Designing a Stellar Intranet: Six Key Components for Social Intranet Success

Social Intranet Success

Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................................................................... 3 COMMIT TO FULL IMPLEMENTATION OF THE SOCIAL INTRANET ......................................................................... 6 DESIGNING THE SOCIAL INTRANET ...................................................................................................................... 7 RICH EMPLOYEE PROFILES ............................................................................................................................................... 7 THE ORGANIZATIONAL SOCIAL GRAPH ............................................................................................................................... 8 TRULY GREAT SEARCH CAPABILITY..................................................................................................................................... 9 RICH HISTORY .............................................................................................................................................................. 9 SIMULATIONS OR SCENARIO ANALYSES ............................................................................................................................ 10 DATA ANALYTICS......................................................................................................................................................... 10 THE BENEFITS OF A GREAT SOCIAL INTRANET .................................................................................................... 11 CONTACT MOXIE SOFTWARE ............................................................................................................................. 12

Moxie Software, Inc. Corporate Headquarters: 650 Castro St. Ste 105, Mountain View, CA 94041 Tel: 650.294.4680

Social Intranet Success

Introduction
Corporate intranets were supposed to make it easier for employees to share their knowledge with one another. Thats not generally whats happened with them. In one recent survey by AIIM, 71% of the overall respondents said it was easier to locate knowledge on the web than to find it in their internal systems;1 not surprisingly, higher percentages of relatively younger employees 80% of 18-30-year-olds and 73% of 31-45-year-olds than older employees (64% of employees age 45+) said this. 2 Intels Enterprise Social Media Program Manager for IT, Laurie Buczek, estimated that the average Intel employee was wasting one day a week trying to find the people with the experience and expertise plus the relevant information to do his or her job.3 With 20% of the workweek wasted in internal search for knowledge, companies like Intel are looking closely at ways to make their internal knowledge-sharing systems and processes much more productive. The challenge of making it easy for employees to find and share the knowledge thats embedded in organizations, (too often trapped in isolated locations of teams, groups, or functional silos) remains, but the rapid growth of social applications for the enterprise is making the solution much easier. Social applications are changing the nature of the intranet from a tactical tool to a vital, strategically important resource for innovation, engagement, and knowledge sharing. Social intranets systems employing sophisticated, searchable individual employee profiles and a growing set of social software applications such as wikis, blogs, and messaging can be much more effective than the traditional intranets precisely because they incorporate a significant social media element into intranet redesign. The word social carries probably unfairly negative connotations for many companies. Many senior leaders assume that social means time-wasting activities like photo sharing on Facebook, Twitter posts about personal views, or instant messaging as a back channel for gossip. That perception may be hard to dislodge, but major corporations (such as IBM, Cisco, Intel, Microsoft, Lockheed Martin) as well as small and medium-size businesses have turned to social software to help unlock the vast stores of knowledge and experience professional and personal that lies in heads and on the hard drives of employees, contractors, suppliers, and partners. Research shows many executives and many companies acknowledge that going social inside and outside the enterprise has produced tangible benefits. A December 2010 McKinsey report based on interviews with more than 3,000 executives at companies worldwide shows some of the internal benefits of becoming a more social enterprise (Figure 1).4 At fully networked companies just 3% of all respondents to the McKinsey survey Web 2.0 tools and applications are deeply integrated into daily work activities. McKinsey concluded, The benefits from the use of collaborative technologies at fully networked organizations appear to be multiplicative in nature: these organizations seem to be learning organizations in which lessons from interacting with one set of stakeholders in turn improve the ability to realize value in interactions with others. If this hypothesis is correct, competitive advantage at these companies will accelerate as network effects kick in, network connections become richer, and learning cycles speed up.5

Moxie Software, Inc. Corporate Headquarters: 650 Castro St. Ste 105, Mountain View, CA 94041 Tel: 650.294.4680

Social Intranet Success

Figure 1: Companies reporting measurable benefits from using Web 2.0 tools and technologies
Source: McKinsey Global Institute

