A cultured approach

By Tom Brannan and Richard Miller

When an intranet fails to deliver the expected benefits, questions are inevitably asked. Is the intranet aligned with the strategic objectives of the organisation – delivering content that matters? Is it set up to support the users – helping real employees do real jobs? Does it function smoothly and reliably, without getting in the user’s way?

All good questions, but sometimes the problem lies elsewhere. The tools and content may be ideal for your organisation and its users. The intranet structure may be easy to understand and the infrastructure may be running smoothly in the background, delivering content seamlessly to all users.

Regardless, employees consistently avoid using it. It becomes a struggle to keep the content up to date and a distinct lack of enthusiasm for the intranet pervades the organisation. What could be wrong?

The answer often lies in how the intranet fits with corporate culture. The content you deliver may be important, but how it engages end-users is vital. An intranet has to fit with people’s expectations, their beliefs and values and the way they do their work. If it feels alien or uncomfortable, it will not be used.

Invisible, insidious, influential

Culture gets forgotten because it is intangible. It is quite simply, ‘the way we do things round here’. But organisational culture is pervasive and strong. It affects everything we do in that environment and creates a set of norms that resist change. The hardest changes to make in any organisation are those that challenge the prevailing culture because throughout the day people are bombarded with information about what is important and what behaviours are valued. If the intranet signals something different, it will be ignored.

Yet some companies try to use their intranet to drive change. They try to use it to bring in a new process for managing procurement or deal with customer queries, and it seems logical to use their ubiquitous and easy to use intranet to drive the change into the organisation.

Unfortunately, the intranet is a poor tool for driving such changes – people will think the intranet is ‘wrong’ and treat it with suspicion and hostility. Many previously successful intranets have been damaged or killed off by organisations introducing changes that work against the prevailing organisational culture.

If a major cultural change programme is under way, the intranet can be used to support and reinforce it, but otherwise the intranet must support the existing culture – it cannot drive cultural change on its own.

When considering the cultural impact of a new technology deployment, there are three forms of culture we need to take into account: national/regional, corporate and functional.

National and regional cultures are especially important in multinational companies with geographically scattered workforces. Beyond the crude stereotypes, people from different parts of the world really do approach business relationships differently. Indian and Dutch people, for example, hold very different concepts of status and power. French and Americans have different attitudes to risk. The user profile will determine whether the intranet is authoritative or collaborative, open or full of security barriers.

Corporate culture, by contrast, is easier to understand. We can all describe organisations as conservative or adventurous, tightly structured or flexible, technically-led or marketing-led. We know, for example, that computer-maker Apple is not the same as Microsoft.

Corporate culture has a big impact on what will work. There has been lots of interest recently in using wikis to build intranets because they make it easy for a range of people to create and edit content. While many companies like that idea, others are aghast at the concept. The intranet head of a financial services company recently told us: “Allowing people to change intranet content without a proper authorisation and validation process would get me fired!”

The third and final important factor is functional culture. Salespeople, accountants and engineers are not the same. They think about problems differently, have different views of what is important and judge success differently. To meet their varying needs, you may have to provide them with varying content, organised and presented in different ways.

In one company, for example, getting up-to-date information on products into the hands of salespeople was a key target. The applications specialists, who knew everything about the products and how to use them, put a lot of effort into creating hundreds of pages of detailed information for the sales force. These went unused.

To discover why, we interviewed groups of salespeople, asking them exactly what information they wanted, and how they wanted it presented. The information was there all along but presented from the perspective of the applications specialists. It did not connect with the way salespeople thought about selling, so they ignored it.

It’s good to talk…

With these different cultures swirling together, how can you understand the environment and develop something that will meet most needs? The only practical approach to requirements capture is to talk to people. Some people swear by questionnaires and surveys, but it is hard to pick up the nuances of culture this way. Less-structured methods of observation and discussion work far better.

Start by identifying the key audiences. It would be great to produce an intranet which is equally attractive and useful to every member of the organisation, but that is unrealistic. Instead, it is essential to support the groups with the greatest impact on the corporate goals. Identify their needs and make sure the intranet supports them.

Next, understand the main cultural features of the key groups. There are three levels of cultural clue; artefacts, values and assumptions. Artefacts are the visible things you can see around you: the way people dress, the way offices are laid out, how people talk and the forms and tools they use.

Values include the things that people publicly say about an organisation: vision and values, mission statements, business principles, and all the framed pieces of paper that are hung on a wall.

Shared assumptions form the third level. These are all the beliefs in an organisation that never need to be articulated, they are implicit: beliefs about the principles that matter, how to satisfy customers, how to innovate and how to succeed. The shared assumptions are hard to get at – precisely because they are deemed so ‘obvious’ that they are never discussed.

A couple of tools we find very useful for digging into shared assumptions are ‘personas’ and a method we call ‘five magic buttons’.

