If you are BC Place – the venue for the opening and closing ceremonies of the Vancouver 2010 Olympics – you decide that the best way to overcome the internal communication challenges is with an intranet.

BC Place launched their intranet, built on the Intranet Connections software, in July with the goal of improving communication, increasing employee involvement, and enhancing information sharing within the organization.

As this was BC Place’s first foray into an intranet project, the intranet roll-out had to focus on introducing the concept of an intranet.

BC Place wanted to ensure that their intranet caught on with all users and would become a dynamic and widely used resource for corporate information. User education was the way to do it. Their message included:

• What the role of the intranet was to be within the organization
• Intranet site usage policies
• Content strategies
• Boundaries to the type of content that should be included on the intranet

BC Place is currently undergoing major construction to revitalize and modernize the facilities, including the largest retractable roof of its kind in the world (!) so a lot of the information on the intranet is currently comprised of construction news. Other information and popular communities on the site include:

Live Construction Updates
A widget on the site Home Page that pulls a live web cam feed of BC Place so users can view the construction site in real time

Press Releases
An area for employees to see all the latest press updates about BC Place

Road Show Information
A central bulletin board for all the latest information and updates about the community tour going on throughout the province

Employee Directory
A central repository for employees to find contact and location information for their coworkers, across the different facilities. Particularly helpful now that many staff members have moved offices or been moved to the temporary offsite location because of the construction

E-Forms
Streamlines daily business processes as users can quickly find and complete popular forms right through the intranet

Department Sub-Sites
Provides each department with an area to store their dedicated departmental content. Granular access to department info

Job Centre
A central area for BC Place to post job opportunities for its large group of part-time, seasonal employees

Although the IT team at BC Place spearheaded the search for an intranet solution, an intranet development committee has since been set up to ensure that going forward the intranet keeps evolving. The committee plans to meet once a month to discuss content strategies, share ideas for the intranet and plan for ongoing development of the site.

For more information about the features mentioned above, check out Intranet Connections: Intranet 2.0 Software.

More about BC Place

BC Place is the largest sports, exhibition and entertainment venue of its kind in British Columbia, hosting the province’s most notable events, including the Opening and Closing Ceremonies of the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Winter Games. Upon re-opening in 2011, BC Place will be the new home for the Vancouver MLS franchise, will continue to be home to the BC Lions Football Club, the 2011 Grey Cup and many other exhibitions, community and entertainment events. Visit http://www.bcplace.com for more info.

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“A form builder is hardly the sexiest tool out there. But think about it….how many forms do your employees fill out each day? New employee forms, pay change forms, benefits enrollment forms, password change request forms, time off request forms…the list goes on and on. The amount of time and energy (not to mention trees) that can be saved by converting paper forms to electronic forms is staggering.” writes intranet blogger, Sean Nicholson.

A Form Builder delivers huge potential for an intranet site. Does your intranet include an integrated form builder?

Check out Sean’s post

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A fundamental decision in determining the course of an intranet evaluation is:

Do You Build or Do You Buy?

Should You Buy

Packaged intranet software would provide the team at Northwest Medical with the framework for an intranet ready to go and out-of-the-box. The software would be installed on a server and a default intranet site will be served up. At that point the site would be ready to use for populating content, choosing applications and default settings, building and ordering navigation and theming the intranet so that it is in line with NWMC’s branding.

Buy: Cost & ROI

• Low initial cost as pre-built applications are included – no development required
• Time & cost savings on resources – rapid deployment and minimal administration
• Delegation – delegate publishing with CMS functionality
• Up-front costs – no scope creep that leads to increased and unforeseen costs
• Vendor does the work – you have full support & on-going development by the vendor
• Upgrades and added features and functionality offered (usually) at a minimal cost
• Focus on education and adoption vs. development efforts

Rapid intranet deployment allows you to free up resources to move onto other more pressing projects that are valuable to the company.

Should You Build

For NWMC, building a custom intranet could range from a developer building a series of simple HTML pages that are linked together (web 1.0) to building a fully custom CMS intranet with social capabilities (web 2.0) that is often based on an existing development platform like SharePoint or Drupal. An intranet platform provides developers with the foundation and development tools to build an intranet and custom applications. Often a development platform will come with a few customizable applications, or there will be an open source community providing applications for sale that they have built using the platform. Typically these applications require development to fit into your custom needs and you can run into issues with the application no longer supported by the coder. The majority of the work requires a development team and/or consultants with intimate knowledge of the platform to build the intranet, but you have full control over the functionality.

