At the same time many innovative software vendors, including some formerly known as CMS vendors, are building sophisticated functionality that would enable marketers to target content at the right audiences and build personalised experiences for the most important customers.

Experience optimisation will have to wait

Unfortunately using these functionalities effectively happens to require a lot of time and energy from marketing departments. And when all eyes are focused on social media and original content production there just isn't enough time to learn all those new fancy features.

For those innovative CMS vendors this can be a real problem. If customers don't have the resources to set up and use the new systems they might question the value of their investment.

For customers it is just a risk they have to acknowledge. If the current marketing team is being overwhelmed by social media and other current hot topics, then competitors might overtake them and achieve a competitive edge. That can happen.

However, the situation seems to be the same everywhere, and for many brands social media can truly offer a lot of return on investment. And this is how many marketing directors seem to view things at the moment:

"Let's focus on social media and content production now, and maybe we return to this "experience optimisation" in a few years."

And it is quite easy to relate to this decision. Many organisations don't even have an extranet system in place that is connected to their CRM and organisations don't have a systematic approach to email marketing. So in any case many organisations have a lot of work to do before they can even dream of building these sophisticated "web experiences".

For many CMS vendors this kind of near future development might mean difficult times ahead. If customers are not ready to buy those "web experience management systems", then the business and product development of those players will suffer (e.g. Adobe, Sitecore, Oracle, EPiServer).

For CMS vendors that approach the market with a more pragmatic view this might be a good thing. For example WordPress is much more about ecosystem and add-ons than about building a heavy system. This is an approach that might get even more support if marketing departments continue focusing more to other things than solving content management problems and optimising their owned web presence. And perhaps other content management systems will follow this model where the CMS focuses on solving the basic things well and leaves the other things for more specialized systems.

In any case, every marketing department should make their own decisions about whether they have the resources to invest in optimising the web presence, or whether there are other, more fruitful investment areas. All decisions are ok - even if the message from your CMS sales guy might be a different one.

It's a huge challenge for CMS vendors - 10 years ago it was very much rich locally installed application layers like media surface with rich GUIs and rich (aka complicated) functionality - the world went for web based WYSIWYG interfaces to cater for the 'I have not seen a CMS before' users. Now users are more likely to have seen a CMS in their jobs and you are faced with the issue that they are 'saddled' with a view of what a CMS GUI should look like based on what they have used before.

Users like evolution - not revolution

My point is that users are creatures of habit - like most of us in most things we do - we don't actually like change as much as we pretend. So if you get used to an interface - clunks and all - which you might groan about and have strong views on how could be improved, in reality the last thing you want is for that to change in any great way. Why? You will then have to re-learn the product. Most CMS customers absolutely do not want massive change to the GUI - and they will let you know if you try! (remember when Microsoft launched the new windows GUI only to have to put back in the link to 'classic view' ?)

On top of this, one man's WYSIWYG is another man's WYSIWONT! I have lost count of the number of times I have heard from users how much they hate a particular interface - which other users happen to love. You also have the matrix of what techies like vs what marketers like - dare I suggest there is even a difference between what women and men find easier to use - or Americans to Europeans to Asians... Add to this the reality of the explosion in number of mobiles and the fact that the interface has to change again to cope with touch screen instructions. Some will 'demand' an ipad GUI whilst others will 'demand' the desktop GUI. Oh and did I forget to mention that WCAG is at odds with WYSIWYG in so many ways - if you comply with one, you can potentially blow the other... and so on and so on....

Changing, but slowly

I think the summary would have to be that vendors DO listen, but with so many competing ends to how the interface should look - and so many views - none of which are conclusive - and all are evolving - it is hard to blame them for changing with caution and not doing anything drastic that might upset their existing customer base.

Based on input from our members as well as our extensive experience with CMS selection, this shortlist is intended to help you navigate the UK marketplace. The list is geared towards buyers from large and complex organisations with significant web demands.

The CMS marketplace remains fragmented and unconsolidated. Many buyers are stuck with outdated systems that are holding them back from fully executing their digital plans. With digital first being the prevailing agenda in many organisations and with with increased expectations from website visitors, the importance of selecting the right CMS is obvious.

