This is one in a series of posts from our Real Intranet Manager Interviews where we highlight the creative and thoughtful people behind successful intranets of all types. Read more about the series, or see previous posts on Nigel Williams of Romec, Emily Staresina of Stockland Property Group, Luke Mepham of Aviva PLC,  Tanis Roadhouse of MD Physician Services/CMA, Christy Season of SCANA, William Amurgis of AEP and Dinesh Tantri from ThoughtWorks.

Jonathan at a glance 

• Name: Jonathan Phillips
• Age: 38
• Hometown: Lives in Bristol, Western UK
• On Twitter: @DigitalJonathan
• Blog: Intranetizen
• Company: Coca-Cola Enterprises (CCE)
• Headquarters: Atlanta, Georgia
• Employees: 13,250
• Job title: Senior Manager of Digital Communications
• Name of intranet: iConnect, re-launched April 2012
• Latest intranet overhauls: April 2012 and September 2008
• Technology stack: SharePoint 2010, hosted in the cloud

Intranet career started with a simple question 

Like many other intranet managers, Jonathan Phillips is a self-proclaimed “web geek” – he loves the web and technology. He got his start in intranets back in 2002 when a colleague in the e-business department said “hey, what do you think of this intranet stuff?” The rest is history.

Since that precipitous question, Jonathan has held several different positions working on several generations of intranets. Through all of it Jonathan has discovered that just as his intranet career has been a winding journey, so too is the life of a company’s intranet.

Jonathan works for Coca-Cola Enterprises (CCE) in the UK as the Senior Manager of Digital Communications. CCE is responsible for the manufacturing, sales and distribution of Coca-Cola products in Great Britain, France, the Benelux countries, Norway and Sweden. Today, the CCE intranet serves over 13,250 employees.

During his 15+ years with CCE, Jonathan has learned that the perfect intranet doesn’t exist. Companies restructure and refocus, technologies evolve, and employee needs and expectations change. A great intranet is not the Holy Grail, but more resembles the epic journey and the most critical factor is the quality of your team.

“The intranet must mirror a company’s 3-5 year strategy” he told me. For most intranet managers that means shifts in intranet direction every three years or so, which is about par for Jonathan. During his decade of work on the intranet he has seen three major re-launches, and he’s encountered just about every intranet challenge one can find.

Revolution and then evolution

Today the CCE intranet has just seen its latest overhaul, launching a SharePoint 2010 site earlier this month. But this most recent launch is part of a longer journey, with a history and a long path forward. “While we had a strong vision for the new intranet, our strategy was not to deliver it all in one big splash. Instead, we committed to a re-launch date, with an updated technology stack and then to follow, a series of improvements in the intranet roadmap. We will deliver the new vision step by step: revolution then evolution.”

This incremental approach has proven beneficial for past re-launches. Instead of investing a huge amount of time in one big intranet re-launch, they metered out the enhancements to deliver useful new features and content, aiming to not overload employees with too much change too quickly.

This ongoing intranet development process has also allowed Jonathan to maintain strong relationships with intranet team members throughout the company.

A good team makes a good journey

Both the 2008 and 2012 CCE intranet re-launches were combined with a large technology switch that Jonathan helped lead. Alongside the newest incarnation of the intranet, CCE employees have received new email clients, Microsoft Lync and added new social enterprise capabilities with Salesforce Chatter, all under an awareness and adoption campaign banner called “Get Connected”. The massive staggered changeover, combined with the intranet re-launch, has left Jonathan with a few gray hairs but he credits the strength of his team for the success of the project.

The broad lesson I learned was about surrounding yourself with the right people. We built a strong delivery team for the project that included people from the Public Affairs and Communications, HR, and IT teams. These people were involved in the project from day one. It was a great learning experience because we had strong governance and strong delivery.

Having a strong cross-departmental team in place has helped Jonathan continue to deliver intranet improvements on an ongoing basis. Rather than only being resourced for occasional major launches, CCE’s intranet evolves over a long and continuous path, with each major milestone bringing new features, new uses and new experiences for employees.

Integrating Communication, Collaboration and Transactions

With the latest stage of evolution, Jonathan and his team have created a truly integrated experience that strikes a balance between James Robertson’s four purposes of an intranet.

One of the most important developments in the latest intranet launch is the integration of communication, collaboration and transactional tools into the new homepage. By bringing them all to within easy reach, Jonathan believes that employees and the business get the best of the limited homepage real estate.

It’s about the cross-fertilization of traffic”, says Jonathan. “If an employee comes only to read his recent pay slip, he will now see the latest internal news, or CEO blog – they’re all on the same page.” In this way, each department benefits from each other’s traffic and the employee gets easy, quick access to key information and tools.

The new CCE intranet, iConnect, is a place of action and information combined.

Holy team, not holy grail

The latest and greatest version of the CCE intranet sounds extremely useful and is light years ahead of where many intranets are. But you can bet that Jonathan and his team aren’t about to rest on their laurels. Many more projects, phases and improvements await as he and his team pursue a stronger and stronger intranet.

While the perfect intranet seems like a Holy Grail to be found and then victoriously hung on the wall, Jonathan Phillips has discovered that a good intranet is a journey rather than a destination. And like any other journey, the difference between success and failure is the team you surround yourself with.

Jonathan carries an exciting vision for CCE’s intranet and sees useful opportunities for social and mobile intranet tools, but his first and foremost focus is involving the right people in intranet planning. Get the right people together and rowing in the same direction and you’re bound to have a successful intranet journey.

A social intranet can bring wonderful changes to a company, but often the specific and measurable benefits get lost in the focus on important but vague goals such as “better communication,” “streamlined collaboration,” “stronger community” and “improved knowledge sharing.”

If you want to make your colleagues’ lives truly better and demonstrate measurable impact, it’s time to focus on shifting specific business processes to your social intranet.

Join ThoughtFarmer’s Ephraim Freed on Wednesday, May 2 at 8:30 AM Pacific /11:30 AM Eastern for a practical client webinar: Moving business processes to the social intranet.

Register now (free)

In this webinar we’ll explore:

• The link between business processes and intranet adoption
• Real-world examples from a variety of different companies
• Criteria for selecting business processes to move
• Tips on how to shift business processes to the social intranet

A new social intranet often generates a lot of excitement as employees and executives begin to realize the unbounded opportunities. But once the joy wears off, you may find yourself under the gun to solve more specific problems.

