The problem with most intranets, is that they are pretty awful. This is not usually the intranet manager’s fault, nor IT’s; lack of governance, and funding beget bad intranets. And without strong governance, the vast majority will struggle to find the funding, fail to substantially improve the content, the user experience, and the tools that make an effective intranet so damned appealing (and viable).

Most organizations are dabbling with social media in some form on their intranet. About two-thirds of organizations have some form of social media somewhere on their intranet; about 10% of organizations in the Western World have a truly social intranet (see The Social Intranet White Paper and the findings of the Social Intranet Study).

Despite its de rigueur status, and I’m partly to blame for promoting it so unreservedly, there are bigger priorities for most organizations, and intranet teams. Of course, readers of this space will think I’m beginning to sound like a tediously nagging parent who is constantly reminding the kids to brush their teeth, but if you don’t have sound governance, you are going nowhere fast. Or you are heading for failure, often very slowly.  As I wrote last week in SharePoint Governance, the most important element for an effective governance model – nay the intranet as a whole – is the strength and level of engagement of the end owners. People are the primary catalyst of intranet success, and senior management rule the people. When senior management is engaged, and actively support the intranet – with the requisite political clout and funding – the intranet is 100 times more likely to succeed.

If the governance is in place, then valued, relevant content can’t help but flow from it. It won’t happen overnight, and does require oversight and enforcement, and an effective user experience to support it, but strong content will surge from the right team (and governance model). The truth of the matter is that content is king, and always will be. User experience, design, information architecture, search, technology and social media are all tools that enable the user to access, retrieve, and reuse content. It’s content they’re after. But if you don’t have the proper governance, how good is that content going to be? How is it being written, managed, formatted, tagged, etc.?

Social media are just tools. A social intranet is just a vehicle for serving up what the proletariat screams for: good content. So, yes, social media should be a priority… but there are bigger priorities for the vast majority of us.

The site collection concept – think the portal home page, structure and information architecture (though you can have many under SharePoint – where site collections bequeath or determine the site structure and properties of all sites that reside under the collection, is in fact a powerful concept and tool. When the properties are set for each site under a collection, all the properties are then transferred to or ‘inherited’ by all other sites created under the bucket site collections (unless otherwise specified). This process of “inheritance” ensures that all sub-sites under a site collection inherit all of the behaviors (and functions) of the original site collection (and also prevents people from doing things they’re not supposed to do) including site design, structure, and information architecture.

Above and beyond site attributes and structure, governance has more to do with people and process, than the configuration of the enabling SharePoint technology. Specifically, governance is about ownership and management:

• The person (people) that own the intranet
• Management team
• Roles & responsibilities of all (including content contributors)
• Decision making process
• Policies & standards

Nexus of Intranet Success, ©2004 – 2012 Prescient Digital Media

Notwithstanding the technology, the most important element for an effective governance model – nay the intranet as a whole – is the strength and level of engagement of the end owners. People are the primary catalyst of intranet success, and senior management rule the people. When senior management is engaged, and actively support the intranet – with the requisite political clout and funding – the intranet is 100 times more likely to succeed. As represented in our model of intranet success, The Nexus of Intranet Success (above), when senior management is engaged, employees will follow and be motivated to use and rely on the intranet. Like the trickle-down effect, people determine the success of the intranet, and the flow begins in the c-suite.

More on the management and governance of intranets, and specifically SharePoint, can be gleaned from our webinar presentation, Intranet & SharePoint Governance (from Prescient’s Slideshare channel):

Video Replay

A complete video replay of the webinar, Intranet & SharePoint Governance, can be seen and heard in our webinars section on www.PrescientDigital.com:

SharePoint Governance White Paper

Finally, for a comprehensive look at SharePoint governance, download the free SharePoint Governance white paper. A detailed, 38-page examination of governing and managing SharePoint 2010. Highlights include:

• Learn about different intranet governance models.
• Learn about the unique challenges of trying to manage SharePoint.
• Find out why assigning intranet ownership is so important.
• See how governance fits into the complete methodology for an intranet redevelopment project.
• Learn strategies for mitigating intranet sprawl.
• See SharePoint governance success stories in two case studies.
• Learn about governance for social intranets.

