Breaking rules: Build your intranet outside your firewall

It's an established fact that intranets (or internal networks) grow and live within your organisation's firewall.

Or is it?

New approaches and technology are now challenging the concept that intranets must be stored within your organisation's direct structure.

For instance in Australian government there is Govdex. This wiki-based extranet system meets secret level Federal government provisions and is free for government users.

It doesn't stretch this system too far to consider it as suitable as an intranet platform for any small government agencies with no intranet budget.

As it is wiki-based it provides basic content management functionality, including a news tool and discussion board - which is more intranet functionality than most smaller agencies can claim now.

For example I've recently worked with another area to implement a secure Govdex wiki space as a micro intranet for a key community within my agency. This will expand into an extranet over time, but it functions now just like any other intranet platform.

Govdex isn't the only option on the horizon.

LinkedIn, a business networking site, is planning to release a series of work-related tools to support collaboration between staff members. These would sit in secure areas of LinkedIn, but on the intranet.

This was discussed in a recent New York Times article, At Social Site, Only the Businesslike Need Apply

One new product, Company Groups, automatically gathers all the employees from a company who use LinkedIn into a single, private Web forum. Employees can pose questions to each other, and share and discuss news articles about their industry.

Soon, LinkedIn plans to add additional features, like a group calendar, and let independent developers contribute their own programs that will allow employees to collaborate on projects.

The idea is to let firms exploit their employees’ social connections, institutional memories and special skills — knowledge that large, geographically dispersed companies often have a difficult time obtaining.

Behind LinkedIn, other start-ups are also entering this space, providing for significant innovation to best address organsational space needs.

This is very interesting news for anyone with a small budget and need for a significant intranet.

Rather than investing in building or buying a content management system, developing social tools or managing intranet hardware and software, simply use openly available software to facilitate it.

So what would it take to make you consider building your intranet outside the firewall?

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Networking Australian government websites

As the business manager of a government website I'm always interested in how much traffic arrives from other government sites.

I can directly engage other agencies, building relationships, sharing content and processes, to the benefit of our mutual customers.

I see a real opportunity for departments and agencies to work together to help ensure that citizens are directed to the right website and can progress seamlessly across departments to complete different tasks with government.

This isn't only at Federal level. Similar transparently should exist at all levels, allowing, for instance, someone registering a company, to then seamlessly obtain all the permits they require to do business in their state.

However what I find from the website I manage is that only a very small proportion of traffic comes from other departments and agencies.

This can be read in a few different ways

• Citizens do not do all their government business in one sitting, therefore do not need to move between departments, or
• Government departments are highly siloed and do not support easy transitions between agencies - or even tell citizens when they need to do this.

Hitwise, using the data they collect on 3 million Australian website users, has produced a visual chart of the connections between the most trafficked Federal agencies. This is a very interesting glimpse of where the government is today.

Chart reproduced with the permission of Hitwise. View the full version.

With the current push towards the Australian Government Online Services Point (AGOSP) it will be interesting to see how this develops over time - whether Australia.gov.au can emerge as a central portal for government; and whether this is what citizens actually want.

What connections does your website have to other sites - and how do you use these to increase awareness of use of your site?

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What's relevant to Intranet Managers

What are the top priorities for your intranet?

There's a few interesting surprises in this quick poll by the organiser of the 2008 Global Intranet Strategies Survey, 3 surprises on the "relevancy list" for Intranet managers

If you don't currently participate in this survey I strongly recommend that you consider it for this year.

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Government intranets challenges and how to meet them

Intranets can be an important business 'glue' for both private and public organisations.

They enable geographically diverse individuals to share knowledge and productively collaborate, areas within the organisation to disseminate information, help senior leadership reinforce corporate values, strengthen internal communication and help align management and staff with corporate goals.

Not surprisingly many of the challenges faced by government agencies in making their intranets effective and successful reflect the challenges faced in the corporate world.

There's a lot government can learn from business experiences if it chooses.

Jeremiah Owyang has developed a useful list of challenges for intranets which resonate with my own experiences. Followin is a summary of his list from his blog posts about Intranets in brown and some of the strategies I employ to address them.

1. Leadership not employee focused. Web strategy is often owned by the Marketing department, or a dedicated web team, they have specific business goals to hit, and they are often aimed at marketing or customer focused –not employee focused.
   
   
   While my Online Comms Team lives within our Comms department, we very clearly define ourselves as custodians, rather than owners of our agency's intranet.
   
   When I took over the intranet function the existing team already saw one of their primary goals as to unlock the medium to enable staff. I've supported and reinforced this goal and advocated it to senior management by demonstrating the value the intranet can provide the organisation.
   
