Good heavens… only half an hour to sort out this time. It seems there’s was another Base64 section in functions.php in this free theme – and the Antivirus plugin didn’t pick it up. I have now checked the whole theme by hand and removed the offending code.
The final Intranetters of 2011 is full to bursting, with plenty of new faces. Our last visit to The Crown Estate was excellent though we’re not here to see their intranet today. Instead Romec and Field Fisher Waterhouse are taking to the stage and James Robertson has dropped in to talk about the 2011 Intranet Innovation Awards.
Nigel Williams‘s presentation was cut short last time, so he returns to demonstrate Romec’s Interact-based intranet.
Romec was established in 1989 to provide facilities management services to Royal Mail. It has a distributed workforce which is highly unionised. The intranet serves 4,500 users, 25% of whom use laptops, though 45% have nothing.
Interact has been around for the last decade and is a modular tool – if you want something, there’s usually a module available. This makes Interact intranets fell nicely integrated, with the activity streams showing not just social updates, but notifications about which documents people have updated.
A feature Romec are experimenting with allows people to tag others with actions. While this could result in “another” inbox, the transparency it demands is useful and a useful step in the direction of online task management.
I hear advertising on the intranet being discussed from time to time. Romec have taken a different approach to simply adding banners to certain pages. The site directory shows advertisements for local taxis, hotels and restaurants, all of which offer preferential rates. The information is maintained by secretaries as part of their KPIs.
Contract Briefs are central to Romec’s business process and Romec have used the intranet to replace a system of ad hoc spreadsheets with a centralised tool. Crucially, the business likes it and have become advocates for the new system. Another success has seen the Romec Management System, which stores forms, policies and manuals, being signed off by auditors DNV.
There was an extended networking break as James Mullan and The Crown Estate’s technical team wrestled with gremlins, but eventually we got underway.
James is bravely following in the footsteps of Maria Cesa and Rod McLean (twice), admitting that FFW’s intranet is due a revamp and presumably looking for ideas and feedback. Judging by the Twitter stream during the presentation, he got what he was looking for! As James explains, the intranet is three years old and he inherited it when the Knowledge Management team took it over. As well as purely technical challenges, like many law firms – and indeed organisations with any history – FFW faces the challenge of changing a culture of “private documents”.
FFW’s intranet allows some personalisation of feeds and information sources, but I wondered why these weren’t aggregated in one place or an RSS reader. Many pages feature communications in a kitchen sink approach to getting the message out there – wherever there’s space.
Navigation is organisation-based, so most people use the “A-Z of the intranet” to find what they’re looking for – a strong indicator that the navigation must be improved.
We were happy that James Robertson of Step Two Designs was able to grace Intranetters with his presence once again, having stepped off a plane from Australia at about 6:00am.
This time, not only is he presenting a review of the very recently announced results of the 2011 Intranet Innovation Awards, but three of the winners are with us to receive their trophies.
Sharon O’Dea collects an award for UK Parliament’s mobile intranet, demonstrated at the last Intranetters session at The Crown Estate, Alex Jackson for placing Framestore‘s core business of visual effects and computer animation at the heart of their intranet, Adam Pope for Arup‘s effort at engaging employees in fundraising for Sports Aid with the Amazing Race.
James’s summary of this year’s awards was peppered with common sense advice. On the need for intranets to evolve as systems: “Redesigns achieve little – the real value is in (continuous) incremental change.”
This was best exemplified by Framestore. Having already won an award last year, their latest innovation uses pictures of individual animation frames to help animators visually understand their progress. Framestore are already planning a version which includes video, so we may well be applauding their third consecutive success in 2012.
I just liked the name of Framestore’s internal microblogging tool: “Fritter”.
James’s parting advice for all intranet teams was simple – make a list: “What are the six things you are going to improve in the next six months?”
(Update: James Mullan has written up this event on his blog.)
For most people the threat of hacking is simply a threat. It’s a risk anyone with a website lives with, but until it happens, most of us give it little thought.
So I was surprised to notice on my way to bed last night that the front page of my blog had been replaced with this screen which reads “Hacked by Amin Safi”:
How could this have happened? Had my passwords been discovered through a brute force attack? Would the blog I’d recently migrated have to be recreated from scratch? Was my entire material wealth currently being sucked from my grasp by some enormous virtual vacuum cleaner?
When I’d calmed down, I set about finding out how to repair the damage and prevent it happening again. Naturally there is a lot of information available on-line.
First, it’s not an uncommon experience: this cyber crime site lists a number of similar violations. And there are no teams of pale, dark-eyed teenagers. It’s mostly done by code which exploits vulnerabilities in WordPress, WordPress plugins and WordPress themes.