Build: Cost & ROI

• High initial cost – research, focus groups, proof of concept, development
• High # of resources – programmers, designers, DBAs, contractors, consultants, quality assurance
• Cost of platform – purchase a CMS platform but you still have to build and have resources in place
• Ongoing costs – constant development, bug fixes, modifications, new technology, user expectations

Long tail to see ROI as the initial cost of building an intranet can be high.

Buyer Beware

Purchasing intranet software can be considerably cheaper than the cost involved in building a custom intranet but fully investigate the costs involved in obtaining an out-of-the-box solution.

• Ask about hidden fees such as implementation charges, training, and on-going maintenance
• Build in a three – five year projection cost on your investment

Some packaged intranets can have a high price tag depending on the number of users in your organization. Most are modeled on a per user price point (costs listed below are in US dollars).

SharePoint is more of a development platform than a turnkey intranet. There are additional development and consultant fees that go along with a SharePoint implementation. The licensing costs for 1000 users on SharePoint 2010 Enterprise will run you about $195,000.

Janus Boye, founder and managing director of J.Boye recently wrote a blog post “eIntranet: A costly toolbox for stage 1 intranets” where he indicates at 4,000 users eIntranet would cost $250,000.

SaaS pricing models mean you are charged either per month or annually, also based on your number of users.  This is a rolling cost, so it can be appealing for SMB’s to get in at a lower cost, but because you are charged monthly or annually those costs add up quickly. Intranet Dashboard (iD) recently moved to a SaaS pricing model that at $1,500/month for 1000 users equals $72,000 over a four year period, $90,000 in your fifth year and so on.

Ultimately you need to assess value for the money.

See how Intranet Connections: Intranet 2.0 Software can help your company.

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The wiki is broken down into a number of different categories and each category contains links to the resources that IntranetExperience.com relies on for intranet information. Current topics include:

• Hot Topics: features trending subjects in intranet mainly from surveys and LinkedIn discussions
• Intranet Blogs: a list of blogs that are regularly maintained and contains information specific to intranets. The blogs are a valuable source of intranet tips, suggestions and strategies as they are written by various intranet consultants, intranet managers and intranet software vendors
• Intranet Events: a list of upcoming conferences and events that Intranet Managers or Administrators might want to consider attending
• Intranet Communities: a list of online communities and forums for Intranet professionals to connect and share intranet expertise

IntraWiki provides a valuable new avenue for the growing online community of Intranet professionals to contribute and increase their knowledge of intranet resources. Keep an eye on this great up-and-coming intranet resource and feel free to contribute by using the forms at the bottom of each page!

Check out the IntraWiki at: http://www.intranetexperience.com/ourblog/intranet-wiki/

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These days your intranet users are employees who are active with Facebook, YouTube, iTunes and their smart phones. They are more sophisticated and savvy. This doesn’t mean you need to rush out and pay big bucks for an iTunes app on the intranet, but you should be taking a close look at how your intranet provides value to employees. It’s not all about the design, but a few key considerations can go a long way in maximizing the use of your intranet site.

Tip #1 – Make use of new features

When you buy intranet software, you have a fleet of developers providing new features and functionality to your intranet on a regular basis so take advantage of this! When we see a site that is still on version 10 but looks like version 4 we hear “employees don’t like change”. A few weeks later we hear that there are complaints by users who want changes and better functionality. Listen to your employees needs and make use of your upgrades. Implement new features. If they don’t resonate, you can always turn them off.

Tip #2 – Use a clean, fresh design

When you first go live with your intranet, sometimes it’s good to have a bold design theme, lots of graphics and a few boxes on the home page for social-fun content. This helps to drum up interest and attract employees to the new intranet.

That approach does not work well for a mature intranet. Time to drop the big graphics, move the social-fun content down (below the fold) and ensure that front and center you have content that is important to employees and that helps them to be more productive.

To supplement your navigation and help employees find relevant content easier, add a “top 5 finds” to the intranet home page. Use stats to track what areas of the intranet are most used by employees and put links to these areas in the top 5 box. Encourage your users to fill up their “My Bookmarks” box with content they interact with on a regular basis.

