Sunday, February 18, 2007

Building the Perfect Beast

Nielsen Norman Group's Ten Best Intranets of the Year is becoming a must-have for people tasked with designing or re-designing an intranet. And while the 2003 version honors intranets from companies large and small and a variety of industries for their designs, it also highlights the evolution of the intranet from an online phone directory and news service to an essential part of the business process and workflow.

Then ten best intranets chosen for the report belong to Amadeus Global Travel Distribution from Spain; energy giant ChevronTexaco; Web design agency Design Matters, Inc.; FIGG Engineering Group, a consultancy specializing in bridges; Fujitsu Siemens Computers of Germany; brand strategy consultancy Landor Associates; the Mayo Clinic medical research center; North Tyneside College in the U.K.; the United States Coast Guard; and Wachovia Corp., the fifth largest bank in the United States.

Judging by some of the names on the list, you might imagine these intranets go beyond providing a company phone directory and the local news and weather — and you'd be right. In fact, a movement away from the local and national news headlines is just part of a bigger shift in the role the best intranets play in their companies.

In its report, the Nielsen Norman Group found people didn't appreciate having the news headlines on their intranet because there are other resources for that (so long as the users have external Web access). The idea that the company intranet needs to be a Yahoo!-type directory that is all things to all people has been replaced. After all, look at the budget and staff it takes to run Yahoo!

Today, the focus has switched to adding value. In place of news headlines, the best intranets feature company news and information that make employees better informed and increase employee morale. The national news headlines are gone; replaced instead with detailed, industry-specific news you cannot find in the newspaper or on CNN.

"Early intranets didn't support work tools or tasks," Jakob Nielsen, co-founder of the Nielsen Norman Group and a renowned expert on usability, told Intranet Journal. "Now, intranets are going toward being a work support tool."

A case in point is the intranet at Landor, which tracks current projects and provides case histories, including visual assets from past branding projects. Design Matters uses a green-yellow-red stoplight-type system to track project stages. The Mayo Clinic intranet tracks the availability of beds at its facilities.

The report found that one trait common in the best intranets is that instead of making users find relevant information on the site, information is being given to the users. Applications that save time and money are more abundant. In some cases, users have told intranet administrators what they'd like to see. "It might also be part of the bigger trend in IT toward 'Let's get down to productivity,'" Nielsen said.

A Pox Upon That E-Mail

Just about everyone has a problem with e-mail. If your job is security, it makes you lose sleep; if you have to collaborate on projects, you hate getting eight people replying just to say "O.K." If your workflow consists of e-mailing attachments, you hate the multiple versions sitting in your e-mail, which doesn't even search for attachments; and everyone hates spam.

Nielsen calls e-mail a "lousy interface for collaboration." In response to one or all of the above issues, the best intranets have taken many of the collaboration and file-sharing tasks formerly handled by e-mail and included them in their designs. E-mail habits may prove hard to break, but document repositories with file transfer mechanisms are replacing e-mail attachments on intranets. Discussion boards that can bring people together and archive discussions have replaced e-mail messages.

Bringing relevant information to intranet users does present one challenge: the fine line between offering them the information they need when they log-on and overwhelming them with too much information. Nielsen said the answer to this problem is inherent in an intranet environment. If you know a person's job title, supervisor, employees and location, then you already have most of the information you need to filter the information they need to see.

So why doesn't every organization have an intranet that keeps employees informed and delivers applications that help them get their job done? In many cases, Nielsen said, the predominant attitude within organizations is that intranets don't provide ROI.

"The focus is on technology savings, such as the number of servers," Nielsen said. This attitude ignores what organizations save in employee time and productivity. A poor intranet with a poor search can make finding information difficult and time-consuming, which also costs organizations money. "Most companies don't get that," Nielsen said.

The Nielsen Norman Group report, which will be issued again with ten new best intranet examples in 2005, runs 175 pages and costs $98 for a single report ($248 for the report and a site license to make copies within your organization and place on your own intranet). It has become a valuable resource for intranet developers because intranets are rarely seen by those outside of an organization.

A detailed report with numerous screen shots, its goal is to encourage usability and design idea that work. It's also a good opportunity to see how your intranet stacks up against 10 of the best. For more information on the report, visit: http://www.nngroup.com/reports/intranet/2003/