The damage was relatively minor: I couldn’t log in to WordPress, so first I had to go in via CPanel and reset the user passwords. This allowed me to enter the dashboard and select the default WordPress theme, which restored my blog to functionality, if not to its former glory.
The following day I returned to understand more fully how my blog had been compromised.
I deleted the hacked index.php file, then reinstalled the theme I had been using, Stripe, which I had found on the web.
I then installed Antivirus and scanned the theme. Antivirus pointed out the footer was encoded in Base64 and decoding the characters in the footer, I found some code which displays an advertisement for acne medication.
I also installed Exploit Scanner, but there doesn’t seem to be anything else to worry about, so having removed the dubious code and replaced the Base64 encoded section with regular, the theme is up and running again.
The following pages all helped me:
Imagine: you’ve been waiting for months to pitch a new, streamlined intranet design to a business leader.
You finally sit down to talk and your heart sinks as they start to outline how scrolling marquees are going to revolutionise their business function.
What if you could point to an example which explains why perhaps their suggestion isn’t such a great idea?
I sympathised with Luke Oatham as I read his excellent blog post on “The horrors of devolved publishing”, but it was the throwaway comment at the end which caught my eye:
“I’ll never forget in the early days, the proud publisher who posted an animated gif of his revolving head…”
I’ve seen a lot of intranets. Most are good. Some are excellent. And they’re all managed by highly-skilled, professional people who understand the field to a depth which few others appreciate.
Responsible for a complex, constantly evolving set of tools which touch every area of an organisation, they’re expected to be a step ahead – identifying future technology to fulfil the organisation’s strategy, while tactically supporting its day-to-day work with the existing intranet tools.
And yet, they’re repeatedly forced to listen patiently as members of their organisation line up to explain why their site can’t follow the design standards, why it must work “like Google and the iPod”, have a four minute Flash intro which can’t be skipped and picture of the regional director on the homepage smiling with his thumbs in the air.
The perfect intranet site.
It’s just over four years since we started Intranetters – a community of practice for intranet managers – and I first spoke at a conference, the Melcrum Social Media Forum. More conferences followed – J. Boye, Ark Group, KMUK, Econique Business Masters to name just a few – and more Intranetters events and I’ve met many, many people who work with intranets.
I’ve enjoyed all these events, but they all have one thing in common. When the doors close, the stories start. The clients with their ridiculous requests, the misapprehensions, the misconceptions and above all the failure to understand the people, the tools and just what the purpose of an intranet is.
If I sat down one evening to redesign my car, then popped in to the local garage the following morning with my drawing on an envelope and asked them to make a few “tweaks”. Because everyone uses the internet, they believe they understand what makes a great user experience. Unfortunately, this often means Flash intros, mystery meat navigation and animated gifs. As James Robertson of Step Two Designs told Intranetters in 2010, if people aren’t listening to the advice of intranet managers, they’re undervaluing their expertise.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from Dave Snowden and his KM principles, it’s that “tolerated failure imprints learning better than success.”
There are excellent resources on the web which highlight good intranet design and poor internet webpage design…
…but I’ve yet to see anything specifically directed at bad intranet design.
So why not create one?
What are the worst ideas you’ve heard and seen? The pointless animations guaranteed to increase “hits”, the awful styles, the unusable navigation…
Send me stories, pictures, wireframes, screenshots… tell me why these ideas were supposed to work. Did you implement them? Or were you able to dissuade the client from a career-limiting mistake.
You can submit anonymously, remove logos… email intranetdisasters@gmail.com and I’ll include the best ones at Intranet Disasters.
Australian intranet author James Robertson recommends the Interact approach to web design and usability
Earlier this year, British American Tobacco hosted a meeting of the Intranetters community of practice for intranet managers. As well as demonstrations of Interact and EDF’s intranet, Australian intranet author and consultant James Robertson of Step Two spoke about the winners of the 2009 Intranet Innovation Awards.
James was so impressed by Interact that he included several screenshots in his recently published book “Designing Intranets – Creating Sites That Work“.
The latest article in his KM column uses Interact‘s My Employment page as an example of Creating effective intranet “shop windows”, calling for content managers to ditch “blah blah blah” content and help intranet users to find what they are looking for.
“The design of these ‘shop window’ spaces,” says James, “is critical. If they are well-designed, staff can quickly and easily find what they need. If they are filled with ‘blah blah’ content, they clutter the intranet with irrelevant content that gets in the way of completing tasks.”
He goes on: “‘Shop windows’ should therefore focus on:
(Read the article and find out more about “Designing Intranets.”).
A wide-ranging session in prospect this afternoon with demonstrations of intranets from The Crown Estate, UK Parliament and GE Healthcare.
