www.socitm.net/insight
Number 77
insight
briefing
... a Socitm Research service
Better connected intranets:
is this now, at last, the time to engage?
At least four more years of public austerity might be the opportunity to see
the intranet as an important tool for employee productivity. As cutbacks
eat deeper into middle management, senior managers might actually have
to start using the intranet, hitherto neglected, and not like what they find.
Moreover, we now have an excellent opportunity for fixing poor intranets
quickly by sharing best practice based on extensive evidence from across
the world of what really does work.
Neglected intranets
Over the years Socitm Insight has published
volumes of information and advice about best
practice in delivering a quality online experience
for public websites, largely centred around Better
connected. Yet our library on intranets is slim
indeed, limited to just one title: Better connected
intranets: Emerging good practice in driving
efficiency (April 2007). It is no surprise, either, that
no briefing in over six years has covered intranets.
Then one day in May
On 12 May, over 40 delegates attended a workshop
in London for the public and voluntary sectors, most
of whom came from local authorities. In all 20 councils
were represented, not all of which were from London
and the home counties; most parts of the UK were
represented, including four from Scotland. There is no
doubt that one major draw was the workshop leader
- web content guru, Gerry McGovern. But there was
more to these numbers than Gerry.
One reason for this is technical. By definition it is
not easy to assess intranets, unlike public websites.
By far a bigger reason, though, is clear lack of
interest. Intranets have always been low priority.
Rarely have we been asked a question or heard
a mention about intranets, say at our numerous
events for web professionals. It has taken time
for senior managers to understand the business
case and potential for the web in general. Intranets
clearly suffer from much greater neglect - hence,
the lack of interest and doubtless poor quality of the
intranet experience.
The initial ‘round robin’ of introductions painted
a strong picture of frustration, lost opportunity
and many things not working - intranets seen as
dumping grounds for PDF documents, search
functions not working, things really difficult to find,
complete lack of governance (mentioned several
times), etc. One delegate summed it up as:
•• ‘Navigation too organisation-centric.
•• Too much focus on news and events.
•• Measuring the wrong things.
•• Devolved publishing in place.’
Is this about to change?
Most organisations represented at the workshop
had new intranet design projects springing up and
at different stages. Will they repeat the mistakes
of the past? There must be a major risk of further
problems, unless one analyses the root causes of
earlier failures.
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The root causes of poor intranets
In our 2007 report we suggested that the key to
intranet success was user engagement. Eight years
later we need to dig deeper, because the people
who are least engaged are senior management.
One of the key benefits of the web is convenience.
This is what has driven the success of many
companies, old and new, in selling products
and services. In the public sector, citizen selfservice is now firmly established as a major way
of delivering information and services, and of
course this also saves the organisation money in a
period of austerity. The value to the citizen and the
organisation is becoming clear and tangible.
As for employee self-service via the intranet, the
picture is far less clear, principally because the value
of employee time is not recognised nearly as well by
senior management. Most organisation cultures do
not respect the value of their employees’ time. The
answer to this should be to measure the impact
of intranets on employee time. How can their
productivity be measured?
The path to intranets that work
The answer is not that complicated:
•• Identify the most important tasks that are
carried out most often (the ‘top tasks’).
•• Measure how long it takes to complete those
tasks.
The concept behind each stage is to collect and
use evidence to support intranet improvement.
Stage 1: Identify the top tasks
The only way of finding out the top tasks is to ask
employees what they see as the most important. In
order to do this you need a process that identifies
from as many sources as possible (offline and
online) what the full range of tasks might be. You
might well end up with hundreds of tasks, which
then need reducing to something manageable for
an employee poll (say 50 to 80). This process will
eliminate duplications and overlaps.
Inviting employees to list their top five most
important daily tasks from this list will identify the
top tasks for the intranet. The results of many
such polls carried out by Customer Carewords
(Gerry McGovern’s company) all point in the same
direction, as explained opposite.
Stage 2: Measure the completion of top tasks
How well does employee self-service actually
work? This is the critical question that can only be
answered through testing. Here, technology comes
to our help. Remote user testing provides a clear
measuring tool. It is faster, better, cheaper and
more neutral than more traditional ‘face-to face’
testing, and immeasurably an improvement over no
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testing at all! Critically, it also provides an audit trail
of things that went wrong on the employee journey
to finding the answers.