Top 10 CMS vendors in UK in 2013

• Adobe
• Contensis
• Drupal
• EPiServer
• GOSS
• Oracle
• Plone
• Sitecore
• Squiz
• Terminalfour

Who's missing? Honourable mentions and high fives

• Microsoft SharePoint is widely adopted, but often for the wrong reasons. Unlike any other product in the marketplace, SharePoint is rarely selected for its strengths such as suitability for intranets and collaboration purposes; rather it is selected as part of a broader IT strategy or simply because it is already in use in the organisation. External websites is still a weakness for the product, also in the recently released 2013 edition. Finally, Microsoft still remains uninterested in CMS.
• WordPress is the most used CMS in the world and "still not good enough". It looks like this is changing, in particular in the UK marketplace, and WordPress might be found on future Top 10 lists.
• Jadu is a UK-based CMS vendors that deserves a high-five. They've been around for a while, have many UK references, appear on shortlists every so often. Yet they seem to increasingly be feeling the competitive pressure.
• Kentico is clearly up and coming with an expanding and experienced UK team of CMS industry experts.
• Magnolia still appears like the only CMS vendor that have really done something when it comes to rethinking CMS in a mobile-first world. Besides their focus on mobile, their community is slowly, but truly growing.

The slides with the UK CMS shortlist

Our methodology

Our list is mostly based on:

• J. Boye Groups; with over 500 members from around the world, including several UK-only groups and groups with UK multinationals, we get to look behind the scenes and hear what happens after the sales presentations.
• Consulting on CMS selection; we've seen how a CMS procurement can go wrong - even when the project is started with the best intentions on all sides. We know what it takes internally, how vendors read the invitations to tender and how they might respond.
• Experts views from the wider community. This list has been based on user input and conversations with agencies, analysts, customers and vendors. In particular intangibles such as community, partner network and roadmap has played a key role.

Putting together a shortlist is a challenging part of any CMS selection, especially if you don't use external expertise. Therefore, the main intention was to help you -- the buyers -- by sharing the list of frequently appearing vendors.

J. Boye is not saying that the 10 vendors are safe choices for everybody and certainly not saying that the list represents the best choices for every imaginable scenario. We are simply recommending that large and complex organisations with significant web demands ought to consider those vendors in the current marketplace.

Feel free to share your comments below.

Learn more about the CMS marketplace

Read our Top 10 CMS vendor list for Germany, Austria and Switzerland and our 2009 global CMS shortlist

You can also consider attending our CMS Expert Groups, where CMS analysts, thinkers, practitioners, experts and vendors meet, set the agenda for future industry developments, provide feedback and share thoughts and ideas in an inspiring setting.

I recently spoke with Marc Jadoul, Marketing Director at Alcatel-Lucent and advocate for the company’s social intranet called ‘Engage’, about the benefits of a social platform – and how to reap them.

Knowledge workers in a high-tech company

Social intranets are especially relevant for organisations that rely heavily on knowledge workers, such as consulting firms and high-tech companies. In a previous blog post, I wrote about how a social intranet can unlock the tacit knowledge that sits in the brains of the employees. Alcatel-Lucent is a typical example of an organisation that is experiencing the benefits from going social:

• A workforce consisting mainly of highly skilled engineers and technical sales people
• A complex, multi-national organisation
• Active in a highly competitive market where innovation and speed of execution are key

According to Laurie Buczek of Intel, knowledge workers spend up to 30% of their working day looking for people and information. A waste of precious time and human resources that may be dramatically reduced by providing employees with appropriate communication tools, putting collaboration and knowledge sharing on the foreplan. This is exactly what Engage aims to do.

Knowledge is power, but community is strength

Alcatel-Lucent’s Jive-based platform is providing a user-friendly environment that empowers over 70,000 employees worldwide to connect and collaborate with each other, and to contribute to over 4,000 work and non-work related communities.

The screenshot below shows the home page of Engage (that can be further customised and personalised by each individual user). It illustrates the approach taken: a rich combination of various types of content, ranging from traditional news stories to blogs, group discussions, unanswered questions and tag clouds to help users find topics and communities of interest to them.