PowerPoint presentation: Intranet & SharePoint Governance

Video replay: Intranet & SharePoint Governance

White Paper: SharePoint Governance white paper

Additionally, we also know that SP15 will have better cloud support and functionality, when compared to the current SharePoint Online offering, better mobile support, and web development support. We can also expect general improvements to all the social tools, such as blogs and wikis (which in previous versions, leave a lot to be desired).

Here’s a summary of the suggested, forthcoming improvements to SharePoint:

• Improved design interface for social networking
• Better suited for cloud environment
• A new SharePoint app marketplace
• Improved mobile support
• Simplified development and integration
• Overhauled Client Object Model (COM)
• Enable workflow looping in SharePoint Designer, eliminating the need for the Visual Studio
• Cross-platform authentication

Read more on what to expect from SharePoint 2015

ALSO:
SharePoint 2015 RoadMap leaked

Social Business Mini-Infographic © 2012

A social business (referring to the common definition associated with enterprise technology, akin to enterprise 2.0, and not to be confused with the similar label used to describe socially ‘conscious’ and community mined organizations) is one that actively uses and weaves social media technology into many or most aspects of content consumption by the target audience – outside and inside the business.

Most of the social activity of a social business is internal, on the corporate intranet. Social business isn’t exclusively internal (you should still have websites with social qualities, a Twitter account, etc.), but it’s mostly internal. A social business has a social intranet, and that intranet is the hub of social activity.

Socializing your internal business (socializing your intranet) need not be expensive, but it does require careful thought, planning and change management. First and foremost, a successful social business has the right mix of people, process, and the supporting technology.

Continue reading my 5 tips for socializing your business:

5 Tips for a Truly Social Business

If you want to learn more about developing, designing and managing a social intranet, and how to sell your senior management to invest in a social intranet, I strongly recommend you attend the Intralife 2012 Conference in Oslo, Norway in May. This is one of the top intranet conferences in Europe, and well worth the trip.

PepsiCo Russia intranet home

Of course, with many new companies speedily integrated under the PepsiCo Russia brand, and dozens of different disparate employee groups, the new consolidated company required a new, modern interactive intranet portal to facilitate collaboration and interaction with a highly social, enterprise 2.0 focus. With social in mind, the project team looked to external social media to influence and shape the collaboration functionality, namely: Facebook, VKontakte, LinkedIn, and Google +.

“We studied the (user) experience of the world’s best social networking sites, and combined it with the concepts of enterprise portals,” says project lead, Eugene Karpov, Intranet Solutions Department Manager at WSS Consulting, the systems integration team that built the portal presentation layer on top of Microsoft SharePoint. The total budget, excluding SharePoint licensing: US$100,000.

The employed technology is WSS Consulting’s own portal product (using ASP.NET) for the front-end, and SharePoint for the back-end and files repository; allowing editors to work with SharePoint’s rich feature set and still deploy ultra-fast ASP.NET pages for casual users. It’s really fast: the server returns pages in less than 0.2 seconds. Content itself is presented in both Russian, and English.

The new portal showcases leading social tools and functionality including:

• Social profiles
• Activity streams
• Community membership
• Quick polls
• Webparts for Weather and Birthdays
• Document management
• City specific portals (geographic location)

Today, 5,000 employees have portal access, but many more thousands of factory floor workers will be extended access in the future. In the future, planned, forthcoming functionality will include:

• Department change notifications
• Bulletin boards
• “Favorites” functionality on virtually all elements of the portal

PepsiCo Russia is demonstrating that not all social intranets are the purview of the Western World and the standard Latin alphabet, but also in emerging capital markets that employ different languages and alphabets. The social intranet continues to transcend industries and geographical borders….

Read more about the social intranet in The Social Intranet White Paper

In fact, Russians are incredibly social; amongst the most social societies, if not the most, on the Internet (Universal McCann, 2011):

• 81% of all Russians use social networks
• 71% of all Ukrainians use social networks

“Russians are the most socially networked people in the World,” the says Anna Kravitz, the most popular blogger and writer on Enterprise 2.0 in the CIS states (former Soviet Union), speaking at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Moscow. However, just as Western intranets lag behind their Internet cousins, the corporate websites (and all things social on the public-facing Internet), the Russian enterprise ha

s been slow to adopt and extend intranet 2.0 (enterprise 2.0) tools to employees.

