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:
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3 Steps to Sustainable SharePoint User Adoption Success - Dux Raymond Sy
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Low Intranet User Adoption: Address It Once and For All - Alexis Rodrigo
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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):
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Passive - an employee that ‘lurks’, someone that simply views content and doesn’t contribute.
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Active - a contributor of content
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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.
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Content - procedures, news, documents, reports/dashboards, video, bookmarks, online training, staff profiles, blogs, lists (customers, products, services), ‘Likes’, tagging
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Document management - version control, collaborative authoring, collecting feedback, reviews, approvals, archiving
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Collaboration spaces - project spaces, team spaces, calendars, tasks/schedule
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Discussion forums - questions and answers, online communities, subscriptions
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Online processes - online forms, workflows, approvals
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Advanced communication tools - video conferencing, messaging, activity feeds
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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.
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.
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 17, 2013
SharePoint V The Rest of the World
There are literally dozens of technologies available that organisations can use to create and maintain their intranets. However Microsoft SharePoint has become the dominant technology with roughly half of all intranets built using SharePoint.
While there are many variables that can affect the value of an intranet such as quality of content, governance, leadership, culture, training, and change management, I thought it would be an interesting exercise to see how much of an impact, if any, technology might have on an intranet’s value.
So I analysed the data from the Worldwide Intranet Challenge (WIC) online benchmark survey to see whether there were any interesting findings - particularly in relation to SharePoint versus Other Intranet Software.
155 organisations have participated in the WIC and the breakdown of software used by participants is as follows,
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24 SharePoint (version not known)
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21 SharePoint 2007
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15 SharePoint 2010
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75 Other (comprised of 66 other intranet technologies with no clear second place)
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20 Not known
To analyse the impact of the software on end user satisfaction, I filtered the results by the categories listed above and calculated the average score for each question. I then compared these averages to see whether there were any significant differences.
Note: Of the ‘Other’ intranet software, 4 was the next highest number of occurrences (Lotus Notes in case you were wondering). So the sample size is too small for any meaningful analysis to be done for software other than SharePoint. Grouping all non-SharePoint related software together in one category runs the risk that those products that perform particularly well in an aspect of intranet (eg. creating workflows or forms) may not be recognised because of this grouping together of products.
Key findings are below:
Overall value
Software doesn’t appear to affect the overall value of the intranet with minimal differences for each software category.
Time on the intranet
Staff spend approximately 5 minutes (around 15%) longer on SharePoint compared to ‘Other’ software (Is this a good thing? See the article If employees spend more time on the intranet, does this mean it's more valuable?)
Finding information
Again, there appears to be little difference in the ease of finding information, regardless of the software.
Online collaboration
One area where SharePoint seems to have an edge is online collaboration. The average rating (out of 4) for SharePoint was 0.80 compared to Other 0.54 - almost double, a significant difference. The chart below shows a percentage breakdown of responses to this question.
This finding is supported to some extent by the results of the following surveys which indicate that the primary use of SharePoint is for supporting team based collaboration.
What are you doing with SharePoint (survey completed by 239 people)?
http://currents.michaelsampson.net/2010/08/what-sharepoint-overall.html
30 July 2010 (completed by over 750 SharePoint professionals)
http://www.colligo.com/media/document/survey-results.pdf
What does it all mean?
For many of the WIC survey questions, there were only minor differences between SharePoint and non-SharePoint ratings. This seems to indicate that there are many factors at play that affect the success of an intranet and that perhaps technology is not as big a part of the overall solution as many organisations may think.
Other key factors, besides technology, that will affect intranet value include:
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Leadership and support - are senior management convinced of the value of an intranet, do they actively use and support it?
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Financial support - are the funds available to sustain ongoing participation?
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Quality of and frequency of content provided - are people contributing content on a regular basis?
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Governance - are roles and responsibilities clear? Is content being maintained and updated regularly? Are there clear processes in place for keeping the intranet current?
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Organisational culture - is the culture one of collaboration and sharing of information? Or are people reluctant to share information?
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Change management and training - are people aware of what intranet functionality is available? Is training provided? Is it easy for people to contribute content?
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August 26, 2013
Improve your intranet by 10%: how benchmarking can help (latest research)
“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.
Andrew Wright
Director of CIBA Solutions, who manage the worldwide intranet challenge (WIC).
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