For a mature intranet, try a cleaner, fresher approach to your design theme. Swap that dark blue background color with a clean white. Change the site font color to be gray instead of black. Soft is the way to go here. Anything that fights the content for attention needs to go. Add pizzazz with punches of bright color (in moderation). Add orange, lime, or ocean blue color punches with an intranet logo, font highlight color, link colors and small icons. Add more padding around your navigation and widget boxes. When you have a text-heavy home page, slightly more white space padding helps for better reading. All this can be done with point-and-click options in the Theme Builder.

And always-always put “border=0” in your linked <img> tags (custom message boxes). Nothing looks more like circa 1991 web design than seeing the ugly blue border around a linked graphic.

Tip #3 – Rethink your navigation

Think Labels. A menu item called “General Information” does what exactly for employees? Now a menu item labelled “Employee Info, Events & Resources” is something I would click on expecting to find value for me, the employee.

The order of your navigation is also very important. Based on the Worldwide Intranet Challenge [http://www.cibasolutions.com.au/] employees go to the intranet to find other employees, to find documents that help them do their job, and to perform tasks like filling out a vacation request form. Based on this, perhaps your first listed navigation items should look like:

People Search
Documents & Resources
Fill out a Form
Submit a Support Ticket

Yes your users may get confused at first because what they are used to has now changed, but if you re-order the navigation based on what they look for first on the intranet, you’ll soon be getting kudos instead of complaints.

PS: if your navigation is NOT at the top of the home page real estate, move it on up. Navigation first.

Tip #4 – Give users some power

Although Intranet Connections was originally built with open publishing in mind (open for all employees to publish content) over the years the need for delegated content publishers, security, and content approval workflow has taken over.

If your intranet is ruled more by what managers want than what employees need, take stock in how that is working for the success of your intranet. This is a tool for employees; they need a voice on their tool. Of course there will be areas that are sensitive, where you need security and to run tight control over what is being published. But create areas where you can open it up to all employees and encourage participation and collaboration. Get your employees involved – you might be surprised at their level of responsibility and ability to share valuable information. Suggestion Box, Discussion Forum, News, Blogs and Knowledge Center are good collaborative applications that can engage your employees.

Intranet Design Examples

All of these examples were accomplished with the customization and theme options built into Intranet Connections – you can do this too! You don’t need to be a professional designer. Changing a theme is quick and can be done in a draft state. Play around with colors and show it to your team before you go live with the new design. And we are here to help – that’s our job, so give us a call or send us an email.

Also check out What Attractive Intranets Look Like by Step Two Designs

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Tim’s top 10 tips resonate and he has provided some great points to consider.

1. Launch User-Centric, Participatory Research: As a first step, begin to gather user input — and develop field skills — with interviews, card sorting exercises and scenario observations.
2. Use Available Metrics to Set the Baseline: Site analytics from the current intranet tell you who uses it, for how long and what parts are avoided.
3. Analyze Intranet Help Desk Records to Identify Top Problem Areas: Doing so provides direct insight into the main hurdles to wider adoption.
4. Interview Users to Discover Needs: However, keep in mind that people often describe how they would like to work rather than how they actually do.
5. Observe and Record Users to Study Work Behaviors: It’s the best way to understand both particular work habits and uncover design flaws that remain hidden from the experts on the design team.
6. Engage Users to Reveal Organizational Habits and Priorities: For example, card sorting helps to discover how they organize, access and manipulate information.
7. Create Personas to Guide Design Decisions: Personas provide key information about users’ goals, attitudes and behaviors that is required for effective interaction design.
8. Deploy Ongoing Usability Testing: A spectrum of users should repeatedly test paper prototypes, wireframe mockups and coded development interfaces in contexts that encourage them to give utterly frank feedback.
9. Identify “Carrots” that Can Help Wean Users Off of Old Methods: You can encourage change by presenting users with clear improvements to their current work habits.
10. Conduct a Heuristic Test: It’s difficult for intranet team members to “forget” their knowledge of the system, so heuristic tests are more valuable when conducted by outside evaluators.

I love tip #3. The power of an intranet comes to light when you can help employees solve problems and assist in their daily tasks. What a great place to start in identifying applications and tools to use on your intranet. The benefit is in reduced Help Desk calls and supporting a collaborative self-help environment that can add a lot of ROI savings to your bottom line.

