Evolving your intranet into a corporate portal

Feature

posted 21 Feb 2005 in Volume 1 Issue 7

Evolving your intranet into a corporate portal

Making the move from intranet to corporate portal is in many ways a natural evolution, but seldom straightforward.

In the post-dotcom age, the corporate portal has enjoyed a meteoric rise in popularity. A well designed portal integrates internet and intranet content, corporate databases, e-mail systems and enterprise applications (eg, Oracle, PeopleSoft, SAP), empowering employees to increase business efficiency, improve the quality of corporate relationships and maximise value throughout the entire enterprise. However, while the move from intranet to corporate portal is in many ways a natural evolution, it is seldom straightforward. With this in mind, I will outline Aegis Group’s approach to portal development and discuss some of the issues organisations need to think about as they decide whether to evolve their own intranet into a portal.

In the beginning

Like most intranets in their infancy, two years ago our intranet was a standard website with limited functionality. While it acted as an entry point to a variety of information sources, everyone had the same homepage and the same options in terms of content. The content publishing process was also top down and, therefore, highly restricted. The end result was clear for all to see – a little used tool with usage levels below 20 per cent.

So what was the problem? Well, although there was lots of valuable content on the site, it was obscured to most users because it was being presented to them alongside a large amount of irrelevant content. A good example of this was our Noticeboard section – this is where key company announcements were made, but we regularly found things like details of the appointment of a new receptionist in our Argentinian office. While this was clearly important to our people in Argentina, the rest of the business could safely have got away without knowing about it. As a result, people stopped looking at the Noticeboard for news.

In addition to these issues, the structure of the company was changing. We had a new market research network – our outdoor network was going global. This process was hastened with the addition of a second media network, Vizeum, and the creation of a global digital media network, Isobar.

First steps

The intranet had to change. The first step that had to be taken was to enable each network to have its own intranet. However, we knew we had to do more than this. Otherwise, we were simply re-creating the old intranet again for each new network.

In such a diverse business, both geographically and in terms of activity, it was clear that we needed to ‘portalise’. By portalise, I mean create a technical infrastructure that allows the delivery of relevant knowledge to the relevant person at the relevant time and in the relevant format. That is as far as I want to go on defining a portal because, like the term knowledge management, portal can and does mean different things to different people. I feel I’m on quite safe ground with this straightforward definition.

But how would we achieve this? The main barriers were technical (what system?) and cultural (are we ready to share and collaborate?). Perhaps more importantly, we needed to establish the reasons for implementing a portal. What did we want to achieve?

Aligning strategy with portal implementation

Before aligning the knowledge strategy with portal implementation, it is crucial to align your knowledge strategy to your business strategy. You have to know what you are trying to achieve for your organisation. In Aegis’s case we have a set of ‘Vision and values’ that covers the whole business, which provided us with the direction we needed. In essence, our knowledge strategy is aimed at enabling individuals to leverage the knowledge assets of the entire group to support the fast action, optimal decisions and innovation needed to drive customer value to sustain competitive advantage on a global basis. From this universal principle we have been able to work with each of the networks to take into account their specific strategic goals and priorities.

Is it possible to put our strategy into broader, cruder terms? In essence, yes – we want to use our knowledge to either save money, secure money or make money. These are goals that I think translate to most organisations in one way or another. To add a little more meat to these bones, saving money means either making things more efficient so people spend less time looking for things or not spending money on something that we already have.

Securing money means adding more value to our relationship with clients. This could either be sharing more information with them or better leveraging and communicating the expertise within the business to give clients better insight.

Making money via our knowledge strategy is the Holy Grail. An example of how this could be achieved would be to analyse the knowledge resources that we uncover or exploit better to create new services or revenue streams.

So, with our knowledge strategy safely aligned with the business strategy, we had to decide what to develop.

