New BBC Gateway homepage

Well we went live at 8am this morning with the new homepage, plus redesigned landing pages. An all staff email has been sent out and feedback is starting to arrive.

As you can imagine it’s pretty full on here, so for now here’s a peek at the homepage and I’ll let you know what the headlines are later.

Before

Before; Gateway homepage 12 April 2011

After

After; New BBC Gateway homepage 13 April 2011

New BBC homepage

BBC Gateway homepage

So what’s been happening? Well loads actually. We go live with a redesigned Gateway homepage tomorrow at 8am, following lots of planning and activities behind the scenes. The result is very diifferent to what we currently have and this new design clearly meets three objectives;

• Communicate.

• Collaborate.

• Do stuff.

Now I could have provided you all with the extremely boring business objectives that we needed to meet, and were part of our business case and you can see them if you want, but these three sum them up. I don’t particularly like business bingo speak, so let’s not run unnecessary stuff up the flagpole and see what synergies emerge. Let’s keep it simple.

In addition we’ve done some content removal too. I have some impressive figures I could share, but won’t bore you with. Except maybe for one; we’ve reduced 78 glossaries to two. And that’s still one too many.

There are lots of other figures that I will keep to myself for the time being and use when the bosses ask how we’re getting on.

Now you’re probably wondering what the journey was to get to where we are, and what the end result looks like?

Well firstly we followed the established journey of research, design, refine, redesign, review and publish. Did we spend enough time and thoroughness at each stage? Probably not.  But you know what? It’s technology – if it isn’t right we can change it quickly enough.

What does the end result look like? Well I can’t show you that I’m afraid, not until after we’ve officially gone live. Over the past few weeks we’ve been sharing what we plan to launch with any BBC employees who were interested our work in progress so I wouldn’t be surprised if its already available somewhere on the internet, but you will have to wait another few days to see it here.

Once we’ve gone live we will go through a review period and invite BBC users to tell us what they think, then agree what we will deliver as part of the next phase.

Simple really.

Information Age

It’s been a year since I’ve provided an update so this is well overdue. Work gets in the way of blogging, but note to self, must try harder. I’m still very much in the intranet business, just too busy to blog about it.

I’m a subscriber to the paper version (how quaint) of the magazine aimed at IT professionals “Information Age“. Most months I have a cursory glance at it and on rare occasions I may read an article if it interests me.

But I didn’t think I was the magazines primary demographic reader. I’m not technical, am not interested in the kilowattage of an IBM server stack or attending an Enterprise Architecture Summit in the Spring of 2011. But obviously there are people who are interested in these things and thank goodness they are, otherwise I wouldn’t have a job and Information Age wouldn’t have a readership.  But interestingly, Information Age’s editorial vision states ”….magazine for all executives,regardless of job title involved in the application of technology.” So that’s me then?

IT departments are considered to be dour places where tecchies scour screens looking for bugs in darkened rooms. This may well be the case in some companies but this is usually a stereotypical view bandied around by some people who have seen “The IT Crowd”; like me. But this isn’t fair.

The technical people I know are intelligent professionals who know their stuff, live ordinary lives and merely choose to spend their work time doing technical things that are simply beyond me. And that’s the way it should be. I shouldn’t need to understand the intricacies of how networks work. They should just work. Network managers? You do your gig and I’ll do mine; without each other we’d be lost. Sorted.

But, and it’s a BIG but……very few companies these days have no IT presence, so it’s vital the people responsible for IT solutions are fully aware of why a business does what it does and more importantly how it goes about doing it. It’s also just as important that the business managers also understand how IT helps achieve the aims of the company.

