A poll conducted by the Worldwide Intranet Challenge
(WIC) LinkedIn group showed that 34% of the 305 respondents wanted a more
interactive and collaborative intranet as the one improvement for 2012. This
was the most popular response from the 5 options available.
This is backed up by WIC research which shows that interactive intranets are more valuable than those that simply provide static content.
So what is the secret to delivering a more interactive and
dynamic intranet?
nSynergy, an Australian based global consulting company
specialising in Information Management, recently participated in the Worldwide
Intranet Challenge (WIC) (the WIC is an online survey that allows organisations
to obtain feedback from their intranet end users and then compare this feedback
with other participating organisations).
Perhaps, not too surprisingly, nSynergy dominated the
rankings for questions related to the interactivity. In fact, of the 8 questions about intranet
interactivity, nSynergy ranked either 1 or 2 (from more than 100+ organisations)
in 5 of them.
The following list shows nSynergy's rankings for questions about interactivity:
- Publish Content - #2
- Upload or download documents - #2
- Discuss work topics (eg. Using discussion forums or blogs) - #1
- Collaborate with other staff (eg. Using online work spaces) - #1
- Provide feedback or comments about intranet content - #2
The WIC spoke to Peter Nguyen-Brown (left), nSynergy’s
Practice Manager about what it takes to deliver an interactive intranet.
WIC:
Were you surprised that nSynergy ranked so well in
these questions?
PNB:
Specifically in relation to interactivity, we weren’t
surprised, but we were certainly pleased to know that we ranked number 1
globally in this area against some highly reputable organisations. Our core business includes delivering
effective Intranets for organisations – and just like the advice we give our
customers, we also have to incorporate a phased approach for our own
Intranet.
Connecting our eight offices
globally with the best available collaborative tools was our primary focus, so
we are very pleased to have achieved our internal goals.
WIC:
Why do you think you received such a good response from
your end users for these questions?
PNB:
For our business to succeed we rely on maximising the
expertise across our teams globally, rather than on any one individual or
project team. The culture we continually
look to improve focuses on the power of team dynamics regardless of location,
so I think our consultants really appreciate being able to call on others for
their opinions and expertise wherever they may be located.
Given we have offices in locations that
enable us to provide 24 hour support to our customers, being able to interact
and collaborate consistently and instantly via our Intranet and collaboration
tools is vital.
WIC:
What was the process or steps you went through to
improve interactivity of the intranet? Was there much focus on training,
communication, or change management? Or was it case of build it and they will
come?
PNB:
We identified as a business in 2009 that Enterprise Social
Collaboration was going to be a hot trending topic in the years to come based
on the way we saw social collaboration impacting people’s lives outside of
work. We implemented SharePoint 2010, and
worked closely with our now partner Newsgator to implement their Social Sites
add-on to extend the existinginteractive collaborative features of
SharePoint.
We certainly kept
communications high leading up to the deployment, but the key to success of Enterprise
Social Collaboration is in simplicity to ensure User Adoption, and providing a
familiar User Experience which minimises the need for training– we achieved
this very successfully.
WIC:
What do you think is the relevant importance of
providing the technical capability for interactivity versus non-technical
qualities such as culture, training, incentives, etc?
PNB:
We have a business philosophy which extends to our
customer projects, in that the true measure of success of deploying a business
solution such as Intranet is ultimately about User Adoption and
interaction. This makes the technology
less important in our opinion, however we do feel that starting with a
SharePoint platform is a great start.
Users shouldn’t need to know what technology they are using to make the
solution effective, users should feel comfortable in the solution and
instinctively know how to use it. As per
our company vision, we believe that “enabling” technical solutions form a part
of overall company culture, our people are absolutely the centre of our
business and we constantly train, incentivise and encourage better use of our
technology.
WIC:
What benefit or value to your organisation do you think
this provides to nSynergy? Do you have any stories or examples of how the
intranet has added real or measureable value?
PNB:
There are some great stories of how the Intranet has added
real measurable value, but perhaps the best examples are by referring to
scenarios we find ourselves in quite a lot.
Consultants often ask a question via our Intranet or search for specific
expertise. It is amazing the number of
times this process has led to 2 consultants who previously didn’t know each
other, to learn more about other people’s experiences and capabilities which
has then led to other discussions about completely different topics than what
the original process was intending to find.
One of our Principal Consultants (Ali) in London has recently completed
his Masters in Entrepreneurship, and when one of our Managers in Australia was
searching our Intranet for people with expertise in Information Architecture,
the search led him to Ali’s user profile page which highlighted his recent
Masters completion - this then led to further discussion between the two which
enabled them to solve other relevant business needs relating to Ali’s recent
Masters program.
A good Intranet is not
just about helping to find information you are looking for, it is also about
connecting you to information you didn’t necessarily intend to find that can be
used for other purposes.
WIC:
What tips or advice can you give other organisations
who wish to make their intranet more interactive and dynamic? Both from a technical and non-technical point
of view?
PNB:
There are some really interesting trends in the modern
Intranet, and they often focus on providing a comfortable and familiar User
Experience. In relation to technology,
definitely consider the use of an Enterprise Social Collaboration tool - we
however would not recommend using any tool that is free and cloud based as you
lose the benefits of connecting internal information such as documents and
tasks with the social collaboration elements.
We would highly recommend the use of Newsgator with SharePoint due to
the way the 2 platforms seamlessly integrate.
Also seriously consider a Unified Communications platform that
integrates with SharePoint such as Lync for enabling Instant Messaging, Video
Conferencing, Desktop Sharing and people search – in our opinion if you mix
SharePoint with Social Collaboration and Unified Communications, you really
can’t get much more interactive and dynamic.
From a non-technical point of view, setting up an internal “Steering
Committee” or similar is vital to continually review and improve the
platform. These are often the times when
discussion on new ideas comes up for the creation of sites and content for
areas such as internal Social Groups, fund raisers, company initiatives etc –
keeping the platform evolving maintains interest with end users, but most
importantly the Intranet needs to be relevant to the user and intrinsically
linked to their productivity tools and solutions.
Intranets should not be a burden, they should
be relevant to how a user does their job.
There are many other techniques which we are happy to share with
interested organisations.
WIC:
Do you have any plans for the future to ensure you
continue to receive good feedback from your end users for this question?
PNB:
We continually ask for informal feedback, but we will be
leveraging the WIC for further benchmarking and analysis. The only true way in our opinion to measure
the success of an Intranet is to ask the users and to look for both intangible
and tangible impacts.
To this extent, we
are highly recommending the WIC to our customers before beginning Intranet projects
to measure their current Intranet, and to re-survey users after we assist with
building and deployment their new Intranet – this is a real tangible
measurement of how we have improved the way our customers do business and
service their teams.
We also have
persistent global icons from the Intranet that allows users to provide feedback
at any time.
And finally, we have
implemented an Innovation Centre which we call “Think Tank”, which allows any
person in the business to submit ideas on how they would like to see the
business improve – others can then vote on these ideas and the business can
then respond to what is most important to everyone.
nSynergy intranet - NewsFeed and Communities screen shot
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