Alcatel-Lucent’s implementation focuses strongly on internal communities and the value that they bring. “It’s all about growing cross-organisational knowledge that we can apply in our day-to-day business” says Marc. “Communities will help to break down organisational silos, put people in touch with like-minded colleagues and provide the opportunity to learn and innovate.”

A light governance model, based on a code of conduct and the principle of self-regulation, has proven its value – only on very rare occasions does the community manager need to step in. It must be noted however that – although a light governance has proven to be the right path towards rapid and smooth adoption – a new collaboration model like the one empowered by Engage can only succeed in an open-minded organisation, in which people, teams and leadership are willing and motivated to transform.

Measuring real value

The hardest part of any social intranet project is to demonstrate the ROI. Earlier this year I wrote about the case of Omron and how their intranet delivers value to the business.

To understand the ROI of platforms such as Engage, it's important to understand the costs of conducting business without these tools, including the missed opportunities of not using them. At Alcatel-Lucent the approach has been to demonstrate success by collecting both quantitative and qualitative feedback from employees and business stakeholders. Some examples:

• “We saved 450 minutes/week in project status conference calls”
• “We got better answers to questions in 30 minutes instead of hours”
• “I have been working 11 years with this company now and because of Engage, I feel more connected with my colleagues now”

Sometimes even non-business related communities on Engage led to unexpected cost-savings. As an example, pictures taken by employees and shared in the community of interest on photography were reused in marketing materials, instead of paying for professional stock photos.

“Another KPI to take into account is the positive effect on company culture, corporate image and employee retention,” says Marc Jadoul. “Recent research by Alcatel-Lucent has shown that in highly successful companies management, IT and HR work together to equip workers with productivity tools that enable a ‘New Way of Working.’”

Intranet is a journey, not a destination

What’s the next challenge for the intranet of Alcatel-Lucent? More integration comes to mind: currently Engage co-exists with a traditional, managed intranet for official communication and with a SharePoint platform for team collaboration. This is a typical phase in the evolution of many organisations’ intranets and matches with Jane McConnell’s model for intranet maturity.

“Today there is only basic cross-linking between the 3 environments,” says Marc. “The next step on our journey is to create a more integrated digital workplace, where employees are presented with a single user experience.”

Want to learn more?

Would you like to see more examples of social intranets and hear the stories behind them – including often some tough ‘lessons learned’? Check out these opportunities:

• Learn from the best: Our next international conference for web and intranet professionals takes place in Philadelphia from 7 to 9 May 2013. Secure your ticket today!
• Share with the best: Join one of our many J. Boye intranet groups across Europe and North America, and share your intranet experience with your peers in other organizations.
• How does your intranet measure up? How strong are your social, collaboration and mobile intranet features? We'll tell you as part of our intranet benchmarking!

At J. Boye, we get our insights and inspiration mainly from talking to our 500+ customers in our many groups of web and intranet practitioners. I have recently spoken to several intranet managers from large and medium-sized organizations. Many of them share the same doubts, but are at the same time taking action and making investments to improve their existing intranets.

Let's have a closer look at two areas where most intranet investments are being made, and discuss how you as an intranet manager can stay on top of things.

1.  Supporting the ‘New World of Work’

A lot has been said and written about the merits of the ‘New World of Work’ or 'NWOW' as Microsoft and others have called it. And while the final verdict may still be out on how much flexibility people and organizations can absorb (check the recent story of how Yahoo is cutting back on working from home), it’s clear that there is no turning back to the old days.

Intranets are growing and maturing in order to support this New World of Work. Yes, the traditional intranet with its official content and corporate news stories will still have a place, but a much smaller one than before. Investments are made elsewhere: Social, collaboration and especially mobile capabilities will ensure that the employees of 2015 will work together efficiently anywhere, anytime, on any device.

Introducing NWOW is quickly becoming a priority in many organizations, and so will be the transformation of their intranet. In an earlier blog post, I talked about Omron as a great example of how a social intranet can support this transformation and deliver tangible business benefits. In the coming months we’ll be showcasing more examples from our customer base. Stay tuned!

