I was a bit late to the conference due to a plane delay, but as I arrived, Cairo Walker from Step Two Designs was kicking off the key note presentation entitled What Makes Intranets Work?

Some of the opening ideas from Cairo:

• Enterprise content management promises to solve all the problems of Intranets, but Cairo urges caution. There are lots of vendor promises, but little delivery.
• Portals are the latest fad in information management; the concept is great, but the technology isn’t there yet. Cairo has only seen two portals work–one where an organization built it themselves, and the other for a bank that was focused on a single business problem.
• Collaboration is the new catch phrase–wiki, chat, blogs, email, bulletin boards, discussion groups. The key is in choosing the right technology to match with business problems.
• ‘Information management’ is an umbrella term that encompasses all of the above technologies … Web CM, DM, RM, DAM, LM, collaboration and more. It also includes people and process, and the content (the information itself).

Information Management Planning
Traditional approaches to IM planning … boiling the ocean, theoretical approaches, taxonomy first, technology first, end-to-end process mapping, content audits, and 100 page strategy documents. These don’t work, or the information is too quickly out of date. The approaches try to create an abstract model that encompasses the organization’s entire needs, but the diagrams are meaningless.

Cairo stressed the role of “needs analysis”, and some of the key factors to getting needs analysis right: don’t jump to conclusions, don’t ask staff what they want, etc. Conduct interviews with actual users, and focus on their jobs. Drill into the main activities of what they do. “Who did you meet with last week?” “What meetings did you go to last week?” “What did you take to the meeting, and where did you get it from?” It’s a simple form of information mapping.

Case Study: Consumers Institute in Australia (CHOICE)
CHOICE is a policy and advocacy group. They used to have a magazine only, but now have an online subscription model too. Their internal processes and systems date back to the 1970s, and they don’t map to current publication requirements. Key systems:
– SharePoint, for default contact database
– Intranets .. centrally managed, good content
– CHOICE Online … old CMS, risky, limited
– Network drives … used well for projects. Every single article would be called a “project”, and all of the supporting material would be put into a shared network drive. They built an application that asks the project code, project title, project manager, and more, and then it publishes the folder to a Projects directory, along with sub-directories, templates in each sub-directories, and so on. Cairo thought this was very successful.
– TRIM … mirrors the old system; is confused
– Project database … built in Microsoft Access, good information, but poor user interface

Key issues for CHOICE: speed and real-world reality verses CHOICE quality and reputation. They are also grappling with the role of consumer. Is CHOICE the only authority? Eg, what do other people say about this, and how do they involve other authority figures?

Key outcomes for CHOICE:
– an information manager across TRIM, Intranet and SharePoint
– CMS for online, and then for the intranet
– Digital asset management, as a tactical initiative, eg, be cost effective
– resolve the issue of authority

Case Study: Family Law Courts of Australia
There were recent changes in the way that cases were heard, and a single call center was put in for all of Australia (except one part). Information is contained in huge training folders to help call center staff to answer questions; but the content isn’t indexed, and therefore it’s very hard to work through. There is a very steep learning curve for the first 6 months, but then after that there are some very difficult and unique questions.

The solution? Use team and individual instant messaging to get answers to unusual questions. The team does the “gardening” at the end of each day, capturing the salient points out of all of the chats and publishes them to the Intranet (or into the manual, or into the call center application). IM is also used for team socialization, interacting with associates in court. Team chat works by everyone having a team chat window open, and questions scroll by thoughtout the day.

6×2 Methodology
There’s too much to be done, and not enough resources to do it. Step Two’s recommendation: 6×2 methodology. Have a firm plan for the next 6 months, and have some general ideas for the 6 months following.

Case Study: Health Care
This organization provides high quality telephone-based health care throughout Australia and New Zealand. Within the call center, 80% of staff work from home. There is built-in support within the application to help call center staff work out what to do, and offers online training. The current Intranet is fragmented, search is broken, and it’s not tied to business indicators and goals. Information is created in a way that suits owners, not the users.

There are lots of things that they could do … a long shopping list of possibilities. The take 1 proposed solution? Within the constraints of time, money and poor system availability, they decided to put in better search, user metrics on the existing intranet, and source a new CMS. They wrote this up, presented it to the CEO, and he wanted more (a full time intranet manager position was created, and a developer assigned to the project). Key outcomes:
– homepages were created or updated for various operational programs
– put search in place
– put user metrics in place
– put in place distributed content ownership model (spending time with people on training and upskilling)
– source a new CMS
– create a new information architecture (how is all of the information going to be organized?)
– design new site look and feel.

Case Study: Caltex
Caltex has 3000 employees, with offices throughout Australia. They were centralizing various functions into a single team, and a range of questions would have to be answered from within the single team. They have over 58,000 documents in 6,200 folders. They had 10 weeks to go live. The cunning plan was to use a wiki approach, with knowledge custodians for all of the supported business processes. The UI isn’t pretty, but it is very flexible. Pages weren’t locked down, but there were some business roles wrapped around updates (eg, if I’m not the knowledge custodian, I can’t edit directly, but rather need to write the suggested changes into the Comments area).

Case Study: Leighton Construction
A heavy construction company, eg, highways, railways systems, etc. They were piloting a very large CMS platform, with millions at stake. Step Two was brought into answer the question: “What should our CMS look like?” Key finding: if you can’t find things, it is because others didn’t want to share the information. Historically, people’s bonuses were tied to the outcome of their own specific projects. The bonus structure has been subsequently removed, but the culture hadn’t changed. Key recommendation: Leverage and improve existing systems, and make changes to the culture. The company didn’t like that answer.

Questions
Why did you like the Leighton Construction case study?
Because from a professional integrity issue, I felt that I did the right thing. We weren’t told this going in, but we believe that we uncovered the real issues. And there wasn’t a happy ending (yet).