After a brief welcome, Rod McLean kicks off with The Crown Estate’s intranet which serves 400 mostly London-based people, a mixture of lawyers, foresters and gamekeepers, many without access to a computer.
In dispersed organisations the challenge for communication is that no single channel reaches everyone. The intranet is currently seen as an internal communications tool, but the organisation is asking whether it can be more, but with no intranet manager, there is a lack of vision when it comes to answering these questions.
The design is attractive. Rod points out a couple of quirks: the navigation appears above the banner, and the logo is positioned top-right. Most people currently use the intranet as a portal to access other systems through the links section and the most popular area is the menu for the cafe. A review is imminent and the next stage is evaluating the analytics in greater detail to find out which areas people find most valuable.
UK Parliament
Sharon O’Dea begins by explaining some of the mind-boggling challenges faced by the UK Parliament intranet. It’s a complex organisation, historically paper-based with strict rules about who can communication with whom. The two houses and support staff total around 5,000 users: a mixture of MPs, staff and interns.
Having already merged eight existing intranets built in Dreamweaver and migrated to EPiServer CMS, the announcement of the 2010 election signalled a different challenge. It was around this point where I stopped taking notes and pictures because I was so intent on the story. Anticipating lots of change, many new people and a more tech-savvy audience, they identified the information new members needed and chose to offered it through mobile phones.
The result is impressive: simple screens delivering the right information to the right people in the right place at the right time on different devices.
The next challenge Sharon and her team face is to move HR self service to the intranet.
Christine Payne rounds off the afternoon with GE Healthcare’s intranet. Founded in 1878 by Thomas Edison, General Electric has 46,000 employees worldwide.
In common with many large corporates, the intranet is based on a common platform provided by the parent company.
A sophisticated system targets stories using mailing lists. ”My Links” are customisable, although Christine admits they ditched portlets “because no one used them”. News and links are tailored to individual users, though alternative settings are selectable. Staff are encouraged to leave comments and HR leaders take notice of feedback and have a policy of responding.
Having wrestled with different ways of presenting search options on the homepage, I also notice users have to select between the organisation and people directory when searching.
We rounded off with a discussion on the role of innovation and then retired to the bar for food and drink kindly sponsored by The Crown Estate.
Thanks to Rod for hosting and securing a budget for drinks!
Most organisations seem to have adopted intranets for communication and collaboration, but how should an organisation’s intranet support its knowledge management activities?
From communities of practice to blogging and ultimately internal social networking, it’s something I’ve grappled with over the past eight years – trying, failing and hopefully learning at each stage of development.
It’s a journey I reflected on in a recent article for Inside Knowledge Magazine.
I’ve been surprised recently to see an online community which I created several years ago – and which, I believed, had lain dormant since – suddenly spark into life.
I originally created the group in 2005 in response to some requests for help which weren’t reaching the correct audience. Apart from one response a year later saying what a great idea this was, there had been little activity – or so I thought.
During the interim period, the membership had been growing steadily. All it took was one request for help in improving the operation of a factory machine. Quickly there was a response from another part of the world suggesting a modification they had used. This included a description, pictures and even blueprints!
This led to a flurry of other requests and responses and although the requests died down after a while, I believe it has helped the community see the tool as a way of connecting with expertise around the world.
Ironically, if we’d upgraded the tool in line with our IT team’s recommendations, this would never have happened as part of that would have meant removing “inactive” communities.
Setting up an intranet governance framework in the context of decentralised publishing by Ernst Décsey, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees
Faced with the challenge of setting up decentralising content publishing using a new web content management system, UNHCR were challenged by senior management to provide publication policies and guidelines to guarantee the quality of material published on the new system.
Ernst presents a comprehensive framework for web governance at different levels. I liked that while it was simple enough to read and understand easily, they took the time to make it relevant to users and to communicate it, the CIO sending a memo to all staff stating the purpose explicitly. It’s even displayed to users as they log in:
- primary tool for internal communication
- place to publish and find information
- place to collaborate
- entry to online workplace
There are similarly easy to read sections covering roles and responsibilities, content approval, intranet access and the intranet content structure.
Feeding The Monster by Mark Wyatt, Environment Agency
Mark gave a captivating presentation about the challenges facing the Environment Agency following an intranet content management tool update – and I forgot to take notes.
Starting with the statement that the perfect publisher is different for every organisation, Mark talked about the aftermath of the introduction of a new content management system. With over 700 content publishers and a central team of five content editors, there was an imbalance which left the publisher community feeling a lack of support from the organisation and too much content of low quality. With the situation tending towards the chaotic, they acted to reign in the content managers, reducing the number by 90%.