Kravitz cites a number of statistics that are very similar to those in the West, in fact almost identical, to Western statistics three years ago:

• 63% of organizations restrict access to social media (e.g. Facebook or Russian equivalents)
• 50% are familiar or are becoming familiar with enterprise 2.0 tools and potential
• 32% understand the concept of enterprise 3.0 (the next generation; think semantic computing)

Russian social intranet at Gazprom, the largest company in Russia, and the largest gas company in the World

The most common social tool in the Russian enterprise: the wiki. However, in a reverse of cultural trends contrasting enterprise social media in the West and East, social networking (employee networking) is regarded as the most valuable corporate tool, whereas the wiki is regarded as the least valuable of all the enterprise 2.0 tools.
Drivers or reasons behind the investment and deployment of enterprise 2.0 tools in Russia, however, reveal a very distinctive, if not Soviet, difference: the principal driver in Russia, is employee motivation (using 2.0 tools to motivate employees). Though I am admittedly quite naïve to Russian corporate culture, and only formal research should confirm the notion, when I hear “employee motivation” I think of those marvelous Soviet era propaganda posters and symbolism use to ‘motivate’ the workers and proletariat (much of which are still very omnipresent today on buildings, in the subway (Metro), and within public spaces across Moscow). In the West, the principal drivers for investing in intranet 2.0 tools are employee collaboration, and knowledge management.

However, my fatigue and jet lag may have me looking  like a disoriented Bill Murray, on the wrong side of the pond, lost in translation. Tomorrow: Russian intranet case studies.

You’ve probably figured out by now that the technology behind a wiki, or a blog pales compared to most web content management systems… and can’t carry the dirty laundry of a killer portal or enterprise content management solution. The technology is terribly simple; what makes it ‘sing’ is people and process.

What makes Wikipedia the most trusted source of information on the planet? Is it the technology? The design? The name? Actually, all of the above are… quite awful, to be honest. The value is in the content; but more accurately, the people who contribute the content. Wikipedia’s technology is painfully simple – add to or an edit an entry and you’ll be shocked at the poor and pathetic state of its editing tool; there were better publishing tools in 1993. The secret sauce: the collective wisdom of the contributing crowd; the end contributors, and the process that encourages the all-too-simple, effortless contribution and peer reviewing of content. The collective wisdom of the crowd is transformative; so significant that it sparked a landslide evolutionary leap in user technology, and the Internet as we know it.

How does this translate to the intranet? It’s the same IP technology, the same browser, and the same users, but with a different focus, perspective and set of requirements. However, the intranet is not the Internet. A quantity of fundamental intelligence must first be applied before said technology can trigger a transformation of the corporate world behind the firewall. But when done successfully… the social intranet is the intranet on Starbucks: caffeinated, ubiquitous, and engaging.

A successful social intranet, though, is not easily achieved. If you build it they will not come… necessarily. However, if you understand the requisite process(es), you will attract the people, and the enabling technology that will help catalyze an antiquated business system into a dynamic ecosystem of collaboration and innovation.

Ten steps to a Social Intranet:

1. Business requirements
2. User requirements
3. Best practices
4. Strategic planning
5. Governance
6. Information architecture
7. Wireframes
8. Design
9. Launch
10. Change management

Learn more about the social intranet….
Download the full size version of The Social Intranet Infographic
Read the latest version of The Social Intranet White Paper (30 pages of intelligence and case studies)

The original intranet, intranet 1.0, typically began as nothing more than a bare bones website on someone’s desktop computer, usually in IT or corporate communications. The first version of this intranet was nothing more than a welcome page, perhaps a name and a phone number, and a simple welcome message.

Intranet 1.0 grew and evolved rapidly, more so at some organizations than others, but in some respects, faster than corporate websites who had a few years’ head start with the advent of the ‘super information highway’:

• Version 1.0: Welcome page (a welcome message and a phone number)
• Version 1.1: Bulletin board (simple communications)
• Version 1.2: Corporate newsletter (structured news & limited document management)
• Version 1.3: Help Desk (simple transactions like the employee directory)
• Version 1.4: Corporate Store (more complex transactions such as e-HR and self-service)
• Version 1.5: The Portal (authorization, authentication, application & database integration)

The trail has lengthened considerably as of late with the advancement of social media, and the intranet has made an evolutionary leap to version 2.0 – the social intranet.

