Cory Banks from PB is talking about Core Business: Reminding Ourselves of the Reason We Are All Here. Cory is the Executive for Knowledge and Business at PB. Key points:
– The spiderman rule: With great power comes great responsibility.
– Cory has been involved in implementing five intranets.
– What’s an Intranet?
– … Cory said, “I couldn’t find a good definition of Intranet.”
– … Traditional intranet – content management, phone book
– … But it has new neighbors – collaboration tools, social, document management, extranet, and other.
– … Some firms are seeing the boundaries between these different things blurring.
– Implications –
– … (1) we are having to do more with less.
– … (2) there’s a lot of tools in the toolbox. None are great.
– … (3) what we do has diversified and become more complex. Our teams include people with a range of diverse skills.
– Key message – we need to get past implementation to adoption (so it gets used, and delivers value to the company).
– At PB, in a recent intranet project, it was run as a change management program – with some IT elements.
– At firms that charge people out by the hour (or at legal firms, who charge in 6 minute increments), it can be really difficult to get time to talk staff about their requirements.
– A variety of things you need to take into consideration – strategy, risk, process, historical data, knowledge, culture, etc.
– User-centered design is great … but organization centered design is a more effective way. People don’t stay around long enough for this anymore. You need people to get productive as soon as possible.
– … What is the need? What’s the content? What’s the functionality? What’s the platform?
– … Have a talk to the Enterprise Architecture people – they are good at thinking like this.

– What does “collaboration” mean? It means very different things to different people.
– … There’s a bunch of things that need to be in place for collaboration to work.
– … Communication is the basis – so I have awareness of what’s going on. And I need to raise awareness of what I’m doing.
– … Cooperation is the next step – gaining support, giving support. But it’s still two different parties.
– … Collaboration is the third step – partnering, alliances. It’s a much tighter relationship.
– … Key finding – when we focused on improving communication between people, collaboration improved.

– If you introduce post-project reviews, you will make people take estimates of value realization more realistic. If people know they will be held accountable, they will take the process much more seriously.

– Summary – of key messages:
– … Think strategically and tactically.
– … Make things open by default, not closed. If you need a closed space, we’ll set it up. It’s an exception.
– … Design things from the user’s perspective, not an org structure perspective.
– … Iterative adoption – add new functionality over time. Users like this – they can absorb this.
– … Flexibility is important – get rid of huge numbers of metadata fields, and go for as few as possible.
– … Hand holding – work with each part of the business … and get them to float. Then use the success from here to increase interest from other parts (see Exemplar Stories in the Winning Attention stage of User Adoption Strategies for more of this).
– … Collaboration – practice what you preach. You need to be using it.
– … Understand the big picture – eg., around the use of third-party plug-ins versus new capabilities coming in the next version. Become an internal consultant.

Questions
1. You spoke about cutting over different parts of the organization one at a time. Does this mean you keep the old tools around?
(Answer) Yes, we run systems concurrently … but get rid of other systems over time. But we move as the business groups are ready to move.

2. How do design an Intranet without using the organizational structure?
(Answer) Our high level structure – “Resources” (for getting your job done), “Support,” “Locations,” and “About PB” (strategic plan, vision and values, etc.).

3. If you implement site-by-site and let people choose the metadata they use, how do you support collaboration across sites?
(Answer) We correlate metadata in the site with a master list in the backend. We let people do their stuff, and then we try and make it work for search, etc.