2.  Unlocking tacit knowledge

Many organizations are introducing social features on their intranet or are implementing a brand-new social business platform. When looking beyond the hype, the main business driver is often about unlocking the tacit knowledge that sits in the brains of the employees.

The importance of tacit knowledge in a corporate environment has been studied and popularized by Ikujiro Nonaka in his Harvard Business Review article and book titled ‘The Knowledge-Creating Company’. Tacit knowledge, as opposed to explicit knowledge, is difficult to capture and document in any formal way. Traditional knowledge management systems are of no help. But social business software can be a part of the solution: at a minimum, it makes the organization’s experts reachable by others and encourages them to share their expertise in online communities and discussion forums. A great example of this is Engage, the social intranet of Alcatel-Lucent, where a combination of communities, wikis and blogs is helping to break down silos and encourage innovation.

Companies increasingly realize the importance of making expert knowledge accessible, across physical locations and departmental silos, in support of business objectives such as product innovation, faster time-to-market and better customer service. In Jane McConnell’s recent digital workplace survey, ‘organizational intelligence’ came out as the top strategic driver for investing in an improved intranet / digital workplace (‘efficiency and cost savings’ was a close second). Clearly, the old management adage ‘people are our most important asset’ – in the past often just lip service – is now becoming a reality.

Lead, follow or get out of the way: Threats and opportunities for tomorrow’s intranet manager

What is the impact of these trends on the career prospects of intranet managers? As is often the case, there are two sides to the coin:

Threats: The traditional intranet is certainly under threat, and so is its manager. Intranet managers who cling to their familiar platform for top-down, controlled content are at risk of being marginalized. Some typical behaviors that I've seen and that are counterpoductive:

• Don't fight the well-meant initiatives of other departments. If IT has decided to launch a new SharePoint platform, or if the business units are experimenting with Yammer, then try to integrate these initiatives into your existing intranet plans. Embrace innovation, don't sulk.
• Don't try to control all content. Accept that user-generated content is good and that people in general will be sensible and respectful. Provide guidelines and be a facilitator, don't be the guardian of a dying breed of 'official' corporate-controlled intranets.

Opportunities: These clearly outweigh the threats. Intranet managers have a unique opportunity to show their vision, take the lead in the transformation process and build a new career for themselves. Some examples of how you can shine:

• Build a 3-year roadmap (no more, as things move extremely fast) for the evolution of the intranet: This is a great exercise for you as an intranet manager. It gives you a reason to go and talk to people across the organization, build credibility and show senior management that you're taking charge.
• Think multi-disciplinary: New World of Work initiatives typically involve people from departments as diverse as HR, IT and Facilities Management. As intranet manager you are ideally placed to bring these people together in a common project.
• 'Ask for forgiveness, not for permission': Leadership is about taking calculated risks and showing initiative, cutting through red tape when needed. Even if your official job description does not mention 'social' or 'collaboration', don't let this stop you to do the right thing.

Do you see the same or different trends in your organization? Are you grasping the opportunities? Let us know!

Want to learn more?

Would you like to meet other intranet managers face to face and discuss these issues with them? Check out these opportunities:

• Learn from the best: Our next international conference for web and intranet professionals takes place in Philadelphia from 7 to 9 May 2013. Secure your ticket today!
• Share with the best: Join one of our many J. Boye intranet groups across Europe and North America, and share your intranet experience with your peers in other organizations.
• How does your intranet measure up? How strong are your social, collaboration and mobile intranet features? We'll tell you as part of our intranet benchmarking!

Despite all these apparent strengths, very few organisations consider WordPress as an option when they go through a CMS selection exercise. Large and complex organisations seem to mostly ignore it. Why is that?

WordPress is not considered a CMS

According to the J. Boye Group members, I've spoken to for this article, one frequent explanation why WordPress is ignored is that many don't even consider WordPress a CMS. Instead, it is considered and categorized as a popular blogging tool.

The few that do think of WordPress as a CMS consider it mostly suitable for smaller sites, including personal blogs. Those extremely rare digital managers, online communicators and others who have raised WordPress as an option internally, have often been shot down by IT departments who do not consider it suitable for anything business critical.