Today, resistance to making your intranet a social system is futile. Employees are forcing businesses to change because they are already reliant on social media applications not just in their personal lives but in their professional lives. When employees make new connections with one another or with clients, prospects, or colleagues from other companies at meetings, conferences, webinars, and social events, they establish personal connections through sites like LinkedIn or Plaxo, use phone messaging for communications, add people to their personal or work profiles, and enter all relevant contact information into their smartphones. Social media and tools are the traditional enterprise IT killer, not just the killer app, says Paul DArcy, Executive Director, Americas Marketing for Dell Large Enterprise. 6 Social connections literally mean sales connections, says Paul DArcy, explaining the reason that Dell has rolled out a social application for its 90,000 employees.7 Employees already use their own personal technology for work. Results of an IDC survey sponsored by Unisys are powerful: 95% of information workers who responded say they use technology they have personally purchased for work.8 A Forrester Research report shows 37% of employees have used their own computers or smartphones for work and 26% have purchased software or other technology for work with their own money.9 And they use unauthorized apps as well: almost 40% of employees who have downloaded such apps use them every day.10 The challenge for business, says high-technology consultant and author Geoffrey Moore, is to find ways to engage peers globally to solve problems.11 Real-time answers to urgent questions are not easily found in systems of record, which is how Moore describes mainframes, minicomputers, SCM, HR, and other transaction-optimized systems, but in other peoples (and even other companies) heads. The social intranet is perhaps the single most useful tool to unlock, expose, and share the often tacit knowledge contained in the workforce that every organization needs to compete.
Moxie Software, Inc. Corporate Headquarters: 650 Castro St. Ste 105, Mountain View, CA 94041 Tel: 650.294.4680

Social Intranet Success

Geoffrey Moore on the need for new systems for collaboration

The following are excerpts from Geoffrey Moores keynote address at SAPs BI and EIM 4.0 Launch Event on February 23, 2011, in New York City.
The rise of collaborative business networks [means] the structure of business is changed. I grew up in a hierarchical world. Now EVPs are no longer more important than VPs, not anymore, thats not the way the world works. In the new world, its horizontal, not vertical. Business networks are the current way of going, and in business networks, what do you need to do? You cant order people around; its not a command and control system, its a communicate-coordinate-collaborate system. All the consumer-world technologies that do so well in our social lives, now you begin to see why those technologies might be so important in our business lives. Relationship management activity is also a business activity. You are trying to get things done across a distributed value chain. You have to reach out and connect with other people, engage with peers to solve problems. All my life, BI (business intelligence) was about making the exec suite more intelligent; it was originally called EIS (executive information systems) because anyone below executive was frankly too dumb to be educated. Being a middle manager sucked because you were just up and down, up and down, and people kind of even wondered what you did for a living. Thats not whats going on now. Now the answers arent just in databases; now they are primarily in other peoples heads and some of those heads are outside of your company. So you have to engage those heads in dialog to negotiate, and everything gets negotiated across this value chain. So the burden is falling on the middle of the organization not the exec suite and not the front-line transaction worker. That first trillion [dollars] of systems of record plus all the reporting and analytics that went with it, that was either for the front lines or for the executive suite. We did not do much for the middle of the organization; laptops and BlackBerries, thats about it. So, now we have to say, What can we do for that middle of the org, IT for the middle tier? I submit to you, you have not invested in anything like the appropriate amount in IT for the middle tier. The middle tiers world is not a world where we get to kick back at 4:00 and have a meeting about the analysts report from yesterday. The middle tiers world is, Line 3, angry customer! Or Im at the convention and Im with the prospect and this is my face time for the year and I have 12 minutes. What can I share? All of a sudden its a much more real time, real world, immediate thing and thats why these [collaboration] technologies come up. Its global because the middle is working across every time zone and every geography, the supply chain guys are going across the Pacific Ocean and the demand chain guys are going across the Atlantic Ocean. Were going to South America. All the great growth things outside of the current developed economies, theyre all over the world. Its mobile because we are never at our office. Its virtual because you cant do these things in an enterprise data center because most of the people you want to talk to dont belong to your company and they cant have passwords to get into your data center. Its inherently social, social for business, not for socialization. And relationships matter, and trust matters, and responsiveness matters, and listening matters, and facts matter. If we are going to let these people do it, weve got to empower them in the moments of their work, not in the moments of our work. Weve historically had technologies that forced us to do it on our time, because we frankly did not have the technology to do it on their timeThe technologys changed, we have to change with it.

Moxie Software, Inc. Corporate Headquarters: 650 Castro St. Ste 105, Mountain View, CA 94041 Tel: 650.294.4680

Social Intranet Success

Commit to full implementation of the social intranet

Companies are approaching the integration of social with intranet in different ways: Many are doing what we call a basic facelift just incorporating some blogs for corporate communication, or maybe a wiki area for some shared content offerings. In our view, this is too little and probably too late for most companies in most industries. Chances are high that competitors are already past this point, and a facelift is not a catch-up approach, not to mention that your more advanced employees people that already use social software to get their work done are not going to be impressed with this kind of effort. Wed recommend you think very quickly about how to move to a much more dynamic system that incorporates more features. Some companies incorporate a handful of limited social tools into the intranet. This misses the greater potential reward of really unleashing the untapped potential of true enterprise intranets, which can offer a host of advantages in business productivity. Because it is highly likely that many of your newest hires already use social media extensively in their personal lives, adopting a limited tool set especially one selected by people who dont actually use these tools or by IT folks whose primary mission is standardization or security runs the risk of actually alienating workers, leading to a shoulder-shrug response and failure to launch.

