Seriously, I’m thrilled to be taking charge of the intranet at Baylor Healthcare system.  It’s an organization with an amazing legacy of care in the Dallas area that stretches back more than 100 years.  And it comes with two perks that sealed the deal:  I’ll be working with some of my favorite former colleagues from my EDS days, and I can literally walk to the office.

Because of this new development, you’re not likely to see much on this site, aside from some potential presentations I may put up from future conference appearances.

Thanks!

~J

One of my New Years resolutions is to make this a worthwhile place for me to provide clients and visitors with worthwhile content.  And I don’t just mean posting all my old Ragan Report columns – tho I’m am curating them and pulling out a few that are still relevant.

On the geekier side, I’ve said farewell to Joomla, my old content management platform, and hello WordPress.  Joomla is fabulous, but overkill for what I’m doing here.  Better to keep it simple, and it gives me a chance to deepen my experience with this fine open source CMS.

As many of us have learned, gaining weight is easy.  Just eat whatever you want and sit on the couch.  The weight will come looking for you.  Losing weight, on the other hand, is no simple task.  There are quick fixes that can help out for a short time, but long term solutions take patience, hard work and will power.  It often means changing long ingrained habits that are difficult to overcome.  And it means putting some realistic, achievable goals in front of you to help you on the path to something greater.    You can’t expect to look like Tom Cruise or Nicole Kidman overnight – but you might be able to lose some of your love handles before bikini season.

And so it is with the average corporate intranet.  If you want to have an intranet that is chaotic, difficult to navigate and full of outdated junk, just ignore the problem.  Given time, more and more sites will crop up.  Some of them will be helpful.  Some will be useless.  All of them will look, work and act in a different manner.  You’ll quickly find yourself with lots of ‘stuff’ – but navigating through the clutter will become more and more difficult.  And your company will end up spending more money than it should – because every group will probably end up working with different search, discussion and knowledge management tools.

Unfortunately, as with weight loss, the problem can’t be solved with something you can buy off the shelf.  Despite the promises of portal vendors and a host of other anxious technology companies, I’ve never seen a shrink-wrapped effective intranet.  So if you’ve given up on magic pills to cure your intranet woes, here are some fitness tips that will help you shape up a flabby intranet:

The most difficult part of building an intranet that really delivers on the promise of the technology is getting all the departments to cooperate with each other.  This is especially true for larger companies that have been in business for a long time.  The reason for this difficulty is that organizations have become overly accustomed to clear lines of authority.  Marketing owns the customer brochures.  Communications owns the employee publication.  HR owns the benefits binders.  That thinking works well for older media, but it causes problems on the intranet – where everybody has a certain degree of ownership, but all the pieces are a few mouse clicks from each other.  Confusion starts to arise when that sense of ownership creates separate sites that do not interoperate – it might make the site owners happy, but employees get lost in all the different kingdoms.

The first step to solving the kingdom problem is to get all the departments to agree that the problem exists.  A good way to get that recognition started is by doing some usability studies on your intranet.  There are many good books on this topic , but the process can be as simple as doing some informal interviews with average intranet users, and asking them to find a specific type of information.  Ask them to talk aloud as they navigate through your site.  Keep a stopwatch handy (but not obvious) to record the amount if time it takes them to find what they are looking for.  Get members of other departments to help you in the effort – especially the groups that seem to be the most defensive of their individual intranet sites.

Now that your problem is better defined, use the data you gained to pull together a larger intranet policy group.  Discuss some of the common issues that your users brought up.  Suggest that the group develop standards so that your intranet can be more consistent and easy to navigate.  Emphasize that nobody should own the entire intranet – but that the group can help define some common approaches that will make all the departments more successful in their intranet projects.  Some of the early standards might include time stamping all of the pages on your intranet – showing the date that a web page was created, modified, checked for content, or even when the information will no longer be accurate.  Or marking the contact person for each web page on your intranet so that ‘orphaned’ pages or sites are less likely.

If you work in a large company, the policy group might want to create a smaller task force that can focus more time and energy on creating standards or working with designers to come up with a common graphical approach to your intranet.  This task force can come back to the larger group at regular meeting to report their progress and get input on their work.

Once you have departments talking to each other and some simple standards have developed, consider taking on bigger challenges – like organizing your intranet by information topics instead of department names.  Changes like that might sound simple, but a greater degree of trust and cooperation is often necessary to get people to give up the neatly packaged web sites they have created for their department to participate in something that is more integrated and holistic.  But the change is one I strongly recommend – if for no other reason than the way we call a department HR one week and Human Capital the next.  Organization charts and department names change like the wind – information categories stay the same.  And if you don’t believe me, take a look at Yahoo, consider the growth of the Internet, and tell me why their categories look nearly the same after more than six years.

