Balancing act

Feature

posted 20 Jul 2004 in Volume 1 Issue 2

With hundreds of Reuters site owners and publishers all over the world, Michel Gelbart, director of the Reuters corporate web office, has to ensure everyone is following consistent branding guidelines and adhering to a unified image of the company’s presence on the internet. Here he discusses the delicate information balance to be achieved in a successful global employee portal and the next set of knowledge-management challenges in 2004-2005.

A Reuters news office is a fast-paced environment used to providing information to thousands of people worldwide as quickly and concisely as possible. So it’s no surprise the company strives to supply its own employees with information about any internal workings at the same pace.

Globally re-launched in March 2004, the Reuters daily briefing portal is designed to do exactly that by being built around the needs of intranet users.

In parallel with the identification of practice communities among our customer base, Reuters has undergone a similar internal practice and identification exercise, identifying groups with broadly common functions and information requirements.

The Reuters daily briefing portal offers a single point of reference to information sources categorised in five broad areas:

Company – generic corporate information about Reuters, relevant to all employees;
Customers and Solutions – specific customer knowledge and information about Reuters’ products and services;
Country and region – locally specific information categorised by country;
Community – information (including websites, forms and database information) and resources to support specific job roles – both for core job functions and project-based activity. People with similar job roles can access common information, enabling online collaboration;
Personal – contains personally customised (selected) resources.

All of the above areas can be customised, allowing employees to tailor the portal to their needs. However, while our global employee portal has achieved a great deal, it remains underused. We still need to turn our intranet into a knowledge-sharing, internal-communications and learning hub.

The balance between push, pull and local content

It is important to pay careful attention to the delicate balance between what is pushed to the user, sign-posted for users’ benefits, published on the front page of the portal and published one click away, or searched for.

The portal must also achieve the right balance between global and local/department/community relevance. For example, look at someone working in Germany. The daily briefing is published in three distinct editions. It accommodates Reuters Europe, Reuters America and Reuters Asia, and caters for targeted regional internal news. In addition to this global component, at a glance the user in Germany will also be able to access content components automatically pushed to them on the basis of their geographical location.

These include two targeted pieces of content:

Electronic Briefs – fast moving bits of internal news edited by community leaders such as the marketing department. They include channels such as market research, focus groups and competitive intelligence;
Local intranet resources tabs or panes (panes are little windows of links or information within the portal).

Thanks to these, our users in the rest of Europe can access local resources like daily local administration systems, online forms and local news – all in the local language where desired.

The importance of sign-posting

While sign-posting is pragmatic and simple to achieve, I’ve found it to be widely misunderstood by many organisations. It seemed premature to talk to organisations about taxonomy when information volume is growing at what seems an exponential rate without rigorous structure or publishing standards. It’s like trying to install central heating in an igloo that has no gas or electricity. What you need is a gradual, pragmatic approach to get your organisation there. We have identified key categories on our portal. These in turn will link to web pages, documents, systems, or websites. The websites displayed in these signalling boxes have all been certified as ‘premium content’ by our internal communications department in order to give them added weight in the eyes of users.

Premium content must follow a stringent set of rules that follow basic taxonomic rules. For example, the use of keywords for quick retrieval by search engine, author details and frequency of update all help maintain standards. These will adhere to the same look and feel as well as ground rules for navigation and nesting of information.

So we have global content, in the form of a daily briefing, web index and global community e-briefs, and local content in the form of mini windows in local language that link to larger local websites.

What about collaboration and knowledge management?

A lot has been said about Reuters’ transformation and its Fast Forward programme, which spans all aspects of the company, including the rationalisation of our product structure to the radical improvements delivered in customer service and support over the last six months.

Reuters takes its lead from external results, where a number of initiatives to provide world-class customer service have been undertaken. Internally, this means knowledge management must be built into everything we do.

We are going to syndicate and unify employee collaboration services. Currently, we still have too many diverse tools to share documents and publish and share content. And we’re still missing out on content locked in people’s heads.

We are planning to build on our most successful tools. Building on something both familiar and highly praised by our users will serve to propel our knowledge management initiative forward.

The global employee directory is built on a winning recipe that balances self-service, where employees own some of the data, with centrally sourced information from HR.

The current user interface has grown over time and is based on feedback received from staff, especially over the last year.

Over this period we have implemented a quarterly global employee survey. It rewards people for their honest feedback on internal systems, allowing for precision road mapping of deliverables for these systems. This means we’ll spend the money where it brings the most benefits. The survey runs three times a year and includes a feedback loop that tells our users what the top five requirements were and, more importantly, what we’re going to do about them.

For example, a number of improvements to the global employee directory could allow users to rapidly pinpoint experts in specialist fields and, more importantly, access their knowledge (documents, meeting minutes, etc) as well as FAQ databases and top tips organised by application.

Taxonomy from within

Over time, we could evolve to a more complex taxonomy structure and migrate key data components to a standard structure.

Our daily briefing portal is bringing the best of all internal resources and applications to the employee’s front page, where Reuters messaging sits next to other collaborative and knowledge tools.

Practice communities are increasingly encouraging collaboration in the new Reuters, reducing duplication and pushing ongoing innovation.

Increasingly, employees will be sharing knowledge with staff in a similar job role or across functions – regardless of departmental, geographical or community boundaries.

Know ourselves

The famous KM mantra, “If only we knew what we know” is going to underpin what we do for the remainder of 2004 and take us into 2005. In the new world economy there are no jobs for life and the old information-management model is no longer adapted.

If it’s true there are no longer jobs for life, it’s also true single-skilled professionals re a thing of the past. This means the days where employees will have the same information requirements day after day are gone.

In companies like Reuters, people tend to belong to multi-disciplinary communities that need to constantly adapt to business and market change. This adaptation often occurs in a matter of days rather than weeks.

Knowledge management is a quantum leap. It’s about spawning an internal culture and infrastructure – one that will result in a new, totally dynamic and flexible information-management model. In the new economy, it’s bound to become a winning differentiator.