Rebuild Your Intranet Without IT | BTalk Australia

In the past Intranets were bespoke offerings, often built as a jumble of various applications and static content with varying degrees of relevance and accuracy. If that’s what your business is living with, now is the time to start again. Products like the Ad-Web Agency’s Intranet Dashboard make it easier to build from scratch. With less day to day involvement from the IT department it also provides an opportunity to think about who is in-charge of the corporate Intranet. Connie Pandos, co-founder of the Ad-Web agency, has a suggestion.

Who do you think should manage the Intranet? Add comments in the Talkback section at the end of this post.

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• Transcription

Phil Dobbie: Hello. I’m Phil Dobbie, and welcome to BTalk Australia. Today, intranets. Do they do what they should? Are they as expensive as they once were? And who should be in charge?

The corporate intranet. There was a time when it was there but rarely visited. It was run by HR. It was as boring as hell and it never changed. Has that changed? Well, Connie Pandos is the co-founder of the Ad-Web Agency, which is an Aussie business who design websites and intranets for clients. And they’ve got a pretty neat product called the Intranet DASHBOARD (iD) as well. So Connie, was that a good description, what do you think of the old style intranet? And are some of those still around today do you think?

Connie Pandos: I think that certainly the old type of intranet is still around. But what is prevalent is the electronic communication that’s increasing and whatever form your intranet takes, if it is in the beast that you described, then it will inevitably change in the near future. And because electronic communication in an organisation is only increasing every day regardless of how big or small you are. And so your intranet is a place to manage that effectively.

Dobbie: It used to be a pretty static process, didn’t it? It used to be a way of various departments pushing information out to employees. But now I guess the key word is collaboration. It’s a lot of collaborative tools that might have existed individually in the business and are being pulled together on the intranet.

Pandos: I think that people are definitely using collaborative tools in an organisation today in an effective manner to create content, create information. And what I think sometimes gets confused though is that collaboration aligns is an intranet, which it’s not. I think an intranet is an environment that governs the content and enables that to be available. It’s a source of truce if you like. It’s a place where people know that they’re going to find information that they trust. Information that is timely. It’s up-to-date, and it’s always there when you need it or want it.

Dobbie: Should everyone have a different intranet? Again, the old style intranet was one size fits all. But I think increasingly, depending on your job, people are tailoring the content or having that content tailored for them. Is that important?

Pandos: I’m not sure whether one style fits all with the past. I think organisations certainly have had very common needs for intranet environments. Over time, what we discovered as a business where we were making bespoke intranets available was that most businesses wanted most of the same things out of an intranet.

Dobbie: So there’s commonality between what businesses might want in terms of intranets. I think my point was about each individual user within a business, actually I think you touched on it, might want to personalise or tailor content specific to them. Now personalisation is one of those things that in the public-facing world on consumer portals, for example, that we went through a phase where everyone was offering personalisation, but very few people took it up. Is that happening in the intranet world? Or is it an important element of an intranet?

Pandos: Personalisation will increase within an intranet environment. The future certainly will have that kind of, you know, my intranet environment growing. What contained in that environment. What is actually part of that personalised environment is certainly a question that management has to ask of their needs. Because people may want that social aspect to their own personalised environment. However, management may also have certain requirements of information that they want them to receive, and they don’t want them to block out. So I think there’s a balance going forward with personalisation. I think that it’s definitely a shift in the way people communicate. That they have a need for a more social level of communication. And a more social way to distribute and share information about themselves on a professional basis within the organisation, and about what they’re doing and what they actually want to make available to others to share in their knowledge, etc.

However there is always the question that management asks in regard to how is this benefiting the workspace? And so it needs to have a balance between the two, this prolific display, access and production of communication and information. It’s somewhat unruly, and I think that you need to have some parameters around that to actually then make sure that strategic objectives for communication are met within that framework.

Dobbie: Which brings on the question — so a bit of order makes a lot of sense, but who applies that order? Does it become an HR function to manage an intranet? Is it an IT job? Is it marketing? Who do you think is best placed in a large corporate to be responsible for the intranet?