To be fair to customers, WordPress and the people behind it have gone to great lengths to avoid labelling WordPress a CMS. So far, the WordPress marketing has been as a "Blog Tool and Publishing Platform", while CMS was only recently added to the list.

5 good reasons you should consider WordPress

As mentioned, WordPress has many strengths.

Here are my 5 good reasons you should consider WordPress for your next CMS selection:

• It has a strong, global and vibrant community
• The user interface is comparatively easy to use and widely localized
• Despite the fact that it has so far flown below the radar, it already has references in all industries
• A wide-ranging list of modules, including for mobile, which is matched in numbers only by SharePoint
• Tend to be cheap to implement and host

WordPress is not perfect

While WordPress deserves a place on most CMS selection shortlists, it is far from perfect either.

Keeping up with the frequent upgrades and making sure plug-ins and customisations still work tends to be an underestimated task among WordPress customers. Extensibility may be the biggest strength, but to many enterprises it is also the biggest weakness as the inexperienced developer and webmaster can easily turn WordPress into an unmanageable black hole and leave you stuck on an old and potentially insecure version.

A few features where WordPress is not best-in-class include complex workflows, fine-grained permissioning and digital marketing requirements such as campaigns.

My advice to the CMS Experts among the readers and anyone else reading these lines would be to stop discussing whether WordPress qualifes to be considered a CMS and instead move on and consider WordPress where it makes sense.

The message at the heart of Martin White’s book titled Enterprise Search - Enhancing Business Performance is that the critical success factor for effective Enterprise Search is investment in people in the form of a “Search Support Team”. This team is the key to unlocking access to the enterprise’s information assets and delivering the sustained focus necessary to keep that capability relevant in the constantly evolving needs of the modern digital workplace.

Acknowledging from the outset how challenging it is to deliver effective enterprise search, Martin White presents all the essential elements for success with search in an accessible, practical and deliberately non technically-focussed way. If you are looking for a book with concise, practical information on how to either get more from your current search investment or to maximise the investment you are considering making, then this is the book for you!

Martin White has been using computer-based search applications since 1974 and in the consulting business since 1979. He founded Intranet Focus Ltd. in 1999 to provide clients with vendor-independent advice on intranet and information management strategy development and implementation and as such has a wealth of expert knowledge and experience to draw on in this his 7th book.

Available as both an e-book and in print format, I am confident that anyone passionate about improving the access to enterprise information assets, will find this book an invaluable and regularly referenced companion.

Learn more about enterprise search

You can meet Martin White in person at the J. Boye Search Day in London on February 13, J. Boye Search Day in Copenhagen on March 18 & J. Boye Search Day in Oslo on March 19.

Omron Europe, a leader in industrial automation, did this exercise successfully and implemented Ozone, a state-of-the-art intranet with a strong focus on delivering tangible business value. Here is a behind-the-scenes look  at how they achieved this.

Where is the pain?

Before diving into technology selection and solution building, Omron took the time to investigate first. Using a Business Value Analysis methodology, the project team went around the organization looking for the needs and especially the pain points of employees. Three areas of pain emerged:

1. Finding information to do the job: ‘Sales is not aware of what is available and what we can offer’
2. Communicate, share and work together: ‘Who is our expert on solar technology in Germany?’
3. Better tools to make a specific task easier: ‘I won’t open all those databases and systems before every customer visit’

Based on this analysis, the priorities for the new intranet became clear. What was needed was an easy-to-use, integrated solution that offers a combination of traditional content (finding information) and social features (communicate, share and work together).

Integration at the glass

The screenshot below shows the personalized homepage of Ozone. Underpinning the dashboard-style design is a concept, which Omron calls ‘Integration at the glass’: Various back-office IT systems are integrated at the level of the user interface (the ‘glass’). The end user sees a unified dashboard with a consistent look and feel, not a multitude of databases and legacy systems.

Examples of business functionality

The strength of Omron's intranet lies in the business value it delivers. Much of this comes through a variety of dashboards that allow the employees to steer themselves towards their objectives. These are a reflection of the strongly held belief that 'if you give employees a clear objective and a good dashboard, they will drive themselves'. Some examples of the dashboards:

• All social features of Ozone are accessible from a single page. Employee profile, communities, shared documents, latest blogs and wikis are all just one click away from the home page.
• Customer dashboards, grouping all relevant information related to a specific account.
• Sales and business dashboards with data about performance of the various country organizations.