Whilst this is the nirvana a company can aim toward, the reality is usually very different. As I said at the start of this piece, work gets in the way; and we normally get judged on whether we actually deliver our objectives. It’s normally unusual to be judged on how we’ve actually gone about doing so and stating “after spending three days, I learned how finance balance the books and we need to reduce IT spend” doesn’t garner brownie points at appraisal time. Well not in my experience anyway. Unless your appraisal system acknowledges your behaviour and you receive recognition (or otherwise) for how you go about achieving what you achieve, IT folks behaviour won’t change. We’ll just continue to blindly deliver what we think is right irrespective of what the business needs actually are.

I have a reputation for challenging existing behaviour, which includes my own. I also have a reputation for trying to simplify things. I’ve lost count of the amount of responses I’ve received from IT folks to a suggestion that I didn’t consider to be particularly radical, and which will ultimately benefit the business, which were along the lines of surprise, denial or just plainly ignored seemingly because they’re “off the wall”, like the most recent example which includes implementing a common approach to delivering internet (yes, not “intranet”. I now have additional  responsibilities for the BBC’s corporate internet and they offer similar opportunities to rationalise our approach even further) development solutions which will reduce overall spend on both design activities and ongoing daily support. My stakeholder stated that she was very supportive of such an approach but also said  ”we’re different to the rest of the business, so have different needs.” Errr, no you aren’t and no you don’t.

Some people seem to enjoy hanging onto outdated systems to meet localised needs, with little thought to pan company requirements, encumbered by bureaucratic processes that simply don’t meet the needs of the user and therefore hinder the business’ objectives. This is an outdated view. A very outdated view.

All companies should ensure at least one of each of their employees’ objectives, and against which they should all be measured, should include innovation, which will improve a business’ success rate. The innovative ideas don’t necessarily need to be big or particularly ground breaking (though if they are then great) but they should demonstrate how things will be “better” as a result of delivering them, and they should clearly demonstrate how they contribute to a business’ success.  And managers should have an additional objective to make sure their people meet this objective. This doesn’t mean it needs to be an onerous bureaucratic process, but it should encourage employees to think differently. The best ideas come from opportunities that break the established model.

People should be acknowledged for innovation, taking measured risks, challenging the status quo and implementing change (no matter how small). If they choose not to, then they should should be mandated to contribute or encouraged to go and work elsewhere. Maybe for themselves, and then they would understand how important change is.

http://www.information-age.com/

Intranet managers pay

Loads of money

Are you worth what you get paid?

As part of our drive to become more “transparent” to the licence fee payers, the BBC announced a while ago that it would be regularly publishing the salary bands of it’s highest earners. The BBC board’s salaries have always been available in the annual report, but the BBC took the unusual step of announcing the salaries earned by the next management level down and this information has already been made public. Apparently it’s raised a few eyebrows internally; probably understandably.

Later in September, the BBC will announce the next highest 100 earners within the organisation. This is in addition to the publication of expenses claimed by senior BBC managers as a result of requests made from the public as provided by the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act.

At last weeks Edinburgh TV Festival, questions were asked about “talent” pay and calls made for the BBC to disclose what it pays its high profile performers. The actor and comedian, Alan Davies, has already been subjected to a 25% pay cut for his role as Jonathan Creek; http://tinyurl.com/mvr48v

Director of BBC Vision, Jana Bennett, stated in Edinburgh “The BBC is in a market; in the broader sense it’s part of the creative industries. It performs a fundamentally different role than that performed by, for example, policemen or teachers. It is a category error to suggest that the public would actually be able to contribute to working out what we do about it. It’s like me talking about Tom Cruise’s movie deals. I’m not of that sector.” http://tinyurl.com/knvxe3

So as we become more open regarding our top earners’ salaries, would you be happy to have your salary become common knowledge within the intranet industry? Would it affect our salaries if companies benchmarked their intranet people positions with other organisations?

I would imagine that our HR departments already do some form of pay benchmarking exercise as part of their role in setting job descriptions commensurate with pay scales, but I’ve seen little evidence of a consistent and common approach.  As intranet managers tend to sit in different departments within differing organisations, this doesn’t appear to be an exact science. There’s also the complication of aligning salaries internally within the appropriate existing pay bands.