Pandos: I think that the title of an intranet manager, or the job description, is yet to be defined in an organisation. We certainly know this from our own personal efforts of marketing our software iD into the marketplace. It’s like we get our salespeople to pick up the phone and try and find an intranet manager within an organisation it’s not usually a common title. It’s rarely that this title is there. So what you have is that today who runs the intranet is still very grey. It may be part of a role of an HR person. It may be a hat that an IT person wears at times. It certainly is worn a lot of the time by communications departments, and increasingly so.

We do retail cases of research every year called the Global Intranet Benchmarking Survey. And last year one of the very interesting findings from that survey was that the intranet management who actually owned the intranet had seen a significant shift from IT into the business. So 66 percent of people surveyed actually said that intranet management should move away from IT. That governance or that management of an intranet is in the future going to be handled by somebody who will have the title of an intranet manager. And that person I believe will be fairly senior in an organisation. And I’ll just go back to the point about the more and more prevalent information being electronic in an organisation. This is not going to go away. This is not going to change. This is only going to increase, so therefore your intranet’s not going away. The process of it maturing and being considered as very important in an organisation, it’s just probably taking a bit longer than what the technology is actually facilitating the output of that information.

Dobbie: I’ve seen many situations, and being involved in businesses, where in the list of things to do upgrading or starting again with the intranet it’s on the list, but never seems to make it to the top of the list. And I think part of the reason for that is because it’s seen as being expensive and time consuming and difficult to measure the real benefits. Would you agree? And if it did make it to the top of the list, would companies find that those fears are unfounded?

Pandos: I think that today you have a lot of solutions out there that are available. Off-the-shelf products such as Intranet DASHBOARD that can be used to implement a really fantastic environment that not only gives you an intranet, but gives you the ability to have an extranet as well. It allows you to manage your information and your communication. It gives you a product that gives you the ability to have an intranet that is the source of truth. And it is off-the-shelf. Therefore, it offers terrific value for the investment that you make compared to a bespoke project of an intranet.

But in the past or even still today, many organisations will take this path and it baffles me why they do, but they do. And that is that they will go out there and employ an army of consultants and an army of developers to create what effectively you can get out of a product like iD. Because we have developed this product out of years of experience. And we’ve been developing intranets since ‘95. Now that’s a long time in this industry. And in 2004, we released a product that was an off-the-shelf, out of the box, plug and play intranet solution that is used by organisations.

Multinationals like Shell use it to run their intranet globally. And on the other end of the scale SME businesses in Australia use this very same product, but just adapt it and customise it to their specific needs. So I think that people need to let go of the myth that you have to have a product that’s developed specifically for you by a group of people. When in fact there are some fantastic solutions and opportunities out there to actually use products off-the-shelf to get exactly the same objectives. And the other thing I think that people also forget to do is really test what a product needs. Firstly, defining. Going to a vendor and actually saying this is what I need. These are the scenarios about what I would like to achieve out of my intranet.

We recently did an implementation for Jetstar. And that implementation, the process of the vendor selection actually occurred on the scenario based in our office where they had their wish list. And they came to us and said these are the things we want to do. Is your product capable of this? And, of course, they went to other vendors and asked the same question. We said yes, but we didn’t just tick a bunch of boxes that talked about the checklist of functionality. We actually said, yes, and let us show you by creating it for you right here, right now. Showing you that all of what you wish to do is possible from this off-the-shelf product, and we delivered that with great success.

Dobbie: So the IT approach fairly often, and I’ve seen this happen a few times, is let’s go around the business. Let’s spend six months asking the business exactly what it is that they want. Let’s get a very detailed list of requirements. And then let’s put it out to tender and find someone who can actually provide that list of requirements. Whereas in fact the quicker way might actually be well, let’s see what’s available. Let’s look at the functionality and let’s see if it fits what we need.

Pandos: I think so. I think that’s what organisations seem to be open to doing. Is not assuming that because it’s off-the-shelf it’s not good enough.

Dobbie: OK, less control from the IT department, it seems. Employer and intranet manager and look at off-the-shelf packages. I think they’re a few take outs today, aren’t they?

Pandos: They are indeed.

Dobbie: Thanks for your time.

Pandos: Thank you.