Join this webinar to get ideas for creating specific value and learn how to identify business processes ripe for shifting to the social intranet.

• Topic: Moving business processes to the social intranet
• Time: Wed, May 2, 8:30am Pacific /11:30am Eastern / 4:30pm UK
• Length: 1 hour
• Host: Chris McGrath, Vice President Sales & Marketing and Co-Creator
• Presenter: Ephraim Freed, Marketing & Professional Services Guy
• Registration link: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/146770473

We hope you can join us on Wednesday!

Planning an epic intranet project?

Whether you’re planning a new intranet, exploring social intranets, or revamping your existing intranet, our new Intranets 101 section provides the perfect jumping-off point. With the honest guides, real-life examples, and strategic guidance provided you’ll leap ahead of the curve and give yourself a clear shot at success.

Intranet projects can be fraught with unexpected challenges and social intranets can bring their own special flavor of issues, along with the many opportunities they create. But with a little extra intranet knowledge and planning you can succeed beyond what you’ve ever expected.

What’s included in the Intranets 101 section?

Use our new Intranets 101 section to learn about the real world challenges of launching a new social intranet and build strategies for succeeding in your own unique organization. This one-page web resource includes:

• Explanations of key terms
• Case studies of real social intranet launches
• Stories from real intranet managers
• Practical articles and tips
• Videos from popular social intranet webinars
• Links to the best in-depth resources available

You can find all of these resources in one place, easy to access on the new ThoughtFarmer website. Check out Intranets 101.

Why so much awesome for free?

Because we love intranets, and we want you to love yours too!

We spend a lot of time helping clients navigate their intranet challenges and have learned the value of some good intranet knowledge up front. We had already produced a lot of this material and now have made it easily accessible, all in once place.

Intranets, and especially social intranets, sit at the intersection of information, communication, business process, company politics, personal networks and culture. But many people who are just starting out may only see simple issues of content or technology.

We are providing these free resources in the hopes that you can navigate the full scope of the social intranet journey successfully and to let you know that we’re rooting for you.

Good luck and have fun! In the words of Andy Jankowski (in the video on the Intranets 101 page), “the possibilities are endless!”

Earlier this month I gave a couple of webinars on encouraging user adoption of your social intranet. As long as we’ve been building intranet software and as long as we’ve been going to conferences, the theme of adoption is always present. And for good reason.

This blog post covers some of the ideas about adoption, what it is, why it matters, and how to encourage it.

This post takes a more theoretical approach (surprise, surprise) to thinking about adoption than others and by the end of reading it, I hope you find it useful in framing your own organization’s adoption challenges and seeing new ways of moving beyond your current state.

But before we do all of that, I’d like you to do something for me: BE SPONTANEOUS!

That’s right, I’d like you to be spontaneous. I’ll give you a few seconds. Okay, are you spontaneous yet? How’s that spontaneity doing? Is it overflowing?

You can tweet me @gordonr if you’ve come up with something really good.

Okay. Time’s up.

Well, I hope that was as awkward for you as it was for me. And there’s a reason for my awkwardness inducing exercise. And it has a lot to do with user adoption of the social intranet.

I believe that asking people to be spontaneous is what a lot of organizations are trying to do when they seek to “drive adoption” to their intranet.

“Driving adoption”, by the way, is one of my least favourite expressions. It sounds like driving cattle. Or herding cattle.

And of course, for those of you who manage social intranets, you know it’s less like herding cattle and more like this: herding cats.

So asking people to be spontaneous is like issuing these commands:

“BE SOCIAL”
“SHARE KNOWLEDGE”
“COMMUNICATE!”

In asking people to do this, we take away some of the conditions (or most of the conditions in the case of spontaneity) for it to happen. It’s called a spontaneity paradox. By asking you to be spontaneous, I made it impossible for you to be spontaneous, as that’s exactly the opposite of the definition of what spontaneity is.

I’d like you to keep that in mind as you read this post; I’m hoping we can understand some different ways of thinking about user adoption that don’t put ourselves and our social intranet users into the double bind of having to share knowledge, be social, and spontaneous because they’ve been asked to.

What is adoption?

So first things first. What do we mean when we speak about adoption anyhow?

Generally when we’re speaking about user adoption of the social intranet we’re talking about some kind of measure of the total number of users of our social intranet often represented as a percentage of the total number of possible users in our organization.

We also often refer to that usage over a period of time, introducing some sort of notion of frequency and repeated usage. It results in charts and graphs like this:

And we all love these graphs!

So we believe that an intranet manager, equipped with the right tools, should be able to answer the question, “Do you know how many people are using your intranet? And how often? Or with what frequency?”

But there’s another part to this definition that’s required. And that’s usage itself.

What exactly are we trying to get them to adopt? How do we define usage?

Now we believe this is dependent upon what your intranet does. And we’ve seen many of our client’s intranets, from outdoor equipment cooperatives to online matchmaking companies to design firms to law firms to 100 year old lime-mining firms and well, and their intranets are all quite different.

Usage is contextual – it depends entirely on your organization’s goals and the intranet’s purpose.

For those of you who know us well, you’ve probably heard us discuss James Robertson‘s 5 purposes of the intranet (here’s a presentation that outlines 4 intranet purposes: content, communication, collaboration, and activity) and at KM World in Washington DC in 2010 James snuck in a 5th purpose: culture (the cumulative result of the other purposes, IMHO).

While everyone’s intranet is different, these are some great foundational concepts to start with.

As we go through some of the possible types of things your users could be doing on your intranet, you can think about which purpose these align with.

• Find and read important HR policy material
• Keep up to date by reading company news articles
• Learn about corporate events happening next month
• Create project status updates for team members to read
• Find experts in the organization on a particular subject
• Participate in a community of practice / discussion group on emerging business trends
• Submit employee expense reports
• Access timesheet system and submit time reports
• Comment on the company “foodie” blog about the latest restaurant in town
• Update status with message about upcoming spring break vacation
• Congratulate another staff member on her 5th anniversary with the organization

And the list goes on…

There are many behaviours we want to encourage on the intranet. And while similar, they will differ from company to company depending on what your priority is. We think the lens of Robertson’s purpose of content, communication, collaboration (both project & community), activity, and the resulting culture is a great starting point.