They took a top-down/bottom-up approach, building support with senior stakeholders to get the right governance in place and highlighting the potential costs of failing to comply.
At the same time, they formed a network of senior publishers – recognising those who produced quality content – and improved communication and collaboration, giving them forums to share good practice and discuss issues. A three-strikes rule for all publishers introduced the threat of withdrawing publishing privileges for anyone whose content failed to measure up.
Mark said the content publishers have welcomed these guidelines, which is understandable since they provide clarity, improve overall quality and ultimately recognise their role as important to the organisation’s success. Managers on the other hand struggled to accept the minimum standards, even while they supported the cost benefits.
Armed with these light constraints, the intranet has been brought under control and while Mark felt the system was optimised, he admitted it wasn’t perfect.
His best learnings warned against becoming seduced by the pursuit of perfection:
- you can’t build a theoretical community
- you can’t take a one-size fits all approach
- you can’t do it in isolation to the culture and workings and strategy of an organisation
A good perspective on working in the real world.
Web Idol
A tradition at the J. Boye conference sees a group of content management vendors line-up for some abuse at the hands of a panel of expert judges. Hence representatives on stage for seven minutes putting SharePoint, eSpirit, Kapow, Terminal4, 23 Video and SiteCore through their paces.
The biggest surprise I got was when Terminal4 showed their product which has exactly the same user interface for setting up navigation as BAT’s bespoke tool SiteBuilder. Coincidentally, their tool, Piero told us, was aimed at occasional users. And the whole experience was very SiteBuilder-like.
Oddly, SiteCore was the only entrant who tried to engage the audience with a story, featuring characters, something meaningful which encapsulated an end-to-end experience. All the other entrants merely tried to demonstrate features. Kapow showed a useful-looking tool for migration, 23 Video a white label tool for setting up video sharing sites which featured some impressive-looking analytics and SharePoint touted its similarity to existing Microsoft Office applications.
SiteCore naturally romped home with the audience’s vote, proving that if you want to communicate with people, tell them stories they’ll understand. The story supplies the context and there are no awkward “…so what I’m going to do here is…” moments.
Global Intranet Trends For 2010 – Towards The Workplace Web – Jane McConnell, NetStrategy/JMC
My early morning Ryanair flight from Stansted must’ve caught a tailwind, because I arrive twenty minutes early, catch the bus into town and arrive to hear the end of Jane’s spot, the first public presentation of the results of her fourth annual Global Intranet Strategies survey. I’m already looking forward to reading the report when I get back, but I’m happy to hear very large organisations who are social media pioneers are benefitting from “more effective knowledge sharing”, “more engaged employees” and “increased cross pollination and innovation”.
Why We Need A Modern Intranet – Miquel Maldonado, Médécins Sans Frontières
First intranet case study of the day comes from Miquel. Médécins Sans Frontières launched a new intranet in August 2009 having decided that a new file sharing tool would not meet their requirements.
The design is clean – the sparing use of colour indicating this is a business tool. They’ve put a lot of thought into their taxonomy, extending the keywords they initially identified by adding popular tags from users, a nice feedback loop making good use of crowdsourcing.
A couple of questions from the floor:
Q: (Regarding user profiles) “How do you indicate ‘complete’ profiles to users?”
Miquel says there isn’t a measure of completeness for a user profile, but it prompts me to wonder whether a Linked In-style percentage measure would encourage greater completion of profiles? Something to try out in the future.
Q: “How integrated is the people directory?”
One of the great strengths of an intranet is its degree of integration. In MSF’s case, Miquel says, it’s not just blog and community posts which link to people directory records, but document authors too. Most intranets I’ve seen aren’t integrated to this level which impressed me.
Using tag clouds
A key feature of the new design is a tag cloud displayed prominently on the homepage. The terms are all countries, the larger ones representing countries with the most documents associated over the last three months.
This interested me because I’d had a conversation with my colleague Simon only 24 hours earlier about the appropriate use of tag clouds. We had a situation where we wanted to give users of a site the quickest access to policy documents. The problem is the tag cloud signifies popularity by measuring volume, not relevance – the most appropriate for my needs – or usage – the most often accessed. With user-generated content, this is great because it shows us trends. In MSF’s case, they’re using a time-frame of three months, so the cloud represents currency, the organisation’s focus areas during that period.
I was lucky enough to find myself sitting next to Miquel at dinner that evening, so I asked him about it. He said he’d had exactly the same conversation. Bravely, they’d gone ahead with an experiment to try it out and see what happened.
It will be interesting to see the results and get feedback from users. I’d be interested to hear other people’s experiences with tag clouds on intranets and whether or not they’ve helped people access user- and non-user-generated content more easily.