Opting for measured steps toward a social intranet often fail because companies do not ask themselves a simple question that employees often do: How can it be that I am so powerful as a consumer and so lame as an employee?12 The mindset employees bring to their workplaces when it comes to technology is based on their personal experiences with it, and thats inevitable: they can search for products, perform technical comparisons, get expert advice, get friends advice, and order and pay for those products online in minutes. When they cannot connect with someone inside their own organization who knows the answer to even simple questions, they become frustrated, enough to find their own applications to fill in the gaps in yours. Imagine how a 2011 college grad reacts when she arrives at her new desk and turns on her PC to discover that its running a locked-down version of an operating system that was first released when she was 12.13

Moxie Software, Inc. Corporate Headquarters: 650 Castro St. Ste 105, Mountain View, CA 94041 Tel: 650.294.4680

Social Intranet Success

Designing the social intranet

A comprehensive, value-driven intranet today requires six key components: 14,15 Rich employee profiles, which function as the essential source material for many of the related applications The organizational social graph, a picture of the networks of employee relationships inside the company Truly great search capabilities with access across multiple databases and applications Rich history capabilities that track patterns and behavior over time Simulations or scenario analyses to prepare for multiple futures Rich data capture and analytics capabilities

The absence of one or more of these capabilities limits a social intranets collaborative power and can significantly inhibit employee adoption. As many companies have realized over the past several years, if you build a collaborative platform that doesnt match the standards employees have come to expect with their personal applications, they may not participate. And even if they do, a lack of thoughtful design can encourage uses that are of limited productive value. Weve built a great deal of capability and participation but it only represents 1% of all the productive activity because its not part of the flow of the work, one executive we spoke with told us when describing his companys social intranet. People in the organization were updating their profiles, and sharing information on what they were doing and all kinds of things, but it wasnt meaningfully connected to the flow of work. Critical to a useful, and used, social intranet is that the social intranet capabilities enhance the processes employees already use to get work done.

Rich employee profiles

Employee profiles are the starting point for many of the collaboration activities that social intranets make possible. They should include data that create a digital rsum of an individuals abilities, experiences, expertise, and interests. Importantly, profile design should reflect the things that are specifically valued in your organization. For example, in some organizations, academic credentials are a very important part of the credibility-building process; people want or need to know what other colleagues academic credentials are (for example, in pharmaceutical companies or engineering companies these might be particularly relevant). In other organizations, academic backgrounds may be far less important than examples of what the person has done recently (for example, in PR or marketing departments or companies). The personal data in profiles enrich the connections among people. Designing profiles requires both sensitivity and thought: What and how much do you need to know about your employees? What and how much do employees want and need to know about each other? Does the profile design reflect the company culture and the way the company thinks about itself? As each employees digital identify matures with more and more relevant information, profiles increase in value. Eventually, you will begin to see whos working with whom, where and how individuals skills align, and whos in demand. The informal organizational structures for getting work done and the shifting patterns of relationships will emerge, and you will better understand your enterprise, its strengths, weaknesses, and talent gaps. In other words, profile design is the window to organizational insight.

Moxie Software, Inc. Corporate Headquarters: 650 Castro St. Ste 105, Mountain View, CA 94041 Tel: 650.294.4680

Social Intranet Success

The organizational social graph

Rich employee profiles help companies visualize the social graph the map of the connections among employees, who works with whom (when, how often, and why). The social graph reveals an important, but normally hidden, organization chart the informal employee network inside every company (Figure 3).

