That pivotal moment, that moment in which the caveman realizes that the spark from banging his rocks together can ignite his pet pterodactyl’s nest, it’s a world changer (for both caveman and pterodactyl), he’s warm. Of course it’s nice to hand the guy the rocks, the right sort of rocks. It’s a delight when those rocks bring real results to his banging… it’s not just the nest but the whole tree and the surrounding forest that is swept by the wave of fiery inspiration.
A new intranet doesn’t just mean you bang different rocks together, it brings about a wave of change (if you do it right). In fact, almost nothing escapes; only the deep bedrock of the business survives and even that can be left seriously charred. Communication, engagement, peer to peer collaboration, information flow and deep-rooted business process can all feel the heat of change. But beware; if you don’t think first, even banging your rocks together can start a conflagration so large that you will never get it back under control and many organizations just want to start by getting warm.
There are, of course, lots of ways to make heat and as consultants we know that, we often do it just by talking. The match and the lighter are perhaps more effective, if a little passé. However, not all companies are ready for these, there are still a great many organizations banging rocks or even multiple sets of rocks together and doing pretty well out of it. Our job is to help these companies evolve, that sometimes means stepping back from our vision of Fuel-Cell-Powered-Pocket-Laser-Intranets and trying to bring the future in manageable steps.
In large multi-nationals multiple intranets are almost a disease, lots of little fires left over from the first enthusiastic rock-banging of the last 5 or so years, most of them only partly doing the job of warming the cave and many standing as flaming barriers, keeping real communication away from the troglodytes inside.
Most companies certainly recognize the need to progress. They can feel the break in communication flow, sympathize with the need for the employee to ‘hunt’ the right source and they can even measure the costs of maintaining lots of different sites. However, the barriers to moving the whole organization forward as one are often simply too great because real-life things get in the way, things such as:
Project costs – “Intranet isn’t core business after all”
Project priorities – “Yes we know we have to do something, and it’s important but the transformation workshops for the top managers must come first”
Analysis Paralysis – “It would take forever to get the requirements”
Resources – “I don’t have time to give you my needs, let alone the time to migrate my content if you actually get something going”
Complexity – “Well we started looking at this corporate policy material and found we had to involve Ben, Fred, Joe, Karl, Mary and most of Dawn’s team not to mention….”
Politics – “I’m not giving up my intranet, it does everything that I need it to do”
And strangely, the one that I’ve heard a lot (probably due to the above)…
Believability – “You’ve been talking about this need for the last 3 years and you’re no further, why should it work now?”
It’s often the case that we think big, try to do everything right and in the process spend so long defining our requirements that the world has changed by the time we get the project live and if you promise the world, the gift under the Christmas tree is only going to be disappointing. More often, we find devolved responsibilities and aligning those, even with a CEO mandate, is harder than building the time machine to hand the guy the rocks in the first place.
If you want to succeed in this environment, you often need to take a super-pragmatic approach to building new Intranets, simple steps with a view on the big picture (the pocket-laser of internal data systems that is the digital workplace). This means I still find myself building Stone Age intranets, from a digital workplace point of view, but the concepts and structures behind them are very 2012. I don’t often get to play with social media, I don’t get to gamify, but I do get to build a really strong foundation for the future and I get to transform the way the organization works, in bite-sized chunks.
With all that in mind here are eight thoughts on how to focus the fire-starting, regardless of the tools you use.
Get power from the top…
You need top level buy in. Get it. Don’t start without it. End of discussion.
Think strategic, build small and assimilate to get big – M&A time for Intranets…
Start with a well-defined and effective nucleus and build out from there. Put the essentials and easily manageable components in to your first build. Don’t get too ambitious but, at a minimum, provide a good routing mechanism to ‘legacy’ Intranet content of worth.
Tackle the integration issues and assimilate your targets, bit by bit and case by case. As with any merger; some parts you’ll want to replace straight away and some will have to merge into other areas of your existing nucleus (which will require some thought). Some parts will be gold dust in their own right, ripe for the picking and some will be superfluous and can be axed there and then.
Pick your battles…
Do your due diligence, prioritize based on impact. Identify the areas where maximum benefit can be had and focus your attention there. Then slice and dice the legacy Intranets to get the value under your control. Deliver measurable improvements for the bits you take; better search, better structure, better content or better governance etc.. Help the remainder to die quickly and painlessly.
Have the ‘difficult’ discussions where necessary and argue from a strategic point of view but remember we are talking strategic for the bottom line of the company, not just for the development of the Intranet.
If you build it they WON’T come, unless…
Make sure you train and empower your authors. The best system in the world is useless without good content. A common error is to assume that people want to read an Intranet, especially Intranet news. They don’t… Unless it’s interesting or helps them do their job.
If you want people to come; don’t just a fabulous venue, fill it with good acts.
Choose Ambassadors…
Pick some super-committed stakeholders and do something good for them. These people become your ambassadors. If you can improve their processes instead of mirroring painful off-line processes then it’s all the better!
Make sure you can measure and prove your success to them. Their support can be used to help you convince your next troglodyte.
Be the belle of the ball…
Build the features and functions that people want and need, make things easy to use, clearly managed and not overly constraining. Make it attractive and fun to play with you. Make it peppy enough that it’s better than the stuff they do themselves. Delegate governance as far down the organization as makes sense.
Make it attractive and easy for the users too. Make it more appealing than the legacy sites they have to use. Support the legacy environment as it moves, help them find old material that they value and remember; if you try to block their way to it and they need it then they will bookmark and go round you.
Use that executive power correctly…
Stop the business building new things in parallel if it makes sense, but don’t stop them doing things that will give them huge wins in the short term.
The world can’t always wait and it may be beneficial to have your focus elsewhere but do take time to think about how to align these activities and nudge them in the right direction.
Remember that an Intranet is all about content…
The expensive part of any Intranet project is not the specification, it’s not the design or build and not even the system on which it runs. The expensive part and the valuable part, is the content itself. That means you need to plan your systems to ensure that the business does not need to keep re-touching and re-migrating content each time something new comes along.
Tools change, Suppliers change and IT systems change but your vital business information just keeps growing. Provide ways to help control that growth; try to stop issues building up for the future.
Do things that detach you from the technology problems; Separate your content and information structures from your systems and you are on to a long term winner. A few other tips are:
Have a strong information structure, make it stable and extensible. Get the core right on day one.
Remember that with your extensible structures, you can go into far more detail when you need to; for example with the taxonomy for standard operating procedures. All that detail doesn’t need to apply to the whole Intranet.
Lastly, don’t build your information structures on unstable foundations such as organization structure, unless of course you want to feed hundreds of hungry consultants in the future!
It’s OK to use new tools, better rocks, water proof matches and branded lighters… but warmth is warmth, don’t keep trying to reinvent that. More importantly, there is nothing that puts out the fire of enthusiasm faster than repetition of annoyingly mundane tasks such as content migration!
And as a closing thought…
I know I’ve mixed my eras up with my metaphors. If that bothers you, my advice is to just think of the Flintstones. Of course, if it still gives you a problem when you do that, then you might just be stuck in the details instead of seeing the big picture.