Now we have a good handle on adoption (a measure of usage over time) and some notions of what usage means in your organization. It seems fairly easy to understand: we just need to know how to increase that graph upwards and to the right.

And this might not sound all that different than measuring and understanding adoption for any other IT-powered system that we’ve deployed in the past.

So is a social intranet really that different than any other IT system?

Well, we believe social intranets are different in that they represent a system of engagement, not simply a system of record.

These terms were written about by Geoffrey Moore (author of Crossing the Chasm and many other books about technology adoption) in a great AIIM sponsored whitepaper that was released a couple of years ago.

This table from Moore’s white paper shows some of the differences between the two types of systems.

In a system of record, you’re transacting with records (data). In a system of engagement, you’re interacting with people.Therefore, there’s a social dynamic. That’s why we call it a social intranet after all.

Not all technologies have as strong a social dynamic and it’s that social dynamic that leads to the ongoing discussion and posts like this about user adoption.

Here’s another great quote that highlights a related thought from Michael Krigsman who in 2009 wrote a blog post on ZDNet about user adoption and Enterprise 2.0 systems.

“Although geeky eggheads may become enamored by cool technology, real users care about solving practical, day-to-day business problems. We call that adoption. Stated differently, satisfied users adopt; those who do not experience sufficient value walk away.”

Walk away? Yes, that’s right. He said “walk away.” Your employees will walk away if they do not experience sufficient value.

Because if it was mandatory after all, this would be the world’s most boring blog post. I mean really, it wouldn’t make any sense to talk about user adoption if we were talking about an intranet that everyone was forced to use. Usage would be guaranteed. End of story.

But certain beneficial behaviours that we hope to encourage and spread throughout the organization are not mandatory, can’t be proceduralized, and aren’t guaranteed through the installation of a piece of software, even ours.

In fact, they’re totally the opposite: they are voluntary, spontaneous, and when they happen, they bring a serendipitous benefit. We can’t predict what will happen ahead of time, but we’ll recognize the good stuff when it happens. It’s like the infamous children’s birthday party that Dave Snowden talks about in this great video.

Which makes it really tricky for you, the intranet manager or communications manager or knowledge manager to “just make it happen” – or whatever the instruction your boss or the CIO has given you with this nifty social intranet technology.

So what’s the benefit of all this spontaneous, unpredictable and voluntary adoption anyhow? We’re taking for granted it’s good, but really, what’s the business case?

This is one of the most important points to consider. We believe that understanding the value of your intranet is directly related to how you frame the problem of your intranet in the first place. And we believe that your social intranet is a manifestation of your company’s communication and collaboration network.

It’s a living, breathing system that’s complex, that learns, and is made up of the dynamic relationship between your employees and their interactions.

It’s a network. And when you think of it like a network, a dynamic, pulsating network, and not as some fixed, static collection of pages that live on a server, you can ask yourself questions like, “What’s the value of this network to our organization as a whole? And how would we measure that?”

Revisiting the value of network interactions

We looked into this very question back in 2009 and Bryan Robertson wrote a great blog post. The punch-line: while adoption of technology through a network might be measured in linear terms (x people / y months) like our adoption graph at the beginning of this post, the value of the interactions that networks produces, grows at exponential, non-linear rates.

If you add 10 people, the benefit isn’t just last months’ value plus 10. It might be something like X-squared 100 or 2 to the N, where N is the total number of people in your network.

Bryan’s post outlines some of the various non-linear models that get applied to value-ing network interactions like Zipf’s Law, Reed’s Law and others.

We like Beckstrom’s law the most out of the bunch. Mathematically it looks like this:

And in English it’s stated like this:

The value of a network equals the net value added to each user’s transactions conducted through that network, valued from the perspective of each user, and summed for all.

So really simplified, increased users in your system is okay, but increased usage is better. And usage, as we already talked about, will have different value both individually for your users and for the organization as a whole.

I recommend you go back and look at Bryan’s post. There’s some really important ideas in there.

So enough with the theory, how do we make adoption happen?

When we listen to our clients talk about getting their employees motivated to use the intranet there seems to be a variation of the 2 levers right?

Carrot: Go there because we’ll give you something nice and fun!

Stick: Go there because it’s mandatory and if you don’t you’re fired!

But actually, the carrot and the stick are really just the same thing. They are an appeal to an extrinsic model of motivation: Do this and you’ll get that (or avoid getting that).

Extrinsic motivation defined:

Extrinsic motivation refers to the performance of an activity in order to attain an outcome. Extrinsic motivation comes from outside of the individual. Common extrinsic motivations are rewards like money and grades, but also coercion and threat of punishment. (source: Wikipedia)

But carrots and sticks don’t address the other type of motivation: intrinsic motivation.

Intrinsic motivation defined:

Intrinsic motivation refers to motivation that is driven by an interest or enjoyment in the task itself, and exists within the individual rather than relying on any external pressure. Intrinsic motivation is based on taking pleasure in an activity rather working towards an external reward.

Source: Wikipedia on intrinsic & extrinsic motivation

These two models are covered in Dan Pink’s book Drive: the surprising truth about what motivates us. For those of you who haven’t read it, I suggest taking a look at it or he’s got a great 20 minute TED Talk which has been viewed some 3.1M times…

And what’s interesting about the two types is that extrinsic motivation and intrinsic motivation both have their place in the world, one isn’t right and the other is wrong – you just need to know when to use them. Incentives (or appeals to extrinsic motivation) can be really effective. If you’re incentivizing the right task.

In the first chapter of the book, Pink talks about two types of tasks & activities and how those relate to the two models of motivation. They are called algorithmic tasks and heuristic tasks.

In Pink’s own words from Chapter 1:

“An algorithmic task is one in which you follow a set of established instructions down a single pathway to one conclusion. A heuristic task is the opposite. Precisely because no algorithm exists for it, you have to experiment with possibilities & devise a novel solution.

Working as a grocery checkout clerk is mostly algorithmic. You do pretty much the same thing over & over in a certain way. Creating an ad campaign is mostly heuristic. You have to come up with something new.”

So when is the carrot/stick approach to social intranet adoption okay?

Well, following Dan Pink’s lead, I’d say when we’re talking about algorithmic tasks and things where a mandatory task dynamic is in place, then its okay.

