Forrester Discusses Barriers to Intranet Use and Suggestions to Get Better

Forrester recently released a report on What’s Holding Back Your Intranet? by Tim Waters with Matthew Brown and Sara Burnes. They were kind to share a copy with me. They found that 93% of employee respondents said they use an intranet or company portal (Forrester uses the terms interchangeably) at least weekly, and more than half reported daily use. However, they found that these intranets were mostly accessed for basic functions such as company directory, benefits information, and payroll. Access to collaborative tools, what some might called an enterprise 2.0 capability was ranked fourteenth. 

At the same time studies have shown that a highly functional intranet can provide great value. A 2009 study at BT found that every £1 invested in the intranet produced £20 in exploited value. This certainly is consistent with my experience implementing such system in the late 90s. Despite this firms are underutilizing their intranets. They found several reasons. 

First these intranets are hard to use. Where is an AJAX interface when we need it? In fact, Forrester reports, “Most enterprises at least try to offer usable online experiences to their prospects and customers — but continue to inflict user-hostile internal systems upon their employees.” Nothing like a cobbler’s children syndrome. 

They also found that there are few incentives to change established work habits that night increase productive usage. Since It is often in charge of the intranet they think in terms of IT-centric intranet teams such as reduced storage costs rather that helping workers do their job better. IT is not usually measured on this. Most current intranets also do not reflect and support the specific roles and responsibilities of their users. The one size fits all approach is consistent with an IT centric intranet as it is easier and cheaper to maintain. 

Forrester wrote that the “symptoms of an ailing intranet are not hard to recognize: poor adoption, irritated users, failed tasks, and ingenious (but unproductive) workarounds in order to avoid the intranet altogether.” I have seen this over and over again as I interview people who moved to social media and away from their intranets. Serena even replaced their intranet with Facebook. Océ is moving massive amounts of information off their intranet. 

Forrester suggests that improving the intranet starts with taking the users’ perspective. I could not agree more. They offer a number of useful suggestions in the report, including a set of criteria to review your current intranet

Comments

[Ellen Feaheny]

I was actually having a thought around this today of a different angle. I work at a company that is very E2.0 style, constantly encouraging more sharing, blogging, contributions - of all sorts - technical, best practices, or even funny jokes or whatever.

(For us, it's living what we preach/sell (Confluence Wiki, etc.)... so natural reqt., but like all companies, not instant adoption across the board - it all takes time, and leader involvement.)

I've watched during 2009 as employees got more and more engaged on the Wiki, even the shy-est in the teams - evolutions and really amazing blogs and other highly useful content are daily and constant now. A surge of employee engagement evolves before your eyes - it's very interesting to watch the progression, as well as the growth pace of the company.

Confluence Wiki has become a core communication backbone in our company with offices in multiple countries. We just accept it as normal - could not function without it (and I never use the company directory - don't need it because you get to know people via their Wiki contributions).

But if people in our company were to leave and go to other companies now, would these E2.0 ways be normal there? In so many places, no! Including not having the open cultural nuances and other innovation benefits that accompany these collaboration methodologies.

Hmmmph! E2.0 styles REALLY becomes part of "you" once you work in this environment for a period of time - it is what only makes sense.

In a few years, if the momentum keeps up - will E2.0 deployments and cultures be everywhere?! Let's hope!

[bill Ives]

Ellen thanks for your extensive and hopeful comment. See my series on Booz Allen in the Fast Forward blog - http://www.fastforwardblog.com/2009/12/21/implementing-enterprise-2-0-at-booz-allen-part-five-–-lessons-learned/ for another example and the Oce series on this blog. http://billives.typepad.com/portals_and_km/2009/11/implementing-enterprise-2o-at-océ.html

[EphraimJF]

The last line of this post is so incredibly true!!

We started an intranet project a while back and set a major project tenet as "focus on the users." We didn't produce an amazing intranet, but with our limited resources we were able to get a good intranet.

And the idea of focusing on the user seems to be a major success factor in so many areas, from web design to product design to services. Bringing that perspective inside an organization for internal-facing tools & services can lead to higher productivity and employee satisfaction (both of which are good for the bottom line).

[bill Ives]

Ephraim - Thanks for sharing your experience and the need for user involvement. It has been my experience that success is a direct function of the amount of user involvement. Bill