By devising appropriate questions related to the top
tasks, one can measure how long it takes to find
the answer, or indeed whether the intranet provides
the right answer. Care needs to be taken with the
questions to make sure that, for example, they are
specific enough, mainstream and not too clever or
complicated, emotionally neutral and repeatable for
future re-testing, etc. Providing hard evidence from,
say,15 testers enables one to measure the time it
takes to answer specific questions. This changes
the nature of the dialogue with senior managers
about the value of intranets. Rather than just, for
example, extolling the advantages of the intranet as
a communications tool which has every chance of
a ‘glazed eyes’ reaction, one has a much greater
chance of engagement with such hard evidence.
The time is right
A new government with a mandate for continued
austerity for at least four more years might just
be the catalyst. Local public services in the UK
will continue to bear the brunt of major year-onyear budget reductions. This will surely squeeze
the middle layers of management, reduce the
back office and put a clear focus on employee
productivity. Providing efficient tools such as an
intranet for supporting employee self-service
and collaboration is a practical response to such
pressures.
Armed with a clear and proven methodology,
the intranet manager now has the opportunity to
engage. All that is required is the receptive ear of
one member of the top management team!
Impact of recent changes
For many the need is magnified by the drive to
collaboration through shared services. A quiet
re-organisation of local public services is taking
place ‘under the radar’ right now, as more and
more councils and others collaborate through
all types of formal and informal agreement with
similar organisations. At the heart of such sharing
is employee collaboration between organisations.
How can they find and share common information
and services?
One final dynamic to consider is the effect of
remote working. This is perhaps the most important
new employee trend since our 2007 report. Local
authority work has always had a strong element
of mobile working for some of its services, but
now many councils have committed to employees
working remotely from home or different offices as
a result of the budgetary pressures. This places a
premium on quick access to information to support
remote workers in their jobs.
Socitm Insight Briefing A Socitm Research publication © Socitm 2015
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A common framework for an intranet
Customer Carewords has conducted top tasks
exercises from 55 intranet polls. Altogether,
49,000 employees in the US, Canada, UK,
Belgium, Holland, Sweden, Denmark, and Norway
participated in the polls. There was a mix of
government and business intranets, from medium
to large organisations (10,000+ employees). The
research shows some strong common patterns that
are summarised in the diagram below. There are
four common groups of top tasks that apply to all
organisations and a core group that is unique to the
sector.
special function whose name you don’t know. For
example, “I need to find someone who speaks
German and is experienced in sales.” Our polls
show the importance of this task is increasing.
Once you find an expert or colleague, often what
you want to do is collaborate with them using the
growing number of tools available to you on your
intranet. This could mean inviting them to join a
discussion, follow your blog or Yammer posts,
asking them a specific question via IM, or simply
calling them up.
News / current affairs
These tasks are concerned with keeping updated
about what the organisation is doing externally and
internally. Again, this is a classic intranet function
that is very important to employees. Included in
this group is a growing number of new tasks that
are ‘bottom up’, such as popular recent posts
on Yammer or blogs, as well as more traditional
top-down news from the CEO or the central
communications team. Also in this group is news
from external sources about the company or
organisation.
About Me
This is the group of tasks related to the personal
experience of being in employment. If you have
a job, then you do ‘About Me’ tasks – apply for
holidays, claim travel expenses, find out what
benefits you are entitled to, etc. The names of
these tasks might vary, but ‘About Me’ tasks are
ubiquitous in both the public and private sector.
They are often the most visited and used parts of
an intranet.
About (your company)
These tasks relate specifically to the organisation
you work for:
•• What are your organisations’ published
strategies and plans?
•• Details about its size and operation and
how it’s organised (although organisation
charts are also important in Find People and
Collaboration).
Find People and Collaboration
Finding people is a classic intranet function and
unsurprisingly it appears as a group of tasks in all
our polls. This is the Company Directory, the Phone
Book or just Search for people. The underlying
concern here is the need to find a person with a
These task groups are like the heat, light and power
in a building. They are the needs employees expect
an intranet to fill. The names of the groups might
vary with language and culture, but there is a basic
expectation from employees that they should be
able to complete these sorts of tasks on an intranet.
Core Tasks
Alongside the four common Top Task groups,
we found another group of Top Tasks in each
poll result. These were tasks that did not fit into
the common groups but were particular to an
organisation. They relate to the core purpose of
an organisation, its essence, the thing people are
employed to produce or deliver. We call this group
Core Tasks.