This falls into Robertson’s “Activity” purpose – where mandatory, routine interactions with systems of record are involved: time sheets, payroll, some HRIS, CRM tools, or other “data collection and reporting systems” etc. Some basic “Content” tasks fall into this category as well too, where consumption of static information or policy material is the goal.

A couple of examples…

IDEO never really launched their intranet in the way that many have a big launch party. Instead they built it up, added some great content to it and then sent out an email to staff about a particular piece of content: their compensation policy that had just changed. The result: a ton of staff went to take a look at it. Everyone was interested in the compensation policy. When the users got there, they looked around the intranet and saw all of the other tasty carrot-like content that had been put on the intranet and they received some significant lift in the overall adoption and usage of their intranet.

Another example of “mandatory” content or more stick-like approach:

MEC put their shift worker schedules on the intranet. This is the mandatory piece of information you need to know as a retail worker at the coop – when am I working next week? They also took away the other options for getting this information; the intranet was the only place, you had to go there. Sounds great for getting people to use the intranet, right? Put one of the most important bits of content out there.

Great, but problem: they did it before people could get access from home. That’s since been changed, but it’s a reminder to you before you start making mandatory bits of information live on your intranet: Mandatory task + limited or no access for the employee looking for the information = high degree of frustration.

Great idea, but some challenges on the implementation side of things. Of course MEC learned from that and Mondo, their intranet, is now available from home and the adoption chart which we saw at the beginning is remarkable – does your organization have 90% weekly usage?

When is it not okay to use carrots & sticks?

If we go back to the two types of tasks, it’s probably not good to use carrots and sticks for all of the stuff that makes your intranet social.

Carrots and sticks may not work well when you’re dealing with heuristic tasks – those things that involve uncertainty, creativity, novelty and require dialogue, knowledge sharing, and exploration and experimentation with others.

And this takes us back to the voluntary aspect and Krigman’s quote we saw at the beginning:

“Stated differently, satisfied users adopt; those who do not experience sufficient value walk away.”

Again, they will walk away because usage is voluntary. If they don’t want to, they don’t have to. We hope they will, but we simply can’t make them.

This is directly in line with the one liner of Dave Snowden, one that I love:

“Knowledge can only be volunteered, it can’t be conscripted.”

We sincerely hope that you’re benefitting from using your intranet for more than simply mandatory tasks. We do hope that you’re deriving value from staff communicating, sharing knowledge, and collaborating freely and openly. And that requires volunteering – or being spontaneous.

Because, and I’ll say it again, it’s those spontaneous interactions that provide the non-linear growth of the value of your intranet. Thats where the “network effects” truly are. It’s why you are running a social intranet and not just a classic few-to-many content management system.

So what’s the conclusion? Is my iPad give-away a dumb idea?

Well, I’m going to suggest that while you may have wanted to “drive adoption” what you are actually trying to do is stimulate the diffusion of innovation – that innovation being your social intranet and all of its associated interactions inside your organization.

So let’s rephrase the question: how do I stimulate the diffusion of innovation inside my organization? Perhaps that’s what the blog post and webinars should have been more accurately titled, because that’s what you’re trying to do.

The study of how technological innovation spreads in organizations owes a lot to Everett Rogers and his work in the 1960′s and his book Diffusion of Innovations. It’s a big book, it’s apparently quite boring, I’ve picked it up and put it down a few times and haven’t read the whole thing by a long shot. It’s a big read.

But let’s look at a tasty bit from the book that I hope you can learn from: the 5 factors or characteristics of an innovation Rogers identified that can influence an individual’s decision to adopt or reject that innovation.

Those 5 factors are as follows:

So let’s think through the social intranet and its usage in your organization through each of these 5 factors:

Factor 1: Relative advantage
How improved is the innovation over the previous generation/competition?

How much better is your new social intranet than the old intranet? Or better than some other competition for getting things done in your organization (email, newsletters, face-to-face meetings?)

What can your social intranet do that nothing else can?

What are you doing to accentuate that advantage? To market the intranet? To demonstrate its value about all of its great capabilities?

Another strategy: take the old things away. Remove choice. That’s what MEC did with their retail worker schedules.

Factor 2: Compatibility
How does the innovation get assimilated into the individuals life?

Do you know how your staff actually work? How work gets done? You’re going to need to become a good observational researcher here to understand the real world of work and how intrusive (or not) the use of the intranet is in your workers lives. Working in the flow: that’s what this is about.

Once you’ve figured that out, align the content, communication, collaboration, and activity functions with people’s job functions. Make it easy for them to adopt and assimilate.

Be a technology steward – help them adopt and accept it, through personal assistance and help. This is more than just training; this is an act of collaboration and problem solving itself.

An example: we spent time with one organization where face to face meetings were super, super important; instead of trying to get rid of them entirely (impossible) we asked ourselves, “how can we use the intranet to help them make face to face meetings better?” Ideas that came up included creating a section about how to run an effective meeting, building better meeting scheduling / room booking tools, and assembling meeting agenda templates.

There are lots of ways to make your intranet compatible with the way things get done in your organization and provide value.

Factor 3: Complexity/Simplicity

How easy or difficult is it to use?

Well, we’re trying (and have always tried) to create easy to use software and we’ll continue to try and release new versions with usability improvements.

In the meantime, you should be focusing on designing easily readable content, learning about how writing for the web is different than writing for print.

You can create small group spaces that work – template spaces for project collaboration.

You can usability test your IA – we are firm believers that your intranet’s foundation still lies in highly relevant, findable content.

And of course, continually measure, learn, and revise your content, and structure. Tend to the garden, weed it, prune it, and ensure that the value added is cumulative and not eroding the utility as the intranet grows.

Factor 4: Trialability

How easy is it to experiment with as you adopt it?

We saw this early on with our very first client and many since. Making it safe, making it okay for people to kick the tires is crucial. Individual experimentation is important, as is small group and “social” experimentation. It’s not just about figuring out how to edit a page or tag something, it’s about becoming comfortable performing those acts in front of others in the organization, knowing that you have an audience on your intranet.

Updating your profile page is a great example of a baby step – it’s your information after all and who better to edit it than you.

Lurking is okay and a valid way to derive value to start; don’t force people to contribute if they don’t want to. And remember the notion of social comfort – a phrase we have Thomas Vander Wal to thank for.