No giant leap for Aegis

There was a temptation to create an individualised portal immediately. The start of any project is the time for dreaming and we had visions of personalised homepages that would deliver every piece of information required. We looked at a number of vendors and were sorely tempted by their visions of seamless integration, asynchronous collaborative working and other apparently meaningful but possibly meaningless catchphrases.

But there were crucial cultural reasons why going for the perfect solution straight away would have been a mistake. We didn’t have either the resource or the history of knowledge sharing and collaboration to do this.

Culturally, we had pockets of knowledge sharing, but nothing that encompassed the whole business and no real understanding of what it could do for us. The platitudes most of us are familiar with – ‘knowledge is our business’ – were not consistently or regularly backed up with action. However, we were in a bit of a chicken and egg situation as there was little point in senior managers promoting knowledge sharing when there were no mechanisms to implement them, but it was difficult to persuade senior managers without such mechanisms. To Aegis’s credit, it invested the money we needed and gave us a chance to prove our case.

The story of many intranets and portals can be summed up by the phrase, “You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink.” Creating a technically perfect corporate portal solution would have been the same as building the world’s most ornate trough. It would have looked good but most of our horses would still have been thirsty.

A half-step back before our second step forward

So how did our strategic intent translate into actual portal development? We took a step back and looked at our business and what knowledge and information our employees needed.

Although Aegis is made up of global networks, the majority of work undertaken by staff is country-specific. A media planner in Germany, for instance, is most likely to need information primarily from Germany. Information from elsewhere may be useful but is unlikely to be most valuable, particularly in a time-pressed environment where people want the most useful information first. Time and again when we spoke to intranet users and other parties, local information was the most important of their information needs.

So, the second evolutionary step towards a portal was to create country-level versions of the intranet for each network. Technologically, we had a bespoke website and extranet system that allowed the creation of local sites that shared some content while enabling the tailoring of information for specific country and client needs. We adapted this application to incorporate the extra features we needed for the portal. Not only did this allow us to save money by taking advantage of developments already made and paid for, it also saved us time. So we ‘walked the walk’ by re-using the knowledge and resources we already had.

While the application was being developed, we resuscitated the group of “Net Managers” who were responsible for the upkeep of the intranet in each market. The group had been moribund, but we worked with them to ascertain the specific needs of each country and to implement the processes to gather and publish content. This was a real eye-opener. By handing some knowledge-sharing power to each office, the enthusiasm we created was enormous. Almost all managers responsible for the intranet had an idea of how the portal could be used to deliver real benefits to their users. The beauty of the application was that we could accommodate almost every request, and accommodate it quickly. An additional benefit of this was that by being able to respond to requests quickly and positively we created a group of KM enthusiasts and began to turn around the negative aura that surrounded the word intranet.

By summer 2004, we had completed the roll out across all four networks. Each country can now make available the information it thinks is most important. This information can be delivered in the relevant local language, as well as reflecting the approach, structure and culture of each company. While different countries are using their sites for different reasons, the portal style of our system allows us to disseminate group information simply.

We can easily share our joint resources (ie, our contact directory covers all four networks, resides in one database and changes are reflected instantly to everyone), we can simply re-publish valuable local content on a global basis and provide the opportunity for collaboration between countries, companies and networks. We can respond quickly to local needs – a new account can take as little as 30 minutes to create, and it can take just five minutes to create a new content area. And crucially, by proving the value of knowledge sharing on a local basis and empowering local knowledge entrepreneurs and enthusiasts to act and react to local needs, we have laid the groundwork for embedding a deeper and more profound knowledge-sharing and collaborative culture across the whole business.

The results so far

The results have been good so far. Across the four businesses we have over 100 accounts, and we are approached regularly to create more – we don’t have to chase offices to get connected when they join the network, they come to us. Many CEOs and country heads have woken up to the potential of the application and are taking a personal interest in its development.

Usage levels are also up by more than 50 per cent year-on-year, with many countries having doubled the number of users. Usage is also continuing to grow as more is offered via the portal.

