Feature

posted 14 Sep 2005 in Volume 2 Issue 3

The world’s local intranet: Recognising cultural diversity

How a field study of its Hong Kong and Taiwan offices allowed HSBC to set the standard for a truly local, global system.

By Matthew Whalley

An organisation’s intranet is often said to reflect its attitude towards knowledge sharing. The presence of an online information-management system indicates a willingness and commitment to share and learn.

More often than not, an intranet is a document-management system with a browser-based user interface. A corporate-communication mechanism is a common feature. The addition of collaboration software and role-based navigation leads organisations into the higher echelons of traditional intranet technology.

Although intranets are often judged by their technological sophistication, the reality of their management is far removed from developing and implementing intranet technology. The combination of human agendas, cultural differences and technological factors makes intranet management an unusual and complex task. With so many contributory factors, it is easy to become diverted from the purpose of an intranet – sharing organisational information online.

Sitting on a global Notes Domino infrastructure, HSBC Investment’s intranet comprises a suite of modular, in-house information-management products. The core user base consists of 1,800 employees across 15 major locations. In addition, the intranet is used within the internal HSBC marketplace, attracting an average of just over 3,500 unique visitors per month, so far this year.

Despite these positive usage statistics, anecdotal evidence was beginning to tell a story of dissatisfied users, out-of-date content and existing information being difficult to locate.

To address these issues, HSBC Investments went back to basics, re-evaluating its intranet from first principles (see box on socio-technical design). We wanted to understand what the core user base thought of the intranet and how they could be encouraged to use it more effectively. This involved a multiple office study of attitudes and perceptions towards the intranet.

Key Factors
First, key factors were identified through industry research:

Content-management (CM) methods: were the CM methods in use throughout the organisation supportive at the local level?
Staff- information requirements: did the information being shared match the information being searched for?
Cultural differences between offices: was an essentially UK-based management structure being accepted in other national offices?

To measure and evaluate these key factors thoroughly would require a two-stage investigation. First, a central content review would be undertaken to provide background information. This would be followed by a local field trip to assess CM methods, cultural differences, attitudes and perspectives within selected local offices.

To ensure that cultural elements could be studied in conjunction with other factors, only offices outside the UK were considered. Hong Kong was at the centre of a vibrant growth area, held technical teams and, most importantly, its chief operating officer gave full backing to the initiative.

Traditionally thought of as ‘good users’, the office was consistently high on usage statistics. With around 150 staff in the office, it has averaged 15,200 visits per month this year.

Conveniently nearby, the Taiwan office had vastly different statistics. With a similar number of staff, the intranet sites averaged only 290 visits per month.

As a combined study, the two offices were ideal. Reasons for the difference in usage could be explored, potentially highlighting the effect of different management techniques and national cultural traits that could be applied across the organisation.

Cultural dimensions
Within a global organisation, cultural diversity is widely recognised as being of high importance. Employing a diverse workforce can create opportunity, innovation and competitiveness.

Equally as important, yet much less well discussed, is the effect of national cultures within global organisations.

Each national culture has individual traits, which when identified, can be used to provide methodology guidance.

By choosing two offices in Asia-Pacific, different cultures could be experienced at first hand. Asking staff about any perceived cultural differences and their effect on management methods and attitudes towards the intranet would provide an interesting additional perspective to the management of the global intranet.

Training sessions
Training sessions were prepared following interviews with senior management and department heads. A total of approximately 100 staff from both offices received training over a two week period. Sessions varied from small-scale (one to three users), focused training sessions with key contributors and new starters, to generic training with groups of between 15 and 30 people.

It was hoped that this training would help to improve usage and awareness in the two offices. For many users in Taiwan, training sessions were actually the first time that they had accessed the system. The sessions also provided valuable feedback on system usage and perception.

The full support of all of the local management teams was crucial at this stage.

Initial training measures
Usage figures immediately following the training period were within previously measured ranges for the time of year. While it was hoped that the training programme would increase usage in these locations, these initial statistics indicated that the training had little immediate effect on usage.

Content review
The review process began with a central content analysis. Intranet content was reviewed and classified in terms of content maintenance, subject and reader base.

The content review showed three discreet levels (see figure 2).

Level one consists of global news and communications. Organisational level content is managed by a small group of people. News articles and communications materials are passed to this team for submission. The content has a wide readership and is timely and up-to-date. Because the news covers a wide range of topics the majority of search results return information from these areas.