Other ideas: create personal sandbox sections under people’s profile pages to play around with or even a corporate sandbox section for groups to test posting or test blog. We have a great food blog on our intranet – it’s a lot lower risk posting there as a new employee than in other sections. It’s fun, non-mission critical, and safe.

Factor 5: Observability

How visible is the usage to others? Who’s using it? What influence do they have?

What’s really interesting about social intranets like ThoughtFarmer is that they are inherently observable through the activity stream, comments, the presence of profile data, and status updates. Everyone can generally see what everyone else is doing.

So work the network: find influential people, try to get them working on it.

This is where having a community manager is really useful; someone’s who’s job it is to keep up to date with the social dynamics.

Pick high visibility, important organizational projects; try to support their usage through the intranet.

Use the homepage to amplify the visibility of desired behaviour: provide kudos to staff, write articles about people doing innovative things in the organization (and especially those using the intranet to make it happen).

Similarly, recognition through commenting gives people a sense that you’re watching what they are doing (in a good way)

Equally powerful: get your leadership to use it and appear active within the system. Nothing like a “nice job” comment from the CEO on your project page to provide you with a jolt of acknowledgement and validation of your work.

Bottom line: experiment, see what works in your organization. Every organization is different, every culture is different. There is no one-size fits all for this.

Hopefully Rogers’s 5 factors gives you a great starting point and one that is theoretically sound to boot.

Adopt a marketing perspective

Last, but certainly not least, think about your users as customers and adopt a marketing approach. Put on your marketing hat, as uncomfortable as that hat might be for some of you.

Every new customer needs to go through a lifecycle where they first become aware of the intranet, then you get them to visit that first time, next you get them to do something you want them to do, and then you keep them there over time as a repeat customer, hopefully one who becomes an intranet booster and helps you with your outreach efforts by becoming an advocate.

Reach, Acquire, Convert, Retain, Advocate: it’s a cycle.

So your iPad idea might be a quick hit to boost your reach & acquisition, but don’t think if there’s no substance there it’s going to keep them converting and sticking around in the long run.

In Summary…

It’s not uncommon to have a mixture of mandatory and voluntary task dynamics at play with your social intranet. Make sure you’re paying attention to what’s a mandatory task and what’s a voluntary task.

For the mandatory ones, you are hopefully working with more algorithmic tasks – you can incent these and perhaps rely on good old fashioned carrot and sticks to get people onto the intranet.

For the voluntary ones, you’re dealing with more heuristic tasks and you can’t “drive adoption” like you can drive cattle. You may not have the ability to incent people, they will have to be internally motivated. It will need to align with a higher sense of purpose and their whole reason for why they want to work in your organization.

The voluntary tasks are where increased usage leads to increased value; and that value gained in the interactions amongst staff grows in a non-linear fashion. But the voluntary adoption is hardest because it is voluntary… each user will decide herself if the benefit is there.

What kind of tasks am I trying to encourage? What motivation goes along with that?

So your job as an intranet manager: it’s not driving adoption, it’s diffusing innovation throughout your organization; amplifying the good stuff. Work the network!

Think about Rogers 5 factors: What are your Relative Advantage, Compatibility, Complexity/Simplicity, Trialability, Observability? Again these are great because they ask you to think about the technology through the eyes of your staff – and you will have different staff with different answers. There’s a call for creating personas for your intranet to understand those different types of users.

And think about the intranet “customer” lifecycle model. How will you reach, acquire, convert, retain, and gain advocates? Remember that what’s going to get them to the intranet the first time (ahem, iPads) might not keep them there in the long run.

Here’s your 8 (or so) big questions to re-think social intranet user adoption:

1. How do you quantify your intranet’s adoption (usage/time as a % of total)?
2. What kind of usage (think tasks, activities: verbs, not nouns) are you trying to gain?
3. How does that usage align with 5 purposes (and more broadly speaking, your org’s strategy)?
4. Which of your tasks are mandatory & algorithmic? What extrinsic rewards might apply?
5. Which of your tasks are voluntary & heuristic?
6. For each of the voluntary & heuristic tasks, how will you address their:
1. relative advantage; to be better than previous intranets & competing systems?
2. compatibility; to work with the way people work?
3. simplicity/complexity; to be easy to use?
4. trialability; to be easy to try and learn?
5. observability; to be visible to others and spread throughout your org?
7. What’s your plan to make this happen, who’s responsible, and when is it getting done?
8. How will you know when you’re done? (see Question 1 – how do you quantify success?)
9. And repeat…

Hopefully you’ll find yourself and your users enjoying the benefits that genuine spontaneity can bring to your organization. And you won’t have to ask for it, it will “just happen” – and you’ll recognize it when it does and you’ll know why.

It’s never too early in the day to talk about intranet user adoption, so if you ask yourself any of the following questions consider joining our webinar on Wednesday:

• “How do we motivate employees to fill out their profile pages?”
• “What type of incentives will encourage employees to participate?”
• “What’s the best way to measure intranet adoption?”
• “How can we reach high rates of use for a tool that isn’t mandatory?”

Many intranet teams struggle to achieve high levels of intranet adoption, and struggle to identify what “successful” adoption should even look like. In this ThoughtFarmer client webinar (which is also open to the public) we will explore the theory and practice of achieving and measuring high levels of social intranet adoption: Understanding intranet adoption challenges & techniques.

On Wednesday, April 18th at 8:30 AM Pacific / 11:30 AM Eastern join Gordon Ross, Vice President and Partner at OpenRoad Communications (makers of ThoughtFarmer), for an educational and practical webinar:

• Topic: Understanding Intranet Adoption Challenges & Techniques
• Time: Wed Apr 4, 8:30am Pacific / 11:30am Eastern / 4:30pm UK
• Length: 1 hour
• Host: Chris McGrath, Vice President Sales & Marketing and Co-Creator
• Presenter: Gordon Ross, Vice President and Partner at OpenRoad Communications
• Registration link: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/718705208
  

We hope you can join us on Wednesday!

Read more & sign up for IBF Live Apr 3

IBF Live is a monthly web show produced by the Intranet Benchmarking Forum (IBF). The show typically includes live intranet tours along with expert commentary (which explains Gord’s presence) and takes place the first Tuesday of every month.

