Christy Season is senior intranet strategist for SCANA, a major energy holding company based in Columbia, SC. Her SCANA team developed an intranet that is highly popular with employees and has garnered widespread recognition. All the excellence and acceptance has been achieved on a shoestring budget. SCANA is a great example of what a corporate team can accomplish through team-based innovation, cooperation and effort.
Q: Based on the feedback you get from employees, what do they want most in their company intranet and how has their perspective changed, if at all, in the past three years?
Christy Season: About four or so years ago, the intranet was primarily a communication tool. Over the past few years, more of the applications and work tools have moved online and on our intranet. Also, more employees are using SharePoint for collaborative project and team Web sites. So, today the intranet has become more of a combination of communications and critical work applications and tools. We surveyed employees back in November and employees told us they are looking for greater customization and personalization on the intranet. Employees want to visit the intranet and see links to tools and communications that are tailored to their role and work environment. We have plans this year to develop new functionality for our intranet that will allow employees to customize the information on the intranet home page.
Q: What are the most popular features and tools on your intranet?
Christy Season: The most popular tools on our intranet are the search features. The People Search is the most popular and was the highest rated tool by employees on the recent intranet survey. The intranet content search is also very popular. On the previous version of our intranet, we did not have a working content search. Employees can now search our intranet by keywords and it has really helped with employee productivity. Other than the search features, our Health, Wealth and Careers section is the most visited part of the intranet.
Q: What are some of your biggest lessons learned from managing your intranet through the years (anything you may want to add about your measurement techniques would be helpful)?
Christy Season: The greatest lesson is that it is important to develop a collaborative relationship with your IT department when it comes to the intranet. The intranet is managed by Corporate Communications, but in a close partnership with our IT department. This has proven to be very successful for both teams, and was one of the driving forces behind our recent intranet redesign.
We have also learned that it’s important to involve employees early on in any major changes involving the intranet. We held several usability tests with groups of employees prior to starting our intranet redesign, including a card sorting exercise. We learned what categories employees saw information falling into, which greatly helped us determine the major navigation categories for our new intranet. We also involved employees prior to launching the new intranet by creating an employee pilot group that was given early access to the new site. The pilot group found some typos and other errors we had overlooked, and they also provided additional insight about the new site that helped us make some final tweaks and adjustments so the site was ready for all employees. Now we plan to continuously improve our intranet by seeking employee feedback with surveys and usability testing.
We’ve also learned that our search tool is only as good as we make it – meaning that it’s not a one time install for success. We continuously monitor our search analytics to see what employees are looking for and what searches are successful and which ones are not. Then we fine tune the search tool, search results, and site content to make finding information on our intranet easier for employees.
Q: What advice do you have for communicators looking to upgrade their intranet or add/enhance their social media tools?
Christy Season: My advice is to start with your employees – pulling together a group of employees who represent your employee population and asking them what their ideal intranet would be can give you incredible insight into what will work for your organization. What works for one company will not always work for another. Having employee volunteers participate in early testing on intranet mock ups or prototypes can identify issues early on with your design, long before you spend the resource time and potential money.
Social media should not be implemented internally without a strategy. You shouldn’t provide your employees with social media tools without first having a communication strategy and guidelines in place for using the tools. It only makes sense to use the tools if it’s driving a greater goal – for example, generating ideas around an important company initiative or providing employees with a way to find subject matter experts within the company to help on a project.
Q: You have accomplished a great deal on a small budget? What’s the secret to your success?
Christy Season: We have a small Corporate Communications team and an even smaller intranet team. With our most recent intranet redesign, we identified content owners for departmental specific communications sites on our intranet. We created a template for the department sites and trained the content owners on how to build and maintain their own department site. We keep a close partnership with this group of content owners, but the content owners themselves manage and maintain their sites with little assistance from our group. This group has essentially become an extension of the communications department. It was a huge win for both parties – freeing up resources on our end to focus on other initiatives, while empowering the content owners to own and instantly update their content.
Enbridge
Andrea Legault is advisor, interactive communications, for Enbridge, a leading North American energy company. In addition to constructing a first-class intranet, Enbridge’s main development challenge was to build a capability that would enable the company to effectively integrate information flow across the organization’s six business units.
Q: Based on the feedback you get from employees, what do they want most in their company intranet and how has their perspective changed, if at all, in the past three years?
Andrea Legault: The latest iteration of our intranet was launched in October of 2008. The former intranet was plagued with outdated content, structural deficiencies and poor content organization. Employees regularly shared their frustration with the site structure, navigation, the ability to find relevant information and search results. Based on that feedback, one of the main objectives of our redesign was to create a site that could accommodate the needs of six different business units while providing a sense of unity and community in one fluid design.
Q: What are the most popular features and tools on your intranet?
Andrea Legault: People Search is definitely the most popular feature of our site. The tool allows employees to get information about their colleagues in one click: their phone number; email; office location; and, most recently, their photo. People Search has contributed greatly to building connections between employees and it’s definitely the top-mentioned item when people are asked what they like about the site.
In addition to People Search, the Application Links section – which provides links to frequently used applications and tools in one location – and the News section are also widely-used.
Q: What are some of your biggest lessons learned from managing your intranet through the years (anything you may want to add about your measurement techniques would be helpful)?
Andrea Legault: Adoption of our new intranet site is high, as is satisfaction. Our post launch survey showed that satisfaction with the site has increased 43% over the former site and employees visit the site significantly more often than the previous intranet.
One of the things lacking with the old site was governance. There was no accountability for ensuring that content was added and maintained over time so we focused very heavily on governance with our new intranet and it has paid off.