Organizational Leadership

IT Team

Figure 3: Example of Social Graph Visualization (each dot represents an individual employee)
Source: Social Networks for Talent Acquisition and Development, Moxie Insight

Social graphs illuminate people who are connected into the organization at only one or two points (for example, points GS and FP in the figure); whos central to a group (point FY); and who bridges or connects groups (point HG). They make it possible to see whats not visible in the formal organization chart the people whose loss can strand others and even bring projects to a halt. Knowing the social graph also helps in onboarding new employees, getting them connected with the right internal colleagues to smooth their transition to working in a new organization. New hires bring their own external networks with them into the organization, and through them expand the real talent pool thats available, so connecting them internally also can expand the external resource network. One thing the social graph does well is to help you rethink some of your key talent management and development processes. A social graph can clarify or actually change your perceptions of who your critical employees are, broadening the scope of talent for development opportunities. The programs themselves can benefit by expanding the pool of mentors who can advise emerging or new leaders on how the organization works. Innovation depends in large part on connecting the people who know with the people who need to know. Having a clear social graph can expose skills, expertise, and experience across the organization, leading to more serendipitous sharing, collaboration, and conversations. The bottom line is: You dont really know your organization unless you know about the social graph.

Moxie Software, Inc. Corporate Headquarters: 650 Castro St. Ste 105, Mountain View, CA 94041 Tel: 650.294.4680

Social Intranet Success

Truly great search capability

The ability to find people, knowledge, and other resources anywhere in the organization whenever they are needed can make a social intranet the first place to go for both sharing and acquiring information. Search needs to enhance the ability of everyone to find the talent, skills, expertise, and information they need quickly, whether they are inside the company, or outside in a contingent talent resource base.16 Internet search engines like Google are too often the first stop for finding answers to questions, but they are never going to provide the enterprise-specific answers employees really need. Salespeople, marketers, content experts, development engineers, and customer relations specialists have unique information that cannot be acquired from external search engines. Great search is premised on great access; if people or internal databases are off-limits, then answers may never be optimal. Restrictions only frustrate employees. This is not to say everything needs to be available to everyone restrictions on IP, financial records, and other proprietary data are necessary. But too often the default policy on information is restriction, when the default practice should be open unless necessary. Visibility is critical to innovation.

Rich history
Just as the social graph provides a picture of the relationships in the organization, the social media tools that employees use to communicate, share, and collaborate can help you create a rich history around some of the most important points of activity or most important processes. Wikis, blogs, messaging, micro-blogs, and applications such as Yammer become repositories for the activities of users. They also can play back a high-fidelity recording of the enterprises state at any point in time. Mobile technology and the growing volume of sensors can provide an unprecedented ability to see whats been done by whom over time. Tracking hours and minutes of work becomes far less important than tracking specific activities, accomplishments, projects, customer interactions, and ideas that form the collective intelligence and memory of an enterprise. Rich history is not knowledge management; it is more because it combines knowledge and information with the activities that created it. Figure 4 shows the percentage of time 13 people spent on a wiki for a single project over several months. Variations in individuals time on the wiki reflect their contributions at specific times based on their skill sets or roles; Lethic and Grum seemed instrumental in framing the project and perhaps contributing organizational skills. Lethic appears critical to the projects completion, given his relatively steady percentage of work time on the wiki. Festi seems critical at specific points, indicating a particular expertise or organizational skill. This graph of wiki participation is just one view of the project, but it can be a valuable means of tracking where specific employees skills can be best used in future projects.

Moxie Software, Inc. Corporate Headquarters: 650 Castro St. Ste 105, Mountain View, CA 94041 Tel: 650.294.4680

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Figure 4: Image of Rich History

Simulations or scenario analyses

Simulations help you understand the relationships among key components of the business for example, the business strategies, talent requirements, and workforce availability. A rich intranet gives the ability to develop simulations regarding the future, based on the detailed information it contains about your current talent base who they are; what they have accomplished and what they can do; their tacit knowledge, experience, and skills; and their connections inside and outside the organization. Knowing your talent at a granular level lets you explore the implications on that talent of a new business strategy, a new competitive challenge, or an economic event. You can see where talent is missing as well as how well prepared you are for a shift in the competitive landscape or the evolution of technology. You can see where your employee networks are strongest or where you may be talentshort as you move in new directions that will demand increased access to specific people or teams. You can predict competitive imbalances before they emerge, and execute talent acquisition campaigns for full-time or contingent employees in advance rather than in response to challenges or new competitive pressures. By coupling your internal information with scenarios of talent pools around the world, you can explore options on a global scale.

Data analytics
The ability to analyze data on your business to understand the correlations between decisions made and results achieved, for example is becoming an essential skill. Building this capability into your intranet turns it from a useful tool to a powerful source of insight. Analysis of rich employee profile data can reveal strengths and weaknesses in recruitment strategies and even individual selection decisions. As people move up and across organizations, acquiring new skills and experience, profile data can show what kinds of employees thrive in your organization. You can follow individual employees careers in your organization through their profiles, seeing what theyve done, how their careers are playing out, and where they have thrived or struggled. Their lives as employees are in their profiles so you can track more than promotion and salary history; you can how the promotion selection process, learning processes, skill training, and leadership training play out for both individuals and across the company. If you regularly survey for employee engagement, trends can be revealed without compromising employee privacy. You can better understand on an individual basis what sparks engagement, what work experiences were most satisfying, and what excites them about work.