Just remember, as with weight loss, start with the simple things (like pushing away that extra slice of pumpkin pie), then take on more.  With time and discipline, you’ll have an intranet that makes everybody happy.

–

Is the e-mail network at your company getting bogged down with too many company-wide e-mail announcements?  Do you regularly keep one finger on the delete key when you open up your inbox in the morning?  An e-mail publication can be a terrific tool to help you regain control over the chaos… And help you drive more traffic to your intranet.

Both benefits were reasons Abbreviations, the e-mail news publication EDS uses to keep its employees informed, won the Gold Quill award at IABC International this year.  I was fortunate to work on the team that created Abbreviations just prior to starting my consulting practice.  Coming up with the right approach took a good bit of trial and error before we refined the publication into something that really worked.  Here are some tips to help you build an effective e-mail publication:

In many ways, an e-mail publication is similar to its print cousin, the newsletter.  You have to pull together a diverse amount of compelling information into an easy to understand format.  Where does that content come from?  Start by looking at all the information that corporate departments are sending out as ad-hoc email messages to everybody in your company.  What if all of those different messages could be consolidated into a weekly publication?  So instead of 8 messages going out from Sales, HR and Security, you have one message with a simple table of contents so people can easily scan the information.  Cutting down on corporate message clutter was a big area of focus when Abbreviations was created.

An obvious challenge to following this approach is getting some of those departments to give up their old ability to blast messages on everyone.  There are a couple of ways to get their support:  first, conduct a user survey that asks if people would prefer to receive one message a week with all the announcements included or if they wish to continue to receive separate announcements from all departments.  I can almost promise you that employees will support the consolidated approach.  Second, make it clear to these departments that they can still send out flash alerts if they need to communicate information which needs to be acted upon with 24-48 hours.  This ended up being the email communication guideline at EDS.  Messages that required a timely reaction from employees were sent immediately.  Informational messages or items which did not require immediate action had to wait until the end of the week to be included in the next edition of Abbreviations.  The result was a marked drop in the volume of corporate email traffic clogging employees inboxes.

Obviously, a message that only contains a list of corporate announcements is probably not going to be the most compelling bit of prose ever written, so be sure to add some variety.  Include abstracts and links to external news items on the public Internet that are relevant.  Highlight lesser known areas of your intranet to make employees aware of all the internal resources that are available.  List some of the important upcoming dates.  Link to the latest press releases that are going out of your company.  List the closing price of your stock and any major events that might have affected the price.  By placing this information in context with the corporate announcements, you make the e-mail publication much more valuable and likely to be read.

Pulling together all of your sources of information into a single e-mail each week can be a challenging process.  How do you keep the message from stretching out over multiple pages and losing your readers?  First of all, make sure you always include a very clear table of contents right at the beginning of the message so that your audience can scan the first page to decide if they want to read any of the items in detail.  Next, limit the amount of information in the email message itself, and link to more detailed information on your intranet.  So if the HR department is announcing a new 401K plan, put a headline in your email publication that announces the change, include a short one paragraph description of what the policy change will mean to employees and provide a link to the all the details on the HR intranet page.  In this way, you are using the e-mail medium for what it does best – alerting people quickly and succinctly about information that is relevant to them, and pointing them to where they can find out more.

Abbreviations used linking techniques in some very interesting ways.  Since EDS was a global company with employees in many countries, there were often instances when an item would be news worthy in the U.S., but not in the U.K.  To make sure that only relevant information went out to everybody, the company-wide version of Abbreviations provided links to regional editions.  So if an employee wanted to find out what was happening in the U.K., they would click on a link inside of the main message which would bring up U.K. Abbreviations, a region-specific supplement that only contained stories that related to their area.  Aside from the regional approach, a link was also provided to an index of topical e-mail publications.  These smaller topical publications covered everything from specific customers that EDS was working with to broad technical subjects like e-business.  Taking this approach kept everybody informed of the corporate information, while giving them easy paths to deeper information on more specific areas of interest.

Crafted properly, an effective e-mail publication can be one of the most valuable tools you can use to keep employees informed.  The trick, as with any good communication, is delivering worthwhile information to your audience in a format that is appropriate to the medium you are using.  Taking the time to do it the right way will help you avoid creating one more message that employees end up deleting, come Monday morning.