Often these tasks are centred on the Products and
Services an organisation offers to its customers.
•• In a bank, we found Internet Banking to be a
top task.
•• In a healthcare organization, Patient Safety and
Clinical Standards were top tasks.
•• In a railway company, it was Ticket Types.
•• In a pharmaceutical company, Clinical Trials.
Sometimes the core tasks are associated with the
culture or strategy of an organisation. For example,
in a fast moving high street retailer the top task
was Performance Reports. Core tasks are where
the intranet can be seen to be really adding value
and contributing to performance goals such as
increased sales and reduced costs.
Source: Intranet In A Box
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This is the most problematic area at the current
time because research into council intranets is
weak, reflecting their general immaturity. It is
complicated further by the wide range of services
carried out by councils and others. The sectors
quoted above are much more focused on critical
services that define the organisation’s existence.
The kind of tasks that might well appear here are
related to features common to all or most services
that underpin them such as:
•• Relationships with elected members (eg
committee reports, protocols in replying to
queries)
•• Relationships with citizens and customers (eg
complaints)
•• Links to council services and the tools, standards
and procedures that support their implementation
•• Standard processes (eg business plans, financial
reporting, recruitment)
•• Use of shared resources (eg print services, HR
advice)
•• Legislation, standing orders, policies and
governance
As these tasks might relate closely to the top tasks
on the public website, the intranet here may link
directly into that website through devices such as A
to Z of services.
Conclusions
Essentially, we are talking about old-fashioned time
and motion studies in a new setting. Introduced
in the 19th century to improve the throughput of
factories building machinery or cutting steel, the
techniques should now be applied to today’s new
factories of knowledge workers solving problems.
Every local public service is such a factory.
to make a difference. What’s more, the meeting
on May 12 indicates that there might just be a
groundswell of colleagues with whom you can
collaborate.
Recommended reading
We strongly recommend that you now turn to two
supporting papers, both published in the past
couple of months.
The first is called Intranet in a box (March 2015)
available with this briefing from www.socitm.net.
Here, Gerry and two of his associates, Brian Lamb
and Fredrik Wackå Audun Rundberg, describe in
greater detail the research covered in this briefing
and the conclusions that the research leads to
in the form of a design template for a successful
intranet.
The second is called What Really Matters: Focusing
on Top Tasks. (April 21, 2015)
Here, Gerry describes how to identify the top tasks
for your website, a recipe that works for public sites
as well as intranets.
Digital is a space of endless replication. It has
never been easier to create and create, and create.
People love to publish, but they hate to remove,
which leads to overloaded websites and constant,
inevitable redesigns. The top layers get a shiny new
coat of graphics and meaningless “we really care”
content—but underneath, a teeming mass of out-ofdate, badly organised information still swirls about.
...Read on!
Further information
•• Better connected intranets: Emerging good
practice in driving efficiency (Socitm Insight,
April 2007)
•• The Stranger’s Long Neck: How to deliver what
your customers really want online by Gerry
McGovern (A&C Black, July, 2010)
This could therefore be the moment to think about
converting your disused, or under-used, intranet
into a valuable tool for employee productivity and
collaboration. It should be task-based; the use of
tasks should be measured, and the journey should
be continuously improved.
Above all, it needs a champion for improving the
jobs of employees, who gets digital. You need to
catch that person’s attention with some meaningful
evidence, or at least the firm promise that you can
obtain that information.
The encouraging news from this briefing is that we
have some valuable information here to help you,
plus a clear methodology to help you collect the
evidence for showing that the intranet is starting
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insight
Socitm Insight is a subscription service to which over 400 local
authorities and other public and private sector organisations
now belong. It identifies and encourages good ICT management
practice.
Socitm Insight has produced a series of comprehensive and
detailed guides on all major ICT themes linked to the critical
issues of the day, which provide valuable advice and support for
ICT practitioners and all involved in application of ICT.
Socitm Insight Programme Manager:
Martin Greenwood Tel: 01926 498703 E-mail: [email protected]
Socitm Insight Briefing A Socitm Research publication © Socitm 2015
Reference: 15014
The local public service context
The research indicates that the first four groups are
common across sectors and countries. The group
that differs for local public services is what the
research describes as the core tasks.