Would the publication of our collective pay help the intranet business overall or are we all too secretive about what we earn?

Views?

You can also choose to respond to the poll below. The results are just for fun obviously.

How will the role of the intranet manager evolve?

I’m in the process of completing a survey of our intranet practices, for a well known consultant in the intranet industry. One of the questions was “How do you see the role of the intranet manager evolve over the next 3 to 4 years?” and it got me thinking.

The role of the intranet manager going forward will be determined by the vision of the senior managers within the part of the business who own it. If they’re brave enough to acknowledge the importance of the role and how a fully supported team of people can make significant efficiencies within the buisness, then the intranet manager will thrive.

Alas many organisations are extremely short sighted in their approaches and the intranet only becomes important when its actually not available.  This in itself, indicates how important intranets are, and therefore how crucial an intranet managers role is.

But it is also upto to us to help ourselves. We need to be ambassadors for change, and challenge the way things are done in our businesses, as well as demonstrating our understanding of what the business wants from its intranet. I see far too many intranet managers who don’t understand the needs of their business. This is a self defeating approach.

We need to get out there and regularly be seen to clearly support what the organisation is trying to deliver, and what we can do to help it achieve its objectives.

Hide in your ivory towers at your peril.

Is Sharepoint the way to go for an intranet homepage?

We’re about to take a deep breath and decide what to do with our intranet homepage. We don’t know yet, but we’re doing some user research and hopefully that’ll give us a feel for how well the current homepage is doing in terms of delivering user needs. Also we’ll get a feel for what users expect from the homepage going forward.

Then will come the challenge in delivering what’s needed. We have Sharepoint in the company so it would seem to make sense to use it wouldn’t it?

But what have been your experiences of using Sharepoint as the basis for your homepage? Good/Bad/Indifferent?

Who has their intranet homepage hosted and delivered via Sharepoint?

And what functionality have you implemented using Sharepoint on your homepage? Does it work? Has it made your organisation more effective?

Intranet content vs intranet strategy

Having been in the intranet business for over ten years, it’s always interesting to see advice such as this being made available to “intranet professionals.” “Intranet Content programming – Connect with your Audience”

As an “intranet professional” myself it never fails to amaze me that such basic advice needs to be provided to intranet people. Whilst I fully understand that not every organisation is at a similar level of maturity in terms of their intranet journeys, if “intranet professionals” need to be told such fundamental things as these, I would seriously question the recruitment policies in place in those organisations that account for the employment of said individuals in the first place. This is kindergarden stuff for intranet toddlers.

Because I’ve been doing intranets for 10+ years, maybe that makes me a grand-daddy of intranet (because we all know an intranet year is the equivalent of a dog year) and perhaps I’ve moved on from some of the basics, (and I suppose it doesn’t hurt to be reminded) but let’s be honest, if you don’t understand your audience needs and write content to engage them, then you may as well go back to whatever it is you did before you became an “intranet professional”.

But one point to remember. An intranet is rarely one entity/site. It’s usually a collective of sites all wrapped up in a convenient wrapper called the intranet – or whatever your title maybe. Therefore by definition of course each site/section will need to be written for it’s intended audience, but held together with a common approach. Just like a newspaper with all its different sections, each one is written for a specific audience, but with the same editorial style. But in the intranet world this can only be really achieved with extremely good governance (including training) and/or an authorising process that involves layers of management approving all content before publication; much like an editor’s role on a newspaper. And that to me, smacks of far too much centralised control. The beauty of a content management system is you can devolve responsibility to the right individual in the business – hopefully an expert in their field – and then get the audience to determine directly with that owner what content works and what doesn’t. As intranet managers are we really all that bothered with localised content? I don’t see that as my role – that’s the responsibility of the author.