Level two is defined as functional level information. This level consists of departmental areas and product-based marketing centres. Content in this area is a mixture of well maintained, up-to-date sites and sites that have fallen out of use.

The third level comprises individual and team-level information, held exclusively in the collaboration application.

Both process-driven information and social information were found on the level three sites. The majority of the sites contained some departmental procedures. In particular, the marketing department was using its document library to store templates and examples of use of materials. A number of sites also contained team social information, (such as photographs of nights out) a clear indication of a desire to share information online. While collaboration was occurring at the local level, this wasn’t being translated globally.

The organic nature of the third-level content makes it a valuable information source for the organisation. Sites are used as aides memoires for teams and projects and with no central editorial control, teams post information that is relevant and important to them or their direct contacts.

Considering the large amount of content in the third-level sites and the willingness to share information online, it was surprising that so little content was being posted to second-level areas. It was hoped that reasons for this would become apparent through interviews and training sessions.

Interviews
Initial interviews – all semi-structured – were held with department heads and senior management, with the goal being to learn as much as possible about working structures and garner the thoughts of department heads regarding the system. The interviews enabled us to gather an overview of users’ attitudes towards the intranet and, by their nature, added to the users’ sense of involvement.

The majority of interviewees recognised the need for the intranet and generally thought it was a useful tool. Paradoxically, the majority also thought it was underused and that content needed to be kept more up-to-date.

Common themes to come out of the interviews can be separated into content and management issues.

Combined with the results of the content analysis, poor search results and out-of-date content (the two most common complaints) were clear indicators that information owners are not posting their information online. The remaining themes all indicated a desire to fix problems with the content.

Training provision was a consistent request from almost all interviewees. Users felt unknowledgeable about key features of the system and wanted to know how to get the most out of the features available to them.

There was a general perception that the second content strata was managed by either global or UK-based teams. This explained the lack of content provision to the field study area and why the office focused almost entirely on using third-strata tools to store content.

Local management practices
The Hong Kong office has taken a collective interest in managing the intranet locally. Using a combination of collaboration toolkits they have built a comprehensive, team-focussed content base. Content management has been delegated to individuals who update content for an entire team. This is uniformly undertaken as an additional task and is not included in performance-management procedures and objectives.

As a relatively new acquisition, the Taiwan office hadn’t benefited from initial awareness campaigns regarding the use and potential of the intranet tools. Taiwan’s involvement in the intranet is limited to a small number of people using some mandatory global workflow applications.

A theme was developing in the local offices. While they had the tools available to manage their information online, there was misunderstanding and miscommunication regarding what they could use them for. In both cases, better communication would possibly have resulted in different patterns of use.

Organic growth results in rich, but messy, content
The organic nature of the intranets growth was evident in the disparate sites, confused navigation, duplicate information centres and un-maintained areas in the second strata. There is a clear need for new content-management methodologies to be put in place for functional and product areas. These must begin with an implementation of a new taxonomy, but should continue with clear content guidelines for each area.

Users’ relationship with the system
The relationship between users and intranet content can be drawn as a trinity of information seeker, information provider and intranet (see figure 3).

Where seekers and providers are in touch with each other (A), they are passing information backwards and forwards. Knowledge is being shared, but the process isn’t captured into the organisational memory.

Where the information seeker is searching the system (B), the relationship excludes the provider. Only a one-way flow exists and no feedback is received about the process. This is where search MI and statistical analysis can be useful.

Where information is posted onto the intranet system (C), a relationship exists between the provider and the intranet.

The seeker, however, is unaware of the information, or it may be of little interest, so it adds little or no value.

When the information provider and seeker are aware of each other and communicate via the intranet system, the three-way relationship exists and organisational learning can occur (central shaded area).

Maintaining these three relationships is the key to successful intranet management. At this moment in time, the relationship between providers and the intranet is at a low point. A number of spin-off information-management initiatives have drawn focus away from the intranet; too many assumptions have been made regarding local-office perception of the system. Central management needs to focus on creating ‘glue’ to bind local initiatives together, thus raising awareness across the global organisation.

Cultural factors are an important aspect of this relationship. Content-management guidelines, a corporate taxonomy, training and education programmes all need to be combined in initiatives to increase information sharing between departments and teams. At a basic level, each member of the organisation should be asked what information they can share to benefit someone else in their position: what information do they regularly pass on to other members of staff and can this be done online?