Moxie Software, Inc. Corporate Headquarters: 650 Castro St. Ste 105, Mountain View, CA 94041 Tel: 650.294.4680

11 Social Intranet Success

The benefits of a great social intranet

Designed to include the six outlined components, your social intranet will provide many benefits 17: Relevance
Employees can update pages, comment, link, tag, and start collaborative conversations with other workers on topics that are immediately related to their work.

Best-in-class self-service
Social software is highly effective as a platform for worker communication and self-help. Well-designed intranets are usable without the need for assistance of any kind.

Healthy information ecosystem

Part of the magic of social software is that it brings with it the link structure of Web technology. Formally called Web-Oriented Architecture, a social intranet can effectively break down data silos and connect enterprise information together into a deeply interlinked ecosystem.

Improved search and expertise location

A healthy Web of internal data means that enterprise search engines work much more effectively.

Better knowledge retention and reuse

When daily work is more social and observable, it leaves behind artifacts to reuse along with the identity of those that created them.

New business insights

The latest social software suites are platforms for apps that take advantage of the social environments in which they run to provide new business insights through simulations and analytics.

Dont let your business fall behind. Build your social intranet today.

Moxie Software, Inc. Corporate Headquarters: 650 Castro St. Ste 105, Mountain View, CA 94041 Tel: 650.294.4680

12 Social Intranet Success

Contact Moxie Software

Moxie Software Moxie Software, Inc.650 Castro St. Ste 105 Mountain View, CA 94041 Tel: 1.800.474.1149 Email: info@moxiesoft.com www.moxiesoft.com

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Learn to deal with information abundance or someone else will, Oscar Berg, AIIM Social Business Expert Blog, September 13, 2010 Collaboration and Enterprise 2.0 work-meets-play or the future of business? An AIIM Survey conducted during May 2009, AIIM Why Intel is investing in Social Computing, blog post by Laurie Buczek, February 13, 2008, quoted at Enterprise 2.0 Conference: A Platform to The rise of the networked enterprise: Web 2.0 finds its payday, McKinsey Global Institute, December 2010 The rise of the networked enterprise: Web 2.0 finds its payday, McKinsey Global Institute, December 2010 5 Reasons Why CIOs Cant Ignore Consumerization of IT, Paul DArcy, CIO.com, March 1, 2011 5 Reasons Why CIOs Cant Ignore Consumerization of IT, Paul DArcy, CIO.com, March 1, 2011 Consumerization of IT: 95% of Information Workers Use Self-Purchased Technology for Work, Klint Finley, ReadWriteWeb Enterprise, March 17, Numbers You Need to Know: Employees Take Tech to Work, Lauren Brousell, CIO.com, May 12, 2011 Numbers You Need to Know: Employees Take Tech to Work, Lauren Brousell, CIO.com, May 12, 2011 Geoffrey Moore, Business Analytics Keynote address at SAP BI and EIM 4.0 Launch, February 23, 2011, New York City Geoffrey Moore, Business Analytics Keynote address at SAP BI and EIM 4.0 Launch, February 23, 2011, New York City 5 Reasons Why CIOs Cant Ignore Consumerization of IT, Paul DArcy, CIO.com, March 1, 2011 Thanks to Dr. Nick Vitalari, Director of the Enterprise Insight Program and Vice President of Moxie Insight, for the identification of these six We discussed four keys to success in design of a social media-based collaborative intranet in the April 11, 2011, Webinar, Catalyzing the

Measure the Evolution of a New Market, July 31, 2009, http://blog.connectbeam.com/

4 5 6 7 8

2011
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components.
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Adoption of Collaborative Technology. The presentation can be found on the Talent Insight Members web site. A report on the same topic is forthcoming.
16

See the new Talent Insight report, Contingent by Choice: Understanding and Leveraging the New Worker, in the Talent Insight library or in These benefits are based in part on blog posts and other writings of Dion Hinchcliffe.

the Complete Research Library on Moxie Insight.

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Moxie Software, Inc. Corporate Headquarters: 650 Castro St. Ste 105, Mountain View, CA 94041 Tel: 650.294.4680