The most popular applications are those that are solving a real business problem for a specific group of people. For the sales force of Omron, the killer app is a ‘prospect navigator’ application using Google Maps to show sales people on the road the route to a nearby prospective customer. This allows the salesperson to combine more customer visits on a single trip, thereby dramatically increasing efficiency and customer-facing time.

Towards the digital workplace

I recently saw a live demo of Ozone when Michel Min, Head of Strategic Communication and e-Marketing, participated in a J. Boye intranet group meeting in Brussels. It was great to see a successful example of an intranet that has moved beyond the traditional format and is approaching the ‘digital workplace’ that many industry thought leaders talk about so much these days. The strong focus on delivering business functionality has lifted the intranet to become a business-critical tool for everyone to do their daily jobs.

Or, as one group member put it: ‘Until today I was skeptical about the value that a social intranet brings, but now I am convinced that it can be done!’

Next steps

No intranet is ever perfect or finished. While Ozone has been rolled out successfully in Europe, other parts of the world are not yet covered, including the headquarters in Japan. Other improvements on Michel Min’s to-do list: adding external social media sources (for instance about competitors) and give access to partner companies.

Want to learn more?

Would you like to see more examples of social intranets and hear the stories behind them – including often some tough ‘lessons learned’? Check out these opportunities:

• Learn from the best: Our next international conference for web and intranet professionals takes place in Philadelphia from 7 to 9 May 2013. Secure your ticket today!
• Share with the best: Join one of our many J. Boye intranet groups across Europe and North America, and share your intranet experience with your peers in other organizations.
• How does your intranet measure up? How strong are your social, collaboration and mobile intranet features? We'll tell you as part of our intranet benchmarking!

“Your experience and your network are all that matters. Everything else you can learn”
“Our real product is not the software, not the features, not the project – but trust”

Having seen way too many misguided digital strategies and failed web/intranet projects in the 5 years before, I started my own business. I felt that there had to be a better way. Not better software, not yet another agency, but a radically different way to increase the sum total of knowledge – and the benefits of such know-how – for customers and vendors alike.

When I launched J. Boye almost 10 years ago, we built the business on trying to leverage experience and networking in such a way that customers felt they were in safe hands – that they could trust us. With their commercial secrets, their personal careers and even their innermost doubts.

At the beginning of 2013 we’ve reached 500+ members in the J. Boye Groups, more than 2,000+ participants at the J. Boye Conferences held in Europe and America, we've carried out high-level consultancy work for large, complex global organisations, and – last but not least – somehow managed to build a talented team of people who are both inspiring and fun to work with.

The J. Boye focus remains digital. However, while being experts in the field of Content Management Systems (and other digital tools-for-the-job) remains the core focus for the J. Boye organisation as a whole, experience has taught me that finding broader-perspective ways to help our customers turn practical, technical experience into concrete commercial advantage is increasingly becoming the real agenda. Knowledge only has value when it is actually applied.

Getting experienced help to write the book

I’ve had the honour and privilege of working with many smart external business partners who have advised me over the past decade.

Among them is David Lalley, who has been working mostly behind the scenes so far, but has been instrumental in getting me to a clearer understanding of what makes the J. Boye approach unique, and trying to help us all understand the true customer benefits and commercial value of the sometimes disconcertingly intangible services we provide. And why all this is so important.

I’m happy to announce that I’ve decided to write a book with David Lalley on this exact topic: turning experience into advantage.

And to make sure we practice what we preach, a lot of the writing process will be out in the open. We plan to share our thinking along the way, with regular blog postings, discussions and many open questions. To get started, we’ve set up a Facebook page called Experiology Inc. and launched experiolo.gy. This blog will now revert to its normal topics.

I hope you find this process as exciting as I do, and will monitor and comment on what we’re doing along the way.

Stay tuned and wish us luck!

PS: The book will be out by July 2013 (we reckon!).