The role of an intranet manager is to ensure the strategy is in place to take the intranet forward and meet business objectives, ensure there is adequate sponsorship from the correct stakeholders in the business and that all the support mechanisms are tried, tested and of use. That’s what intranet managers should be focussing on.

Oh and what criteria actually determines an “intranet professional”? The fact that I simply call myself one - is that sufficient?

I’ve been advocating for years the introduction of an academic qualification that recognises the value intranet people bring to their companies. A formal qualification that recognises our abilities and gives our roles far more creedence is the only way forward. Other industries have had them for years. And as I’ve already said the intranet industry has been around for the equivalent of 50+ dog years it’s about time we had the same.

I know the Intranet Benchmarking Forum (IBF) are working with Warwick University and exploring such opportunities. let’s hope something comes of it soon.

Self service – a good thing?

This blogging malarky is ok if you have the time to do it. It’s ok for those ‘professional bloggers’ who’s job it is to regale us all with their tales of derring do, and who get paid to impart pearls of wisdom. It must be great to do blogging all day, when there are no other demands on your time. Like work, or life. Even better if you’re a “blogger in residence”, like the BBC employs. Blog, blog, blog – all day long. What a great gig to have.

But for us normal folk, who have to fit it in around our day jobs, it isn’t so easy to keep a regular dialogue with our readers. And also finding the time to read all those pearls of wisdom; well they always seem to drop down the (electronic) to-do list.

Now self service. Over the past few years intranets have evolved into far more than their original objective of delivering communications to an organisations workforce. Most companies I know have now delivered on-line self service and are heading toward, what Razorfish describe as ’The Consolidated Workplace Interface’ within the ‘The Intranet Maturity Framework’, which is basically psycho-babble for outlining what stages intranets go through on their ever evolving journey. I hate business speak, so for me it’s bleeding obvious. Intranets evolve based on user needs and organisational objectives. Period. Give it whatever fancy title you want, but the outcome is the same. Why don’t companies speak in plain langauage? After all we tell our intranet publishers to? Same rules apply. It’s not big and it’s not clever.

Anyway, maybe the world is taking this whole self service malarky too far. I was in Tesco’s yesterday and for those of who who don’t have someone to do their shopping for them, you will have noticed that they, plus many other supermarket chains, have introduced self service kiosks whereby you can self scan your goods and (allegedly) get through the queues far quicker. Or at least that’s the idea. In my experience they’re not quicker as they either don’t work as they should or they’re out of order. On the few occasions I’ve used them, they hold you up ‘cos you’ve bought alcohol and an assistant has to come over to verify that you’re over 21. What is this – the States? I thought 18 was the legal age to drink booze?

This entails a supermarket employee (and there’s only ever one doing this, as others stand around and scratch their heads wondering what to do next) coming over, checking your password, driving licence and birth certificate, plus ringing your parents to ensure you are a) who you say you are, b) old enough to drink and c) a ‘responsible’ drinker, by only buying Chablis instead of their crappy supermarket brand, and giving you permission’ to ‘purchase’ their goods.  Gee thanks. Oh yes and they usually ring Gordon Brown to make sure it’s ok too. They should ring Paddy Pantsdown, he’d say yes in a flash!

Now I know the reasons why they need to do this, so no emails please Mr Leahy. Well we wouldn’t want gangs of teenagers drinking White Lightning on the corners of every street corner in the UK would we? Not like in my day. No that’s all been resolved now thanks to “responsible selling” of the corporate supermarket conglomerates. In my day we just used to send in the oldest kid in the gang and he’d buy it for us. Or the local drunk. Kids these days haven’t worked that one out yet. Errr, yeah right.