Time & date: April 3rd at 8:00am Pacific / 11:00am Eastern / 4:00pm UK

For the April show IBF has brought in Southwest Airlines to provide a live intranet tour and discuss how their culture of customer service is represented on the company intranet.

Gord is the Vice President and partner at OpenRoad Communications, creators of ThoughtFarmer, and will be discussing the topic of our recent white paper, titled Social Intranets & Employee Engagement: A Lasting Solution for Meaningful Morale Building. You can download the white paper for free from our website.

As you may know from our Real Intranet Managers Interview Series, we like to highlight the brilliant people behind great intranets. In this post we’ve highlighted a short list of real intranet managers worth following on Twitter.

Their job titles may not be “Intranet Manager” and their work is often much bigger than “intranet management,” but all of these folks do strategic intranet work, have tremendous skills and experience, and share steady streams of great info through their Twitter feeds. They’re also fascinating people worth knowing.

Disclaimer #1: There are many more brilliant intranet managers whom we have missed. Sorry about that – there are only so many hours in the day. If you know of others, please link to their Twitter profiles in a comment on this post and tell us about them.

Disclaimer #2: Any personal information we have mentioned below, such as employer or personal hobbies, was gleaned from publicly available sources, such as people’s public Twitter and LinkedIn profiles.

40 intranet managers you should follow on Twitter

John Stepper
Works for: Deutsche Bank
Keywords: Collaboration, New York
John is both a visionary and a pragmatist. In his blog he writes about very real-world issues based on his experience as well as bright-eyed ideas for what can be.

Dan Pontefract
Works for: Telus
Keywords: Learning, leadership, Vancouver, Canada
Dan writes fascinating articles, generally chock full of interesting references, about leadership and learning and how both relate to intranets.

Martha Brown
Works for: Duke Energy
Keywords: Intranet governance, Charlotte, North Carolina

Martha’s team won a Nielsen Intranet Design award recently and Martha is one of those all-around skilled intranet managers who seems to understand intranet challenges from top to bottom.

Luke Mepham
Works for: Aviva
Keywords: Intranetizen blog, UK

Luke brings a thoughtful and almost light-hearted perspective to his work and conversations, all while being a highly skilled intranet manager. Follow him on Twitter to see what we mean and read the blog post we wrote about him.

Ian Thorpe
Works for: United Nations Development Group
Keywords: International development

Ian comes at intranets from a very strong knowledge management (KM) background and carries great insights on the world of intranets in global nonprofit organizations.

Elizabeth Lupfer
Works for: Verizon
Keywords: Social workplace, blog

Elizabeth may be a super-human intranet superhero. She works an impressive job and runs highly useful website, blog and Twitter accounts. She’s garnered oodles of respect in the industry and shares a tremendous amount of useful information through her Twitter feed.

Jonathan Philips
Works for: Coca Cola Enterprises
Keywords: Intranetizen blog, Bristol, UK

Jonathan Philips is a great intranet thinker and writes about intranets fairly prolificly on the Intranetizen blog. He generally carries a quite balanced perspective.

Nigel Williams
Works for: Romec
Keywords: Field-based user research, Manchester, UK

Nigel is a no-nonsense intranet manager. He works for a very industrial company whose employees want the intranet to be simple and work well. That’s what Nigel delivers, with exceptional results. Read more in the blog post we wrote about him.

Christy (Season) Punch
Works for: SCANA Corp.
Keywords: Charleston, South Carolina, translator between business & IT

Christy is a brilliant “business translator.” She is the catalyst that combines business units’ needs and IT wonk to produce an intranet that works for everyone. Read more in the blog post we wrote about her.

John Tropea
Works for: Hatch
Keywords: Collaboration, intellectual exploration

John is almost an intranet philosopher or mystic. Keep up with his Tumblr “Snippets” to read fascinating quotes and ideas from around the web and world.

William Amurgis
Works for: AEP (American Electric Power)
Keywords: Social intranets, photography on the intranet

In a post we wrote about William we called him a “giant” and his small children agree. His very human approach to intranets and internal communications have helped him produce truly excellent results.

David Christopher
Works for: Oracle
Keywords: Social business, Berkshire, UK

David is a very enterprising intranet pro and founder of “Stop, Think Social.” Keep up with him… if you can.

Tanis Roadhouse
Ottowa, Canada
Keywords: Social intranets, business analyst

Tanis’ experience (and the blog post we wrote about her) demonstrate that she truly understands the “people” aspects of launching a new intranet. Her efforts to engage colleagues throughout the entire intranet implementation process stand as an example for all intranet managers.

Dinesh Tantri
Works for: ThougthWorks
Keywords: Bangalore, social intranet, gamification

Dinesh comes from a fascinating programming background (which we mention in the blog post we wrote about him) and has a very thoughtful perspective on how to fit intranet gamification with company culture.

Brendan Mullen
Works for: Continuum
Keywords: Social intranets, collaboration, Boston, Massachusetts

Brendan is the kind of IT manager you dream of – he speaks plain English and understands the strategic value of technology. He aims to help employees around the world collaborate more effectively, not just manage technology capital spend.

Andrew McNelis
Works for: PNC
Keywords: Social business, running, hoppy beer

Andy loves running and beer. That’s enough for us to like him, but I you might also like to know he’s a great guy and a social media and Enterprise 2.0 pro.

Mamie Peers
Works for: The Cosmopolitan Hotel
Keywords: Social intranets, viva Las Vegas

Mamie comes from an internal communications background and has done fabulous things in a very short time with the Cosmopolitan Hotel’s fairly young social intranet. Any intranet nerd visiting Las Vegas should Tweet her up.

Edward Ford
Works for: McGraw-Hill
Keywords: New York City, social intranets, community management

Edward is the kind of hip and emminently competent intranet pro who’ll be running the world soon enough. He expounds upon social intranet topics in a way that makes him a pleasure to listen to.

Kevin Jones
Works for: NASA
Keywords: Alabama, social business

Kevin has a knack for articulating the challenges of social intranets and does so especially well in short, entertaining vidoes on his website.

Calvin Symes
Works for: WestJet
Keywords: Intranet governance, Canada

Calvin has a background in journalism and legislative processes – no wonder he’s a sharp communicator and has brilliant thoughts on intranet governance.