The big problem is that the intranet is too often seen as a project. You may have a nice intranet vision that talks about how your intranet will be the one place above all and must support the business goals and strategies. So, I ask: Since when did it become a business goal to always use the latest version of SharePoint?

Sustained intranet development needed

Some intranet managers argue that you need a more sustainable development model where changes happen incrementally. You need to match what the employees expect from a digital solution that supports their daily work. This is a product of what they need on a daily basis to do their job, but increasingly also what they see and experience on consumer websites. This means that the expectations will grow gradually, which fits nicely with the incremental model. However, from time to time you will see a major shift in the consumer web (eg. Google, Social networking, Mobile) and the user’s expectation shifts with it.

If your development model is based on small, incremental changes it will be hard to catch up with these big changes and you will, over time, see a widening gap between the expectations from the users and the actual offering on your intranet as illustrated in the figure below.

The accelerated development in expectations and the widening gap will result in people moving away from using the intranet or even worse, you will experience mutiny where the users take charge and move elsewhere.

The recurring intranet project

A natural approach to dealing with the shifts will be to rely on the platform vendors to fix this. They have the development capability to make this happen, but the big problem is that all of this development tends to happen retrospectively. The result is that you will have solutions that – at best – gets you up to par. Rarely does it put you ahead of the curve.

Internally in the organization the result is a situation where you do meet the expectations of the employees but you are left with a continuous change management task that you need to attend to while doing the next project. Every major change increases the organizational uncertainty and decreases the trust in your intranet. Combined with the fact that most organizations are not equipped to handle that level of change in an efficient way, you are likely to end up in what can be described as a “perpetual beta situation” where the end users never feel comfortable using the intranet.

The risk of mutiny as described earlier is minimal as the platform meets all requirements for those who would leave, but for the majority of users the level of uncertainty will make them defect i.e. give up on the intranet altogether. Proper change management can prevent this, but in a scenario where change becomes a constant, even your change agents will struggle with keeping up and in the end you will see the perception and satisfaction with your intranet decline.

The balanced intranet development approach

The incremental model comes up short and the project based is too risky – then what?

The key to the answer is to be very aware of the gap between expectations and what you offer. You need to incrementally develop your intranet but do not try to keep up with all the latest trends and infatuations.

Monitor the developments internally and listen to what the users say they need. Two people who think that a social network is a great idea is not enough to warrant as much as one minute spent on clarification but if you see 1000 people using 4 competing solutions then you have discovered a potential need and this is when you need to intervene.

One of my favorite quotes is from American philosopher Henry David Thoreau:

We must walk consciously only part way toward our goal, and then leap in the dark to our success

This describes the above model quite nicely. Any big leap like this will to a certain extent be into the dark and there is an enormous change management task ahead. The good thing, however, is that you will be able to plan ahead and knowing that you will go back to the trusted incremental development, you will have every chance to succeed using frameworks like Kurt Lewin’s model for change management.

The biggest risk in this scenario occurs if you cheap out on the change management part - do this wrong or with too little impact and you will have alienated all users because of the huge change and your intranet is doomed. It’s simply not enough to post a story on the intranet and run 4 webinars for the employees.

Minding the gap - also on your intranet

How to assess the gap between your current intranet and the employee’s expectations is not an exact science and there are many factors playing a role on this. It will be a complex mix of internal factors like company culture and technical proficiency among staff but also factors like company growth strategies (acquisitions require more flexibility than organic growth), management turnover rate (new people bring other expectations), and change frequency in core business processes (little or no change in the processes = few changes in tasks = slow intranet development) contribute to the size and growth of this gap.

In the end it all boils down to finding the right balance. Many of you are probably thinking that this is all about governance so why this talk about development models? I don’t disagree – governance is hugely important here to ensure that you have all the resources you need both people-wise and financially. But even the most well governed intranet may fall into one of these traps.

Incremental, Project based or Sustainable – all three models can work but only as long as you watch out carefully and mind the gap distance between the train and the platform.

Learn more and continue the intranet conversation

If you found this useful and have any comments, please feel free to share them below.

I'm speaking on this exact topic on the intranet conference track at J. Boye Aarhus 12 in November and hope to see you there!