   We constantly test new things to improve the intranet for staff and actively foster innovation amongst our intranet authors, who are closer to the audience of our intranet than my group can be.
   
   
   
2. Little love from IT: IT often owns the infrastructure, systems, and applications that the Intranet sits on top of, and they often are focused on ERP project and leave the intranet in a ‘maintenance and manage’ mode.
   
   Fortunately my agency does not suffer from this IT culture to an enormous extent, although in the past I have witnessed varying levels of commitment to the intranet. My biggest challenge in this area is to keep our IT team engaged and focused on the outcomes generated by the intranet, rather than focusing on the technical and bureaucratic processes that enable these outcomes.
   
   Achieving this is all about mutual communication, understanding and engagement while supporting the expertise of our IT team. It's an area I've not yet perfected (and neither has our IT group), but we've built significant forward momentum.
   
   
   
3. Value not recognized: The intranet management team (if you have one) is perceived as a corporate cost as it can’t directly generate revenue further perplexing the problem.
   
   
   This challenge was one I faced, not regarding the intranet as a profit-generating product, but as an accurate, useful and highly frequented medium the agency could use to achieve it's staff communications and collaboration goals.
   
   I've invested heavily in appropriate intranet statistical and user satisfaction reporting, ensured that our content is relevant and up to date and worked on our approach to train and support intranet authors. The authors are particularly important as advocates of the intranet within business areas, as champions of the channel who are able to create the value our intranet provides for staff.
   
   Out of this followed an ongoing communications campaign to management and staff, ensuring that the organisation understood the frequency and purpose of intranet use and the number of vital resources for staff it contained.
   
   This has reinforced the intranet-aware culture in the agency and builds on the intranet's importance as a communications and engagement tool.
   
   
   
4. Too many cooks in kitchen: Many constituents from Marketing, HR, IT, and every business unit make decisions at an enterprise level difficult, unwieldy, and often not worth the effort.
   
   This is still an issue for our agency and I do not expect it to go away. What I am currently building towards with my team is an approach that segments intranet content owners by their need for support and guidance in the effective use and management of the medium. Some owners require only light contact from time to time, others require ongoing support to build their knowledge and skills and thereby their effectiveness.
   
   Through this process my team works to embed intranet standards and thereby create alignment across different groups. While this doesn't reduce the level of consultation necessary, it does align the decision-makers, ensuring they all have sufficient information and insight to make key decisions.
   
   
   
   
5. Decision makers oblivious: Management and decision makers don’t use the intranet, they rely on administrative staff for scheduling, sometimes emails, and any intranet tasks, the pains and opportunities are rarely seen.
   
   
   We're able to track intranet usage by individual, which provides a keen insight into which levels of staff most use our intranet. As with most organisations I've worked with, it is the front-line staff and middle management who rely on the intranet for the information to do their jobs. Senior managers have other resources to enable them to do this, and also tend to operate in smaller circles of peers, which reduces their need to rely on our intanet.
   
   To address this my team spends a geat deal of time ensuring there is awareness of the intranet and the value it delivers to staff. We are fortunate in that a number of key job tools for the majority of our staff are primarily accessed from our intranet, which helps embed its importance for the organisation.
   

Other challenges my agency faces includes:

1. Consistency of intranet content, language, tone, depth and clarity. Where consistency is low so is trust in the intranet's accuracy and relevance. There's a great deal of work I still have to do to establish more effective training programs for intranet authors - in particular ensuring that this training is valuable for them in their careers to generate commitment in our staff to build these skills.
   
   
2. Transforming the mindset from comms to collaboration. Our intranet is still very much an outbound communications tool used to spread messages, like ripples, from an inner core to our staff on the outer rim. Due to a number of factors this works well for my agency at the moment, however it does not help engender a full sense of engagement in the organisation for all staff or facilitate horizontal knowledge transfer between people at the same level in different geographic areas.
   
   To meet this challenge, we are gradually moving towards more of a collaborative model, within the limits of our infrastructure and management's safety zones. The eventual goal is to have our intranet become a living resource where staff can work together, support and mentor each other within a lightly moderated environment. This network-centric model, with some balancing from experts to ensure accuracy, provides more timely and direct collaboration than a more traditional 'command and control' environment.
   

What additional challenges does your agency's intranet face - and how have you addressed them?

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User experience design made simple

Ruth Ellison gave a fantastic talk at BarCamp Canberra looking at user experience design from the perspective of chef Gordon Ramsay's TV show, Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares.

Her presentation gave me a new way to look at the topic and a simple way to explain what it is and how it works for people unfamiliar with the approach.

Ruth blogged about the talk, but I've only found it today, Gordon Ramsay - a guerrilla UX consultant?

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