Kate Hamilton
Works for: Myriad Group AG
Keywords: Marketing, communications, mobile, Liverpool

Kate is a pleasure to work and spend time with. Her charm is a deft combination of humor, kindness, x-ray level intelligence, and straight-shooting. She’s also got a very cool Twitter profile.

Peter Richards
Works for: Echo Entertainment Group
Keywords: Surfing, Sydney, Australia

Peter is the type of pragmatic intranet manager who always speaks from experience and says something useful. Follow him and just try to prove us wrong.

Emily Staresina
Works for: Stockland
Keywords: Usability, social media, Sydney, film

Read the blog post we wrote about her to learn how Emily has approached the social intranet in a thoughtful, metered way. Who says you can’t have a traditional intranet and social intranet all in one? Have your cake and eat it too, just like Emily.

And the list goes on…

We simply ran out of time to keep writing about intranet managers, so you’ll have to learn about the rest of these folks on your own, without our helpful and witty summaries.

Nadine McMahon
Works for: The Guild Group
Keywords: Coffee, Melbourne, Australia

Kelli Carlson-Jagersma
Works for: Wells Fargo Wholesale
Keywords: Collaboration, Minneapolis, Minnesota, founder of Twin Cities Intranet Forum

Richard Dennison
Works for: BT
Keywords: Intranet governance

Patrick Durando
Works for: McGraw-Hill
Keywords: Social intranets

Tyler Kerr
Works for: Scotts MiracleGro
Keywords: Social intranets

Sharon O’Dea
Works for: UK House of Parliament
Keywords: Intranetizen blog, London

Sean Winter
Works for: Capital One
Keywords: Social intranets

Trisha Liu
Works for: ArcSight
Keywords: Social intranets, cocktails

Ana Silva
Works for: Sonae Industria
Keywords: Portugal!

Lauren Rosencranz
Works for: Common Ground Environmental Consultants
Keywords: Runner, Cambridge, Massachusetts

Melissa Hendry
Works for: realestate.com.au
Keywords: Social intranets, Australia

Katrina Marques
Works for: Brightstar
Keywords: Intranets, Melbourne, Australia

Tammy Young Heck
Works for: Ernst & Young
Keywords: Professional MacGyver

Barbara Z. Haven
Works for: California Technology Agency
Keywords: California, government intranets

Dana Leeson
Works for: BSI
Keywords: Intranetizen blog, London

Martin Risgaard
Works for: Grundfos Management A/S
Keywords: Denmark, multilingual tweeting (English & Danish)

Ernst Decsey
Works for: UNICEF
Keywords: Digital workplace, international development, Geneva, Switzerland

That’s it! That’s our list.

Again, apologies to the many exemplary intranet managers we don’t yet know or forgot to put on our list. You all deserve some recognition and at least a few more legit Twitter followers.

[sniplet marketing]

On Thursday, March 22nd, at 8:30am Pacific (11:30am Eastern, 3:30pm GMT), join ThoughtFarmer and Senior User Experience Designer
 Selma Zafar for an educational and highly useful webinar: Understanding and exploring the context of use for mobile intranets.

Your intranet in your pocket, anytime, anywhere — that’s the modern knowledge worker’s productivity dream. But the dream can rapidly become a nightmare if your intranet designers don’t take into consideration the idea of “context of use.” Learn how making your intranet mobile isn’t just about miniaturizing it or finding the right mobile style sheet.

Date & Time: Thurs, Mar 22nd, 8:30am Pacific / 11:30am Eastern / 3:30pm UK.

Register now (free)

This webinar is a live repeat from the 2011 Social Intranet Summit. For news about the 2012 Social Intranet Summit keep your eyes on our website, sign up to receive our newsletter, or follow ThoughtFarmer on Twitter.

See ThoughtFarmer Mobile in action

How do we know so much about mobile? Besides the fact that our usability superstar (Selma) once worked as a Human Factors Engineer for Nokia, we’re the creators ThoughtFarmer Mobile.

ThoughtFarmer Mobile is a mobile web app – a complete mobile version of our user-friendly social intranet software, optimized for use on smart phones and other mobile devices. See it for yourself:

We hope to see you on the webinar!

This is one in a series of posts from our Real Intranet Manager Interviews where we highlight the creative and thoughtful people behind successful intranets of all types. Read more about the series, or see our other posts on Jonathan Phillips of Coca Cola Enterprises, Emily Staresina of Stockland Property Group, Luke Mepham of Aviva PLC,  Tanis Roadhouse of MD Physician Services/CMA, Christy Season of SCANA, William Amurgis of AEP and Dinesh Tantri from ThoughtWorks.

Nigel at a glance

• Name: Nigel Williams
• Hometown: Manchester, United Kingdom
• On Twitter: @FootShort82
• Company: Romec, an integrated facilities management provider
• Headquarters: Manchester, United Kingdom
• Employees: 4,400
• Role / job title: Intranet Coordinator or “Intranet Manager”
• Name of intranet: “Intranet”
• Date of most recent overhaul: 2 years ago went live on a whole new platform
• Technology stack: Interact Intranet
• Size of intranet: About 20,000 pages

They call Nigel Williams “The Intranet Bulldog”

That’s not actually true. But it would be cool if it was true, considering that Nigel’s father was a famous wrestler named “Kendo Nagasaki” who went up against “The British Bulldog” in infamous bouts around the UK. Nigel told me about his father’s history with a hint of pride in his voice when I interviewed him for this post. While he may not yet have the renowned nickname or national fame, he is gaining recognition for his excellent work as the intranet manager for Romec, an industrial services company based in Manchester, Britain.

Nigel didn’t start out working in intranets. After all, in college nobody majors in “intranets” and people don’t earn graduate degrees in “intranet management.” Like the other intranet managers in this series, Nigel comes to intranet management from a fascinating background and doesn’t fit a particular mold. And like other intranet managers he has, through commitment and ingenuity, become quite good at doing great things with his company’s intranet.

Standard unusual background for an intranet manager

Nigel’s original background is in recruitment and sales. Fresh out of college he started working as a consultant helping companies recruit for their open IT positions. During the many hours he spent on site for projects Nigel discovered clients needed much more than just recruiting support. He set up wikis to help clients capture details about their recruitment strategies. Other consultants  also contributed to the wikis, which became valuable sources of information for clients to retroactively examine the decisions they made.