So avoiding the self serve terminals I placed my goods onto the very long runway which transported them half way across the supermarket to the stern looking cashier ensconsed in front of the screen that takes your money. Now she was under pressure to scan them all. Phew that looks like hard work I thought as I hastily packed everything into the one bag she presented me (they’ve removed self service for helping yourselves to bags – summat to do with the environment, but that’s easily solved – use paper instead of plastic – the States have been doing it for years – derr. How hard can it be?). So she scans and I pack. Notice there are no longer the runways at the customer end anymore, so now all these employees have to actually stretch to pass the goods on. Blimey, I think she nearly broke out into a sweat.

Then comes payment time. After providing my Clubcard (those points add up you know and will pay for most of the days out next year for my girlfriend and I if I plan it properly) the ‘cashier’ scans it and mumbles under her breath what the bill comes too. Luckily I catch what she said and then have to insert my payment card into the terminal (I have a Tesco credit card so I earn extra points on that too – double bubble, but don’t tell ‘em – we’re thinking of going on a world cruise on the proceeds soon – might see Leahy whilst we’re at it) and enter my PIN.

Now here’s the rub. In the olden days, the cashier would hand me my receipt. No longer. Oh no. I have to take it off the printer myself. A very small thing I accept, but an intrinsic step toward the deterioration of customer service, which let’s be honest Tesco has done quite well in the past. I’m all for me, me, me, but c’mon isn’t this taking things too far? And if you visit the cafe in these establishments you have to help yourself to the food laid out in front of you. Cuts down on serving staff you see. I know these things as many years I was responsible for implementing such new trends. Yes I’m to blame.

So what’s this got to do with intranets I hear you say? Well quite a lot actually. Are we not in danger of implementing on-line services that we have to negotiate and navigate with little understanding of what we’re actually doing which then results in more work for the employee? Most companies have self serve operations on-line that merely meet the requirements of the organisation at the expense of the employee. I know – I’ve been responsible for implementing some of them – blimey the charges are adding up M’Lord. We’ve all experienced crappy expenses systems, HR procedures and finance processes that are so mind numbingly complex we simply give up ‘cos it’s too hard. Usually to the overall benefit of the organisation.

All these systems do is throw the problem over the wall to the employees and relinquish the responsibilty of their rightful owners, who merely state they’ve been “user tested” – yes they have, usually amongst stakeholders in who’s interest it is to reduce costs. But the overall cost to the business goes unmeasured. We all know it increases.

So some self restraint is in order I reckon. If it isn’t fit for users to use then don’t do it. just ‘cos it meets the business objective does not absolve owners from their responsibility.

And as for Tesco’s? Well on-line shopping is obviously the only way to go. Either that or support your local shops.

And finally. If Tesco’s could also put my goods into my cupboards for me when you arrive then that would be perfect. Oh yes and remove the delivery charge - it wipes out the benefits I get from your loyalty points and I’m saving up for my world cruise, so I can have dinner with that lovely Mr Terry Leahy.

Intranets everywhere……….

Most companies have ‘em. And most companies employ people to manage them. Some companies even do it well, and inevitably some don’t.

Lots of guff is said about intranets. Most of it nonsense, some of it is technical (yawn) and occasionally words of wisdom seep through from people who’ve been there from the start. And who know what they’re talking about.

This blog will be forthright, opinionated and to the point. Like me; funny that. I’ll tell it like it is. I’ll cut through the crap so you don’t have to.

Will I know what I’m talking about? Well that’s for you to decide. Readers determine what’s popular and relevant. In this internet age we all have a voice, but only the most interesting writers have an audience. Crap floats to the bottom and the cream floats to the surface.

This blog will provide views, opinions and commentary on what’s going on in the world that I work in. Intranet.

I’ve been doing this for about 10 years and have the scars to prove it. Some things I’ve got right, some things I haven’t and some I really don’t care about.

As I said a lot of guff is said about Intranets. This blog won’t add to it.

But there will be things said here that you don’t agree with. That’s ok. I don’t care one way or the other to be honest. But what this blog won’t be is boring. I’ll leave that to others. They know who they are.

So what shall I start off with? Now let me think……………..