The site is governed by a steering committee, an operating committee responsible for the day-to-day operations of the site, and a content management team that includes the editor-in-chief, site managers, and content authors, approvers and owners. To instill greater accountability, many employees have this responsibility included as part of their yearly objective setting and performance process.
Q: What advice do you have for communicators looking to upgrade their intranet or add/enhance their social media tools?
Andrea Legault: Do your research. Ask your employees what matters most to them; and when you have the answer, make sure you deliver. Employee involvement has a big impact; employees from across the organization were involved in the planning, design, development and roll-out of our site, helping to ensure that the result was user-centric and took into consideration how employees worked and what information needed to be readily available.
Q: Re your specific intranet at Enbridge, how you do work with your six business units in assuring consistency of content?
Andrea Legault: The site’s editor-in-chief is responsible for accuracy and quality of content across all business units and we also have individual site managers that support content contributors within their own business unit.
The site managers work very closely with one another, and with the editor-in-chief, to ensure there is consistency across the site and we also encourage content contributors to remain aware of content outside of their own business unit, therefore reducing duplication and increasing consistency. This is all combined with regular reviews of the site, and adherence to content and branding guidelines.
Q: Also, please comment about your "lite" remote access capability as that's a high interest topic with communicators.
Andrea Legault: One of the business goals of the intranet redesign was to build a sense of community. elink “lite” was created to ensure that employees in remote locations have access to the information they need on the intranet. It’s accessible on all mobile devices and provides a quick view of the information users regularly access in their day-to-day work. A link to the full intranet is also provided for convenience.
Q: Any closing comments you care to offer?
Andrea Legault: The creation and management of our intranet was, and remains to be, a collaborative approach, with involvement from all business units and offices, in both Canada and the U.S., where we operate. It’s this collaborative approach that has really made our intranet successful. There is a real sense of ownership, and pride, on all levels and that has made a tremendous impact on the quality of the product we have.
JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory)
If you have heard of Mars Rover and other planet and star voyaging spacecraft, you know JPL. It’s the NASA center that manages robotic spacecraft exploration of Earth, the solar system and the universe. Frank O’Donnell is Manager of the Institutional Communications Office for JPL and worked closely with IT and internal/external teams to enhance the technology and design of the agency’s intranet and internet.
Q: Based on the feedback you get from employees, what do they want most in their company intranet and how has their perspective changed, if at all, in the past three years?
Frank O’Donnell: Our employees want speed and simplicity. They told us that when they looked at our intranet they were overwhelmed with the amount of information. If they wanted to do a search, they had to use several different search engines to find different categories of information. That’s by far the biggest takeaway from the feedback we received from them.
Q: What are the most popular features and tools on your intranet?
Frank O’Donnell: That’s easy – our quick find feature is the most popular aspect of our intranet. We had used different search engines in different parts of our intranet. Now, we have one, consolidated and powerful search tool.
Q: What are some of your biggest lessons learned from managing your intranet through the years (anything you may want to add about your measurement techniques would be helpful)?
Frank O’Donnell: We learned just how strongly employees feel about having an intranet that works for them and their need for speed, fast access, and good applications. The other big thing we learned is the importance of finding the right mix of information to put on the intranet – adding enough to meet the needs of the organization while avoiding information overload in the eyes of employees. Different people have different thought processes in what they perceive they need and how they access it. That’s why you must look for clues in your metrics which provide a guide in what they access and look at on the intranet.
Q: What advice do you have for communicators looking to upgrade their intranet or add/enhance their social media tools?
Frank O’Donnell: Work closely with your IT organization, In fact, our Office of the CIO really took the lead in developing our new intranet site, so I have to give them the credit for all of its best features. Beyond that, have a unified approach, put in a great search engine, reduce clutter and improve applications. Put somebody in charge – for the editorial content on our intranet we have a team leader who acts as the editor-in-chief. Another thing we were sensitive to is coordination of the look of our external web site and our internal web site. We established some similarities between the two sites but also want them to look a little different so employees could know at a glance whether they were on an internal or external website.
Q: One of the most interesting aspects of your intranet redesign is the move to improve user mobility. Could you explain what you did?
Frank O’Donnell: We added an iPhone app for the internal workforce and also have it on the external web. For internal use, it’s designed to provide access to basic information such as people lookups, maps, shuttle bus routes and so forth. Externally, we began with a basic text mobile site that works on just about all smartphones, and expanded with a graphics-rich version specifically for iPhone. Last month, we released an iPhone app called Space Images that’s been getting very good attention. It was recently featured on Apple’s top iPhone app page as a Staff Favorite.
Q: What does your intranet home page look like?
Frank O’Donnell: We have a Flash module that toggles between our top three news stories. The stories are at the top of the page. Some people like it, others don’t, and our IT team is looking at a way to provide a customized setting to allow people to permanently pause the Flash if they want to. Then there is the search capability to content such as meeting notices and general announcements, and an area with links to external news stories about JPL. People also have the ability to personalize the page and bookmark places on the intranet. We have a section with organization charts that acts as a portal of sorts to all the various departmental and function sites. The IT team also put a box with each user’s training status on the home page because of the importance here at JPL of mandatory training in areas such as ethics and IT security. When they visit the intranet site, each individual sees a stop light graphic that tells them if they are green, yellow or red in terms of where they stand in completing their required training.
Q: Any closing thoughts?
Frank O’Donnell: We’ve had very positive response to our enhanced intranet. The real credit for it belongs to the IT team from our Office of the CIO who took the lead in its development. All in all we had an excellent experience with this collaboration, and look forward to adding more features for our internal audience.