And enthusiasm is up. We’ve had lots of positive comment from all levels of the business. This has replaced much of the slating, criticism and negativity that surrounded the intranet. We still receive some negative feedback, of course, but it is more than outweighed by the positive noises.

We still have a long way to go. We want people to use the portal more. We know that we can deliver more valuable information and we need to encourage people to use the portal as a springboard for contacting and collaborating with colleagues, not view it as simply a repository. In evolutionary terms, we’re down from the trees but our knuckles still drag a bit.

The path ahead

So where next? Another intermediate step needs to be taken before we can move to personalisation. We are now moving towards defining our content and portal space by job function. Most people doing the same job need roughly the same information, so this approach allows us to target information more effectively and to cross-fertilise knowledge resources between countries.

The aim is to do two things: First, deliver the specific knowledge assets each function needs, such as case studies, statistics and reports; and, second, to provide the space and tools to enable access to the real knowledge repositories – people’s heads. We want to provide a collaborative space and the opportunity for staff to interact with colleagues doing the same job.

This approach continues our policy of devolving ownership of the portal to the people using it. The portal belongs not to HQ but to each country and job function that uses it.

What does personalisation really mean?

Personalisation is, or rather may be, the next stage. We are already asking the question whether personalisation is really necessary, or rather what degree of personalisation is necessary. We have a feeling that the needs of most employees will be met when we have completed the job function stage and that very little further personalisation will be required. Instead, personalisation may in fact come from things such as integrated searching, folksonomies and other ways of categorising or serving information based on how individuals organise their resources. The most interesting vendors to watch over the coming years will be those that develop the best integrated desktop, e-mail, intranet and internet search, categorising information according to a user’s language, and not using artificial taxonomies.

The missing link

An area that is often neglected when we look at portals and personalisation is the issue of how people consume information. The main focus during most portal implementations is on the technology rather than the content. But differences in people’s jobs, attitudes, time, education, organisation and character mean that content will only be relevant and useful if it is served to them in an appropriate way. I’ve come up with an unscientific, but hopefully accurate, division of the type of consumer we have to satisfy to achieve what the portal promises.

Spoon feeders: These people want the answers and nothing else. There is no tacit knowledge exchange and no desire to adapt or enlarge on what is given to them. Spreadsheets, FAQs and templates are what they need.

Convenience eaters: They need key knowledge/information to be encapsulated and given to them in a quick, easy to use and digestible format. They need concepts, overviews and summaries, but not the detail.

Connoisseurs: They want as much content and information as possible, but it has to be good quality. They know their subject and want to know more. They want the full reports, the sources and background, as well as the links to related sites.

Bon viveurs: They like to share but need good company. The value of sharing knowledge isn’t in the output, it’s in the exchange. Communities, blogs and discussion forums are the places online where these people want to gather their knowledge.

The next step of portal evolution is to ensure that personalised content meets all the needs of the end user. This isn’t a technology issue – it’s a communication one and, as knowledge managers, we need to become much more knowledgeable and skilled in marketing communication, publishing and even broadcasting to ensure that the portal doesn’t deliver relevant information to the relevant person at the relevant time in an irrelevant format. To be fully evolved, the portal must push all the relevance buttons.

So, we’ll be taking another breather and another step back when we have completed the job function element of the project. And we may well find that we’ve evolved our technology enough but have only just begun on delivering the content.

So, do I need a portal?

To understand what the portal concept means to your organisation you need to know what you are trying to achieve in business terms with your intranet/portal application.

In essence, you need to assess how much you need to portalise. How evolved do you need to be? Is there enough of a distinction between your organisation’s job functions to move beyond the one-size-fits-all approach? Are your employees ready for a portal? Is the culture and resource available to support and sustain the technology? Is getting the right information to the right person enough, with time and format less important (this may be the case for more process and workflow-driven businesses)? Or do you have to push all the relevance buttons? The answers to these questions will, of course, be different for every organisation. The key is to agree your objectives from the outset, keep focused on them and remain pragmatic at all times.

Toby Howard, group intranets manager, Aegis Group