Social media behind the firewall

Once a pipedream or just another passing fad, intranet 2.0 tools such as blogs, wikis and other vehicles have become mainstream, and are present in nearly two-thirds of organizations. In fact, those organizations that haven’t adopted such tools are now in the minority and are flirting with disaster and the ‘global talent crunch’ – the fight for young, talented individuals to replace the rapidly aging and retiring baby boomers. Organizations risk being squeezed by the talent crunch and losing the campaign for young talent if they ignore the demands of the next generation of 20-something workers that not only desire social media in their jobs, they’ve come to demand it.

Consider for a moment the powerful Telindus study (2008) of 1,000 European employees that should serve as a warning to all employers and communicators:

• 39% of 18 to 24 year-old employees would consider leaving their employer if they were not allowed to access sites like Facebook and YouTube;
• A further 21% indicated that they would feel ‘annoyed’ by such a ban.

This study is four years-old. Four. There’s a point here: if employees were demanding intranet 2.0 tools four years ago, they’re surely a little more impatient and demanding today.

It should be of no surprise then that social media on the corporate intranet has jumped in prevalence so dramatically in the past two years: from nice-to-have to common-place (if not mandatory). According to the Social Intranet Study (results from 1,400+ respondent organizations):

• 75% have intranet blogs; 26 percent have deployed blogs enterprise wide; 4 percent have no plans or interest in deploying blogs.
• 65% have intranet discussion forums; 26 percent have deployed intranet discussion forums enterprise wide; 7 percent have no plans or interest in intranet discussion forums.
• 63% have intranet instant messaging; 44 percent use instant messaging on their intranets enterprise wide; 16 percent have no plans or interest in deploying instant messaging on their intranets.
• 61% have intranet wikis; 19 percent use intranet wikis enterprise wide; 12 percent have no plans or interest in intranet wikis.
• 60 percent have intranet user commenting; 32 percent have deployed intranet user commenting enterprise wide; 8 percent have no plans or interest in intranet user commenting.

The Social Intranet

Not to be confused with intranet 2.0 — the loosely labeled collection of social media tools applied to the intranet — the ‘social intranet’ provides structure and evolution to these tools; it organizes and ingrains the use and adoption of social media into most aspects of content consumption on the corporate intranet.

The phrase social intranet has only appeared in recent years (late 2009) to describe an intranet with social media features. Although with any emerging technology there is likely to be disagreement on the precise definition of a new term, I describe a social intranet as the following:

An intranet that features multiple social media tools for most or all employees to use as collaboration vehicles for sharing knowledge with other employees. A social intranet may feature blogs, wikis, discussion forums, social networking, or a combination of these or any other Web 2.0 (intranet 2.0) tool with at least some or limited exposure (optional) from the main intranet or portal home page.

However, a few employee or executive blogs do not make a social intranet. A social intranet requires wide participation, or at minimum, opportunity for participation, by most or all employees that have intranet access. Social intranets require social media: blogs, wikis, and user comments, to name a few. More advanced social intranets may incorporate multimedia, user-tagging, and social networking that are integrated into multiple channels including user profiles (such as the feature set produced by Microsoft SharePoint 2010 or Lotus Connections).

A social intranet however does not have or include:

• All social media tools (two or three will suffice);
• The participation of all employees (but be open to most employees); and
• A technology platform that is strictly a social media platform (e.g. blog or wiki platform).

Social intranet basics:

• Multiple social media tools
• Open opportunity to use social media tools for most or all employees with intranet access
• Access to social media tools from the intranet home page
• Social options woven into most content consumption (e.g. user comments, rating, links to tools, etc. on most page templates)

Social media on the intranet is a relatively new phenomena having only appeared behind the firewall in the past 4 or 5 years (with the exception of instant messaging and discussion forums which have been around, in some form, since the late 1990s). In the past year or two, social media on the corporate intranet have become mainstream with nearly two-thirds of organizations in the western world having some form of social media on their intranet.

LEARN MORE ABOUT THE SOCIAL INTRANET. DOWNLOAD THE FREE WHITE PAPER: THE SOCIAL INTRANET

Yeah, Intranet 1.0 really sucked.

Intranet 2.0 is the promise of something so much more – an evolutionary jump so significant that when compared to the original, the new hardly bears any resemblance to it. In short, it describes the next generation of intranet characterized by more advanced and engaging collaboration processes and tools best represented by social media tools.