Starting with his early roles as a consultant, Nigel learned to dig deeply into the problems clients were facing. One of the keys to his success is Nigel’s almost anthropological approach to improving the intranet. Like the very best usability experts, Nigel spends time observing real people doing real work. He runs focus groups in remote offices, captures video of colleagues using the intranet on project sites and builds a deep understanding of how people work before he tries to design solutions for their problems.

Nigel’s commitment to researching reality gives him the types of insights one cannot capture in more removed and indirect ways.

Favorite project: Wrangling 7000 Excel-based “Contract Briefs”

One of Nigel’s favorite intranet projects started with a giant problem. As an industrial services company, Romec works with many clients in many capacities. Unfortunately the different lines of the business were managing contracts and services separately. All in all, 10 different departments were managing over 7000 Excel files with data about clients, projects and contracts.

These “contract briefs” lived in many different locations on the company’s network, with differing formats and access levels. Information was siloed, wasn’t getting to the right people, and in some cases, people were seeing much more information than they needed.

People across the departments recognized the problem and it became Nigel’s job to find a solution.

Romec's intranet homepage

The answer was to move all this information out of Excel and into intranet pages that could be accessed more easily. But that proved a complex job. Nigel needed to find a design that worked for everyone, from account managers to engineers. Additionally, the design had to look the same on all the different devices used to access the intranet, whether PDAs, “ToughBook” computers in the field, or desktops in the office.

As a critical first step Nigel went out into the field to examine his colleagues’ daily environments. He conducted focus groups with the people that used the contract briefs on a daily basis and learned about the typical conversations they were having. Through many revisions they developed a format for the intranet pages that would display the contract briefs in a format that was surprisingly simple.

The first step was to shift from a departmental perspective to a client-based perspective. Next, Nigel built in a layer of permissions so that people could only access the information they needed, but not other, more sensitive information.

They added at (“@”) commenting (similar to Twitter and Facebook) so people could be alerted to join conversations about specific contract briefs. The new consistent format ensured that everyone knew the “script” and helped elminate offerings of non-standard services. The design also broke down departmental barriers and allowed engineers and account managers to work together directly on services for specific clients.

By making the information more about the client rather than the departments, and by employing the simplest possible design, Nigel helped streamline the flow of information and improve collaboration. But none of that could have happened without extensive outreach and field-based observation.

Undertanding the real-world experience of users is really Nigel’s specialty, and it has helped him in many a project.

Addressing the low bandwidth challenge

Many intranet managers know that some employees have slow connections and can’t easily access code-heavy intranet pages, but they persist anyway with their designs because the intranet looks good on desktops in HQ. Nigel, however, takes the bandwidth issue seriously.

A simple page with embedded form on the Romec intranet

In all intranet projects he starts with the lowest common denominator. How will this look and how quickly can it be accessed by an engineer in the field wth a mobile device and low bandwidth? That question, along with Nigel’s appreciation for Steve Krug‘s usability mantra of “don’t make me think,” have guided the design of Romec’s intranet.

Nigel has even gone to the effort of capturing video of engineers trying to access graphics-heavy intranet pages. He then used that footage to show content contributors the real hassles people faced when accessing pages with rich content.

These are the efforts of a man who takes users’ experiences seriously.

Marketing the intranet without techno-babel

Before launching their intranet in 2010, Nigel and his team gathered feedback from colleagues through several different means and discovered that fancy technical jargon made people uncomfortable and would do no good in gaining adoption of the new intranet.

All the results of their research pointed to the need for a user-friendly intranet and clear communications. Nigel even started a “plain English” campaign and they created a “Jargon Buster” on the intranet where employees could go to look up the sweeping array of acronyms and terms they heard in meetings and read in communications. Communications from executives even started going through the internal communications department’s “plain English” review before going out to staff.

"Jargon Buster" page on the Romec intranet

All of this, again, was based on an almost anthropological approach to understanding the real challenges and needs of colleagues.

Can’t argue with results (or “The Intranet Bulldog”)

Nigel’s heavy focus on understanding employees’ real challenges has achieved results and helped to meet the company’s needs. Romec recognized they needed a new, good intranet when they brought Nigel on back in July of 2009. After the launch of their new intranet, the 70% reduction in calls to the help desk verified that need and validated Nigel’s approach.

Since Nigel came onboard, executives have been very supportive of the intranet and have made sure the content champions from different departments were the right people and were fully involved in the project.

The new intranet, along with improvements such as the Contract Briefs section and the Jargon Buster, have had a strong ripple effect at Romec. Sharing information has become a motivating driver rather than organizational hierarchy, and the siloes within the business have started to desolve. A good, user friendly intranet project can be about much more than just the intranet, Nigel told me, and that all starts with knowing your audience.

In a time when, as Nigel said, people launch new fantastic technology for its own sake and try to squeeze solutions into the technology rather than vice versa, it’s heartening to see someone taking a very human approach. Nigel’s workplace anthropology starts and ends with a respect for his colleagues, something every intranet manager should have in spades.

Connect with Darren & Gord via Twitter

Follow the guys on Twitter and look for their #SBS2012 and #SXSW tweets: @DGibbons & @GordonR.

Check out Gord’s SXSW panel on Sun, Mar 11th

On Sunday, March 11th at 9:30 AM in the Omni Downtown Capitol Ballroom join the panel session The Connected Company: An Inventory of the Possible, hosted by Dave Gray (@DaveGray). Dave has brought together a fine collection of minds, including Gord’s, to discuss the adaptive design of modern companies for a complex, networked, rapidly-changing global marketplace.

If you can’t make it SXSW (or want a primer before attending the panel) read Gord’s epic post on Connected Companies, Complex Systems, and Social Intranets.

Meet the ThoughtFarmer’s

Darren is the Co-Creator of ThoughtFarmer and President of OpenRoad Communications, the web development firm that created and sells ThoughtFarmer social intranet software. Besides being one of the friendliest CEOs around, Darren has an impressive encyclopedic knowledge of videos that have gone viral on YouTube. This may be explain why ThoughtFarmer software allows employees to post comments with embedded videos on virtually any intranet page.

Gord is Vice President and Partner at OpenRoad Communications. In the office we call Gord “The Professor” behind his back due to his astounding reading habit (despite being a newly minted parent) and ability to pull impressive and obscure academic references out of thin air. This may explain why ThoughtFarmer software has such a killer hyperlinking feature.