Project findings
This project has shown that locally managed content provides a rich vein of organisational information - always a key factor in understanding a globally diverse organisation.

There is enough evidence of cultural differences between the UK, Hong Kong and Taiwan offices, to suggest that such differences should be taken into account during local initiatives. Cultural dimensions could have an effect on awareness campaigns and on overall management methods.

For an intranet to be more than a corporate communications tool, it must have meaning at the local level; solving local problems first and providing global knowledge sharing second.

The project has made one thing clear – there are no quick wins in global intranet management. The human, cultural and technological factors must all be taken into account for intranet initiatives to succeed. While traditional focus has been on the technological side, this is simply one element of a broader system. For an intranet to fulfil its goal of sharing organisational information online, it must be tied into the organisation at the micro level.

References
Hofstede, G., Cultures Consequences. Comparing Values, Behaviours, Institutions and Organisations across Nations, (2001)

Matthew Whalley is intranet manager at HSBC Group Investment Businesses Limited.

The study of technology in context with its users and culture is known as socio-technical design. It takes a holistic approach, considering technology and culture as an interactive system. The people who interact with the technology, along with the culture within which the technology resides are taken into account as an integral part of the system design.

A key part of the study was based on Hofstede’s theory of culture, applicable to management. The theory is based on a study of 64 national subsidiaries of the IBM Corporation, in 1968. The five cultural dimensions (Hofstede, 2001) are summarised below:

Power-distance relationship
Inequality in organisations, for example in a high power distance (PD) culture, a manager will rarely be seen mixing informally with subordinates. The high PD cultures will react more naturally to a top-down management approach. Lower PD cultures will require a more “persuasive” approach.

Individualism
The emphasis on individualism or collectivism. A highly individualistic culture will reward high-performing individuals within a team. Cultures with low individualistic tendencies will reward team performance and focus on collective working.

Masculinity
A masculine culture has a focus on aggressiveness and competitiveness, rather than caring, quality of life and concern for the environment. Little parallel can be drawn to relationship within online content. Could act as a guide to motivational techniques.

Uncertainty avoidance
The degree to which members of a society feel threatened by unusual situations. The likelihood for members within a culture to take risky decisions. Posting content online for others to view could be considered as “risky”. Low uncertainty avoidance would therefore indicate higher likelihood to post content.

Long-term orientation/Confucian dynamism
The long or short-term orientation of different cultures. A dimension found in Asian cultures. The countries/principalities with the highest long-term orientations were China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan and South Korea. Little parallel can be drawn to relationship within online content. Could act as a guide to motivational techniques.

cultural dimensions>

Individualism vs. power distance
Groupings can be seen for HK and Taiwan. People from these countries are more likely to act on instructions without questioning, seek guidance from management and work closely together as teams or units. With central management from the UK and an individualistic and questioning culture, differences could prove significant.

Uncertainty avoidance vs. power distance
The weak uncertainty avoidance indicates a tendency to take risks (post content) in HK and the UK. In Taiwan, however, the culture is less inclined towards this.

Individualism vs. uncertainty avoidance
The chart below indicates that, while HK and UK (labelled GBR) are almost equally likely to take actions with unknown consequences, in HK this will be done as a group. In the UK, it is more likely that an individual will take risks alone.

The collaboration application Teamsite had been made available to all staff, and team managers were encouraged to set one up when it was initially released.

Effectively a miniature intranet, the application consists of a document library, news area, contacts system, calendar, external links section (subject gateway) and FAQ tools. In addition, for team use it contains facilities for posting team-member biographies and an organisation chart.

Requests for new collaboration areas have been steady at around three per month for teams and project-based activities. Analysis of content in these areas provides a useful insight into local working methods and values – good background for future content initiatives.

Sitting on a global infrastructure, with a multiple-layer security model, the intranet is available in all investment and distribution locations. It consists of a suite of modular products (figure 4), developed in-house over a number of years.

Configurable document libraries and online collaboration toolkits can be set-up on request, giving the system the flexibility to meet changing business needs. Publication software provides a single mechanism for corporate communications. Single interface content management enables users to post content in the same environment in which that content is presented, no matter where they are. Bespoke workflow applications are included as a means of capturing some key global working processes.

A system-wide search has been implemented and statistics are available to measure use at individual site level. KM applications, such as expert and telephone directories that are relevant in a broader context, are linked in from the HSBC Group site.