Intranet Journal
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How to Get More Eyeballs to Your Intranet
Many companies are reporting that, when it comes to remaking their old intranets, employees are slow to embrace (or even understand) the new intranet concepts of employee-controlled content, social software tools, and other new technologies.
That all-too-common trend of anemic intranet use was the norm at one Canadian company, Intrawest. But a division of Intrawest called Placemaking made significant improvement in intranet usage -- increasing it tenfold to five page views per employee per day -- when it rolled out a new intranet from ThoughtFarmer. The following is a case study on how Intrawest Placemaking did it and how it is affecting employees.
Project history
Placemaking (325 employees) is the real estate development division of Intrawest (25,000 employees). Placemaking develops resort villages worldwide, including Whistler-Blackcomb (British Columbia), Mountain Creek (New Jersey), and Tremblant (Quebec).
Tracy Hutton, director of learning at Placemaking, wanted to leverage the company intranet to create community at the recently re-organized company. She also wanted a better way to capture Placemaking's intellectual capital online.
The existing intranet, released in May 2004, was infrequently updated and poorly used (averaging 0.5 page views per employee per day). Hutton needed to redevelop the new intranet, and then maintain it, without a single full-time person on the project.
Solution: Social Software
Creators of ThoughtFarmer social software, Chris McGrath and Darren Gibbons, approached Hutton with the idea of using wiki-type technology to create a self-sustaining intranet democratically maintained by the entire company.
Hutton embraced the idea and won support of senior management. The redesigned intranet was launched in April 2006 on the ThoughtFarmer social software platform.
Placemaking's new intranet is built on the wiki principle of open editing. All employees have the ability to add and edit content, even on the home page.
Recent changes are listed on the home page and a search engine indexes all content. Pages and people are intertwined: each page is linked to the author's profile and their profile page links to pages by that person.
Unlike wikis, Placemaking's intranet has a hierarchical content structure with auto-generated navigation. It was felt that non-technical business users wouldn't be comfortable with WikiWords and free-form page creation. Instead, clicking the "Add a page" button creates a subpage of the current page.
Tenfold increase in use
At launch, intranet use immediately increased tenfold to 5 page views per employee per day. The increased use has held steady for 6 months.
Use is pervasive. There were 1,486 unique users in the second quarter after launch. With just 325 employees, this means over 1,000 non-Placemaking employees -- mostly employees of the parent company, Intrawest -- used Placemaking's intranet. (Although it's not advertised, all of Intrawest's 25,000 employees -- including those working in the lodging and ski operations divisions -- have read-only access to Placemaking's intranet.)
In September, Mike Hartigan, a Placemaking project manager in Vancouver, created a page about a method of finishing concrete floors that creates an appearance better than tile at a substantially lower cost. Using the method at the entrance to a resort saved $500,000 and reduced the project timeline.
Other project managers in Florida and Nevada posted comments to the page, asking further questions. In response, Hartigan posted photos of the finished job and addressed their comments. The other construction managers planned on using the information on future projects.
On another occasion, a construction manager shared his approach for lighting supply for condo-hotel development. By using a light broker to assemble the lighting package and gather competitive bids, he saved about $200,000 on a typical $30 million project.
Placemaking manages dozens of multi-million dollar developments a year. These construction tips, if implemented on just a handful of projects, will save the company millions of dollars. Without the everyone-is-an-editor intranet, it is doubtful that they would have been shared.
The first social feature of ThoughtFarmer to resonate with Placemaking employees was Employee "Places:" a personal spot for each employee to add a profile and create pages. As employees uploaded photos of themselves and revealed a little more of who they are, the popularity of People Places skyrocketed. Within 3 months, virtually all employees had added their own contact information, one-third had added a personal profile, and 15 percent had created pages.
Company president contributes
Placemaking's president, Drew Stotesbury, has been an active user and proponent of the collaborative intranet, posting news articles, uploading photos, and starting new forum topics.
Placemaking's parent company, Intrawest Corporation, was recently acquired by Fortress Capital. During the period of uncertainty preceding the announcement of the acquisition, Stotesbury used the intranet to good effect in assuaging the concerns of employees. He posted regular updates on the impending transaction, invited questions, and posted answers.
Stotesbury's leading role contributed to a change in attitude amongst staff, as employees began to view the intranet as a serious tool and a viable platform for communication and discussion.
In the six months since launch, there have been no incidents of employees misusing or abusing their ability to edit and post content. No content can be posted anonymously, as Placemaking's intranet software integrates with their Windows network and Active Directory. Employees take responsibility for their own postings and this self-policing seems to be effective.
Challenges
In any social system, a small group of users is usually responsible for the bulk of content creation. This holds true for Placemaking's intranet.
On the encouraging side, about half of all users have gone beyond just updating their contact information, and have uploaded a picture, posted a comment, or created a page. Still, there is a small network of users that is responsible for the vast majority of page creation, content edits, and forum posts. Getting the other employees to not just lurk, but to actively participate, remains a challenge.
Software to support emergent collaboration in the enterprise is new and imperfect. No doubt some lack of user participation at Placemaking is due in part to limitations of the underlying software.
One feature the user community has repeatedly requested is a mechanism to alert them if a particular page changes - in Enterprise 2.0 parlance, "signals." While RSS is the preferred signal platform in tech circles, no Placemaking user has mentioned it: they want alerts delivered by email.
In December, Placemaking will migrate to ThoughtFarmer 2.0, which includes email-based signals when a requested page changes. In addition, Placemaking's updated intranet will include content tagging, social bookmarking, and "related content" links. It is hoped that these system enhancements, all part of McAfee's "SLATES" formula for Enterprise 2.0 collaboration, will increase participation on Placemaking's intranet.
Everyone-can-edit is a foreign concept
Some users do not edit intranet content because the concept is so foreign.
For example, one user posted a comment to a page with a recommended change: "Tracy, can we change out CW's name for John's? What is the procedure for updating the entire paragraph?" The user could have made the change himself by clicking the prominent "Edit this page" button.
User interface issues aside, if the user expected the ability to edit content, he would have found the edit button. But many users are still not expecting this ability. This cultural shift will take time.
In a large company, the cost of an effective enterprise collaboration platform is trivial compared with the value of the knowledge that is shared. Placemaking's total investment in their intranet, including customizations and information architecture consulting, was under $100,000. That money is recouped by one construction manager implementing the suggestion to use a light broker.
Additionally, Hutton is convinced that the social software aspects of the intranet have strengthened the feeling of community at the company and helped foster loyalty among employees. These tacit benefits represent a return on investment that's hard to quantify.
Currently, about 50 percent of Placemaking employees do not edit the intranet. But employees can't be forced to participate. They have to first see and believe that participating benefits them. That's a cultural shift that will take time.
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