Murdoch about one of the indicators the signalled the decline of MySpace.


Could the same 'hours spent' indicator be used for intranets?

And then there is this interesting interview with Jeff Weiner, the CEO of LinkedIn:

Interviewer: Are you succeeding in getting people to stay on LinkedIn longer during the course of the day, and is that a goal?

Jeff Weiner: Time spent has never been the primary objective. As we like to say, LinkedIn is not a service that enables you to pass the time, it's a service that enables you to save time. And that goes back to our mission, which is to connect the world's professionals to make them more productive and successful.

So, ultimately would we like our membership to become more engaged [ie. spend more time, click more things], yes, as a proxy for the value that we're delivering to them on a daily basis, and that's why we're introducing products like LinkedIn Today, that's why we have over a million groups now servicing LinkedIn members within a professional context.

What does it all mean?

While it’s a noble and worthwhile goal to look for more meaningful ways to measure and improve the effectiveness of your intranet, it’s important not to overlook or undersell the above 5 core measures as important, valid and legitimate. This is even more important for organisations that don’t measure anything.

So the big challenge for intranet professionals is to provide content and tools that employees need to be more productive and do their work more effectively. As Weiner notes, ‘time spent’ should not be a goal in itself but as “a proxy for the value that we're delivering to them on a daily basis”.

You may also like

• If employees spend more time on the intranet, does this mean it's more valuable?

• Are intranets becoming more collaborative and accessible?

Would you like to compare the level of staff satisfaction with your intranet?

If you are interested in benchmarking your intranet against 150 other organisations, why not register for participation in the Worldwide Intranet Challenge (WIC) free online benchmarking service. Read what participating organisations say about the WIC or find out more on the WIC FAQ page.

 

Improve your intranet by 10%: how benchmarking can help (latest research)

by Andrew Wright

“You can’t improve what you don’t measure” goes the old saying by I’m not sure who. This is certainly true in the case of the Worldwide Intranet Challenge (WIC) free online intranet benchmarking service.

Eleven organisations from the 150 organisations who have participated in the WIC have now completed the WIC survey twice. So what are the results? Have these organisations been able to improve their intranets the second time around?

It seems they have.

Every question in the online survey, on average, received a higher score for the second benchmark. The chart below shows the average score for each survey question - sorted in order of % improvement - for both the first benchmark and the second benchmark. Some interesting things to note:

• The average response for each question has improved by about 10% the second time around. Meaning that it would be reasonable to say that these intranets overall have improved on average by 10%.
• The average ranking for each question the first time the organisation completed the survey was 87.1 (from 170 surveys). The second time around this ranking improved dramatically to more than 20 places to 65.9 (from 170 surveys)
• The average time between the first and second survey is 539 days (nearly 1.5 years)
• The chart below:
  • Ranks the questions in order from biggest improvement (Collaboration 30.2%) to least improvement (Speed 1.7%)
  • Shows the average score for each question for both the first and second surveys
• Interesting to note that the question "Collaborate with other staff (eg. using online work spaces or team rooms)" has improved the most (30.2%). This perhaps indicates that the 'social intranet' is a priority for improving intranets 
• Also interesting to note that Mobile access has improved by almost 20% - indicating another priority area of improvement (though off-site access improved only 11.1%)
• So does it pay to benchmark? It would seem so. One of the big benefits that organisations mention when they participate in the WIC is that it helps focus the intranet team on measurable objectives. The fact that there are goals that can be measured is enough to focus and inspire teams to work towards these goals
• Interested in participating? Register for the Worldwide Intranet Challenge.

 

Why measuring page views, time spent and user activity is a worthy measure of intranet success

by Andrew Wright

This article argues that there are five core measures that organisations should be tracking (and benchmarking if possible) over time to determine the effectiveness of their intranets:

• Average time spent on the intranet per employee

• # of page views per employee

• % and frequency of employees that view content

• % and frequency of employees that contribute or update content

• Level of employee satisfaction with the intranet

Combined together and in conjunction with some kind of comparative data, these 5 measures can provide a valuable snapshot of intranet success.

However, not everyone necessarily agrees with this approach. There is a view that traffic, page views and the like are too simplistic and superficial as ‘real’ measures and don’t give an accurate or deep understanding of the underlying business value of an intranet. 

Approaches to intranet measurement

For example, Nigel Williams in his article Judging your intranet by hits alone is really a miss, says that “if you are judging your intranet by hits, stop!” He then provides a list of more than 20 other variables that intranet managers should also consider tracking (check out this interesting LinkedIn discussion about the article).

Gerry McGovern says in his article How to measure the success of your intranet”, “intranet teams are measuring the wrong things, like traffic, hits and page views. Is more traffic a good thing? Why?”. He goes on to say “Focus on your employees’ time. Be relentless in seeking to save it. If you do you will create a great intranet.” (The logical conclusion being that measuring time-saved is a better measure of intranet success than traffic).

In It’s not about the outputs, it’s about the outcomes, Jonathan Phillips says “Outputs such as page views, or time per visit, are interesting numbers but don’t get to the heart of the matter. It’s the outcomes, or the results of intranet activity, that’s most important.” He then says, “These numbers are much harder to generate and report, but do provide better clarity of return on investment and of purpose of your intranet.“

And Anna Rydne says in Why Miserable Intranet Stats May Indicate Success “effective communication means keeping the employees informed in the shortest period of time. And that’s why high click rate and a lot of time spent on the intranet doesn’t necessarily mean success.”