Unearthing culture

Personas are widely used in interaction and interface design3 and are a great way to help a group of people to describe their culture and what will work for them. Ask the group to imagine a user for the intranet that represents their role or their department. Get them to make that user as real as possible: What is their name and job, how long have they been with the company, what is their history, what are their interests? Then ask them what their goals are. What are they trying to achieve and what are their challenges? Finally, how will they use the intranet?

This exercise gives an excellent insight into group needs, culture and how end-users will interact with the intranet. It is also fun! One company chose a salesman who was on the road a lot and rarely visited head office as a user persona. As the persona took shape, it was clear that the individual felt isolated – an ‘outsider’ in the company. This led directly to the development of social content for the intranet specifically targeted at remote and mobile workers to make them feel part of the corporate ‘family’.

The second tool is the five magic buttons. Take a flip chart and tell the group that the blank page before them represents the intranet home page. Draw five buttons along the bottom and tell them these are magic buttons that can do anything they want. Then ask them what the buttons do. Whatever answers you get, ask why these functions need to be performed or why such a button would be a good idea. Gradually the group will begin to expose unspoken needs and assumptions.

Having evaluated the organisational culture, think about how that influences the design and implementation of the intranet. One way is to map the culture into six organising principles. These are pairs of opposing descriptors; you can set the slider anywhere between the extremes. Group discussions usually reach a quick consensus on where the slider sits. For each aspect of structure, services and content for the intranet, you can use this chart to decide which approach will suit your organisation better.

Process – Function

Some organisations are dominated by functional thinking; naturally talking about what they do in terms of human resources, finance, research and development and manufacturing, for example. Others are more process driven; employees tend to talk in terms of new product development, supply-chain management and so on.

The navigation of the intranet needs to reflect the normal language. A functional organisation will expect navigation that reflects the organisation chart; a process-based organisation will expect navigation to follow key processes. If the organisation has a mixed outlook, it may be necessary to provide both kinds of navigation to satisfy a broad range of users.

Open – Closed

How do people feel about information sharing and security? Some cultures are very open, with an assumption that all information is made available to everyone unless there is a specific reason not to. Others operate on a need-to-know basis where the default is secrecy. An intranet in a closed environment needs different tools to an open one. The search tool should only return results to which the user is permitted access; content publication will involve authorisation procedures; parts of the intranet will be hidden from unauthorised users; and sophisticated user authentication tools are needed.

Central – Distributed

Organisations that tend towards control, centralisation and clarity of process and message will be more comfortable with an intranet managed by a core team dedicated to the task. This will affect governance and the tools used for creation and content management. But a loosely structured, entrepreneurial organisation will never willingly be constrained by the discipline of centralised intranet management. It will be more comfortable with a distributed system where small teams create and manage areas of the intranet, and have the tools and infrastructure to do it.

Serious – Fun

For some organisations, the social side of the intranet is one of the key reasons for its success. The two most popular features of the intranet at the advertising agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty are strictly work-related: archives of the company’s TV ads and archives of its print ads. But number four in employees’ top ten favourite features is spoofs of the company’s ads, five is simple digital games, and six, seven and eight are pictures of social events and occasions: karaoke nights, newborn babies and the secretaries’ Christmas party. That informality could be hard to make work in an insurance company or a white goods manufacturer.

Designed – Emergent

For some organisations, standardised design and layout are essential. Enforcing common language, messages, tone of voice, taxonomy and processes are all key reasons for an intranet. For others, it is more useful and interesting to allow the intranet to evolve under the control of users. BT has very loose control of what its intranet looks like or contains. It is a brutal Darwinian environment, where new areas emerge on the intranet with bewildering speed, but unless they offer genuine value to the users, they just as quickly die. BT’s ‘launch and learn’ philosophy is completely different to that held by a company like Halliburton, which believes that maximum value is generated by carefully selecting and designing the services and content on its intranet.

Static – Interactive

A key functional decision for an intranet is: will it be static, or dynamic and interactive? Providing discussion forums, communities, shared workspaces and online collaboration tools all have major implications for the IT infrastructure of the intranet. At first glance, it seems obvious that these are desirable; surely interactivity is one of the key benefits of web technologies? Possibly, but users may not value interaction. A top-down, highly structured culture, for example, has less use for feedback and interaction.

One professional services company successfully used a forum for staff to directly question the CEO. Open debate fitted its values and helped to keep the team aligned. A government department tried the same idea and had to close the forum down after less than 24 hours because of the level of personal abuse in the posts!

Deciding on these organising principles does not constitute making value judgements about them. An open, fun, emergent, interactive organisation can fail spectacularly, and many hierarchical, tightly managed, ‘need to know’ companies are highly valued both by staff and customers. Whatever the culture, make sure that your intranet is a good fit. Work with the grain of the company, not against it.

Tom Brannan and Richard Miller are the founders of Vigorat, a consultancy specialising in intranet design. They can be contacted at: info@vigorat.com

References

‘Culture and Organisations – software of the mind’, Geert Hofstede, HarperCollins, 1994
‘The Corporate Culture Survival Guide’, Edgar H Schein, Jossey-Bass, 1999
‘The Inmates are Running the Asylum’, Alan Cooper, Sams, 1999