The original intranet, intranet 1.0, typically began as welcome page, designed by some techie using Front Page or native HTML. The first version of this intranet was nothing more than a welcome page, perhaps a name and a phone number, and a simple welcome message. Hidden on a server under said techie’s desk, the welcome page slowly expanded into a bulletin board, with lists, appended PDFs, and often a newsletter cobbled together by corporate communications.

Intranet 1.0 grew and evolved rapidly, more so at some organizations than others, but in some respects, faster than corporate websites who had a few years’ head start with the advent of the ‘super information highway’:

• Version 1.0: Welcome page (a welcome message and a phone number)
• Version 1.1: Bulletin board (simple communications)
• Version 1.2: Corporate newsletter (structured news & limited document management)
• Version 1.3: Help Desk (simple transactions like the employee directory)
• Version 1.4: Corporate Store (more complex transactions such as e-HR and self-service)
• Version 1.5: The Portal (authorization, authentication, application & database integration)

Though not every intranet has followed such a clear evolutionary path, Intranet 2.0 is a great leap. We’ll discuss this evolutionary leap, and how best to tackle it, in a very unique, online, interactive event on February 8th, Real Engagement Event – Intranet 2.0.

THIS IS NOT A WEBINAR. Real Engagement is the only event series that is 100% about the audience. Submit your questions for experts, vote for the questions you want to see answered and weigh in on the topics that interest you most. It’s all about you. Come see this new, exciting technology in action… a sneak preview of the future of employee town hall forums.

Reserve your spot now and make sure you’re with us on February 8 for what promises to be a great conversation.

It’s a testament to the Microsoft organization that SharePoint (in some shape or form, at some level of deployment, often limited to a work group or department) is present and running in more than two-thirds of all medium to large businesses (and many SMBs as well). Microsoft has invested hundreds-of-millions of dollars in this diverse web development platform – no longer marketed as a portal solution or enterprise content management system – and has spent many more millions marketing and selling it to you.

I must disclose that most of our clients use SharePoint; and we at Prescient Digital Media also use SharePoint 2010 for our internal intranet. I’ve come to know it intimately as a user, and reasonably well as an administrator – both its’ strengths and weaknesses. This famous technology has many, many strengths, and many, many weaknesses; a great it for many organizations, and a terrible fit for many others.

I’ll be honest: I wouldn’t choose SP 2010 for our intranet if I didn’t have to. There are many more, better suited, effective enterprise content management system solutions that are a fraction of the price that are better suited to my company. But my company is not every company. This is not a personal opinion or choice, I am a power Microsoft user and owner, and an unrivaled PC, Windows, and MS-Office user as you will find (and not at all a fan of Mac. In fact, I openly dislike Apple). However, SP is used by so many clients, and the platform itself has so much potential, I, as a consultant, have no choice but to not know it intimately.

Here’s the crux of the problem: SharePoint 2010 has so much potential, so many potential benefits, and can deliver so much value for the average organization… but not the basic version, and not out-of-the-box, and not without a multitude of additional costs, hours and frustration. Yes, SharePoint can be customized, and tweaked, enhanced, and built upon – it’s only a function of time and money.

Do you have the dollars? Do you have the patience? I don’t know anyone that uses the basic SP 2010 edition, and no one that hasn’t spent a lot of money customizing and enhancing it.

The social intranet @ Prescient Digital Media, using SharePoint 2010

SP 2010 gets a thumbs-up when compared to MOSS 2007, but given the cost, gets a failing grade or a bare pass in nearly every other category. It’s very revealing to learn 54% of your customers say that it fails to live up to functional expectations; and 46% say it fails to live up to technical expectations.

However, as I’ve said, SP 2010 is a “mile wide and an inch deep” – which is exactly what some organizations need. SP 2010 offers a lot, but it’s more than what many organizations need, and less than what still others demand.

For you and your organization, you need to make careful, informed decisions about SharePoint, and alternatives to SharePoint, and more specifically, you need to know what it can and cannot do, at what cost. Call it the “dos and don’ts” of SharePoint.

Learn more about SharePoint Dos and Don’ts on our webinar – it’s absolutely free, and is not a sales pitch – next week, February 2, at Noon EST. Register online for for the SharePoint Dos and Don’ts webinar.