Is it worth looking beyond the raw data?

So it seems to really measure true intranet success, you need to look beyond just the raw numbers. You also need to look at business performance and outcomes.

I don’t necessarily disagree with the general intent of these articles but it does seem like a lot of hard work (as Jonathan points out). And is it overcomplicating something to the extent that it discourages organisations from even attempting to measure intranet value? Why bother measuring page views, usage and traffic at all if this data can be interpreted in different ways.  

In fact, many organisations don’t do any intranet measurement so asking them to commit time and effort in applying sophisticated techniques that measure business value of an intranet is a big expectation. Wouldn’t it be better to use some fundamental measures where the data is relatively easy to obtain, than nothing at all?

But does increased intranet activity necessarily = success?

From my research into effective intranets I have found that a good case can be made that tracking the 5 measures above - which is a relatively simple and straightforward task -  provides a reliable indicator that the intranet is also delivering business value. More reliable than perhaps the articles above acknowledge.

In the article, If employees spend more time on the intranet, does this mean it's more valuable? I reveal some interesting statistics that show that the more time staff spend on the intranet - both as viewers and contributors - the greater it's value.

While the statistics can't show whether there is any correlation between intranet value and business outcomes (the ideal measure of success) it's fair to say that an intranet that is perceived as being valuable by employees will most likely result in positive business outcomes.

It's similar to determining the success of a book. Lets say there are two books about SharePoint 2013 - one sells 10,000 copies and the other sells 100 copies. Which one is judged to be more successful? Which one has provided better business outcomes to the SharePoint community? You could possibly argue that the 100 copy book could potentially add more value. Maybe a single company that followed the advice in the second book was able save more money than all the companies combined that read the first book (almost impossible to measure). But I would say that, on balance, the chances are that the more popular book would also provide the most value (I know which one I would prefer to author).

Or compare two coffee shops - one is always busy the other has only a few people. Again, it could be argued that the one with the fewer people is making a bigger profit and is more successful. Perhaps they charge $50 for a cappucino. Again, I would argue this is unlikely and that the chances are that the busy shop is more successful.

Wright’s Rule for Intranet Success  

Based on this research, I’ve come up with a highly scientific formula that is a guide to intranet success. I’ve imaginatively called it: Wright’s Rule for Intranet Success.

The key word in this formula is ‘more’. What is more? More in comparison to what?  For this formula to work, the measures need to be compared to something. A baseline or benchmark. This could be past measures within your organisation or measures against competitors or against industry standards. As Nigel rightly points out in his article, statements such as  “I have a great intranet because we have 100,000 hits a month” are meaningless.

What is wrong is not so much the fact that it’s measuring hits but that the hits are not being compared to anything. A better measure might be something like number of page views per employee per month for the last 12 months. An even better measure would be average page views per month per employee against an industry benchmark. The ultimate measure would be to correlate these intranet measures with key organisational performance indicators such as profit/loss, revenue, market share, growth, research & development, and employee engagement (register for the Worldwide Intranet Challenge if you would like to benchmark the level of end user satisfaction with your intranet).

There may be certain situations where a case can be made that increased traffic or an increase in the number of users is a negative thing or a decrease is positive (read Anna’s article), but I would argue that these cases are not common and Wright’s Rule is a fairly solid guide.

Time spent as indicator of success

Time spent as an indicator of success is not a new idea. I was interested to see the following Tweet recently from Rupert Murdoch about one of the indicators the signalled the decline of MySpace.


Could the same 'hours spent' indicator be used for intranets?

And then there is this interesting interview with Jeff Weiner, the CEO of LinkedIn:

Interviewer: Are you succeeding in getting people to stay on LinkedIn longer during the course of the day, and is that a goal?

Jeff Weiner: Time spent has never been the primary objective. As we like to say, LinkedIn is not a service that enables you to pass the time, it's a service that enables you to save time. And that goes back to our mission, which is to connect the world's professionals to make them more productive and successful.

So, ultimately would we like our membership to become more engaged [ie. spend more time, click more things], yes, as a proxy for the value that we're delivering to them on a daily basis, and that's why we're introducing products like LinkedIn Today, that's why we have over a million groups now servicing LinkedIn members within a professional context.

What does it all mean?

While it’s a noble and worthwhile goal to look for more meaningful ways to measure and improve the effectiveness of your intranet, it’s important not to overlook or undersell the above 5 core measures as important, valid and legitimate. This is even more important for organisations that don’t measure anything.

So the big challenge for intranet professionals is to provide content and tools that employees need to be more productive and do their work more effectively. As Weiner notes, ‘time spent’ should not be a goal in itself but as “a proxy for the value that we're delivering to them on a daily basis”.

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Would you like to compare the level of staff satisfaction with your intranet?

If you are interested in benchmarking your intranet against 150 other organisations, why not register for participation in the Worldwide Intranet Challenge (WIC) free online benchmarking service. Read what participating organisations say about the WIC or find out more on the WIC FAQ page.