A lot of Tim’s tips include getting out there and talking to your employees and departments, but be prepared to fine-tune after the launch of your intranet. Planning, research and concept meetings can help to guide and outline goals and execution before your intranet launch, but how your employees interact with the live intranet will differ from how they conceptually determine their needs. Keep a close eye on intranet statistics as usage grows. Look for patterns and different ways that users approach and find content.

A great resource in what employees want out of their intranets is The Worldwide Intranet Challenge (WIC). The WIC conducts regular studies on what users find valuable on their intranets, and “finding instructions for completing work tasks” is an intranet quality that they value the most. http://cibasolutions.typepad.com/wic/page/2/

Keep the intranet navigation intuitive and simple. Include tools for employees to customize and personalize their own intranet experiences like our Employee Hub. You can help employees to get started by pushing site alerts based on group or department designation. Be sure to encourage employees to set up their own personal hubs and create widgets to display content that they care about and want to interact with.

And for those of you (like me) who need to look up “Heuristic” (tip #10) here is the shortened version of Wikipedia’s definition: an adjective for experience-based techniques that help in problem solving, learning and discovery. Sounds like a good core value to adopt for your intranet experience.

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Brad Walton is the Training and Recruitment Specialist at West Coast Savings Credit Union. He works with the department and branch managers to recruit and fulfill staff needs within the credit union. Over the past few weeks Brad has been working with Helen Whithall, the manager of their Main Street branch, to hire a new teller.

Brad has just finished adding a new training course to the Career, Health and Wellness area of The Buzz Intranet when he receives an intranet chat message from Helen letting him know that she has selected Steve Birk to fill the teller position out of all the candidates they interviewed. Brad has all of the applicants’ resumes on file so Helen leaves him to complete the rest of hiring process.

Brad pulls out Steve’s resume, calls him to offer him the position and firm up his start date. That task out of the way, Brad opens up the E-Forms area in The Buzz where all the corporate forms for the credit union are stored. He navigates to the Employee Forms area so he can fill out the ‘New Employee Form’ that is set up to help streamline the internal processes associated with hiring a new staff member.

He starts by filling in Steve’s first and last name then selects Steve’s department. The department field is a SQL query that pulls in the list of departments from the Employee Directory on the intranet. If a new department is added, or changes, within the Employee Directory, the New Employee Form will automatically see it. Brad types in Steve’s title, selects the agreed upon start date from the calendar date tool and checks the following options for IT to create a user account in Steve’s name:

Add to Active Directory
Create an email in Exchange
Create User in Payroll System
Set up HUB in The Buzz
Send out Welcome Package

Referring to the Activities and Interests section on Steve’s resume, Brad types in a quick blurb about the new employee. This information will be used in Steve’s profile on The Buzz intranet and Steve can modify it once he starts. Brad leaves the upload field for Steve’s photo blank as it will be added to the intranet after Steve gets his photo taken for his security card on his first day.

In the Approvals section of the form, Brad selects Helen’s name from the pre-populated list of managers. Helen will be Steve’s manager, and she needs to approve the information on the form first. Then it will be routed to Heather Jenkins, the HR manager, and then Karen Parson, the IT manager. By signing off on the form Helen acknowledges that she approved the new hire and both the HR and IT managers agree to their departments completing the tasks associated on the form. Lastly, Greg Tolsten, the Network Administrator, is notified of the form response so that he can take care of all the necessary action tasks and create the user accounts.

Brad clicks on the submit button to send the form on its way, knowing that he will be notified once it has moved through all the approval stages.

“A Day in the Life of an Intranet” is a blog post series by Rachel Lai of Intranet Connections that explores how employees at the fictional company West Coast Savings Credit Union interact with their intranet, The Buzz, during the course of a day at the office

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Eva Collins is an HR Administrator at West Coast Savings Credit Union. Last week Eva met with Heather Jenkins, the HR Manager, to discuss setting up a Career, Health and Wellness area on The Buzz Intranet, with the goal of fostering a productive and rewarding work environment for all WCSCU employees.

Eva is tasked with building this new sub-site on the intranet. Referring to her meeting notes, Eva begins by entering The Buzz admin site and clicks to create a new Department Site, giving it the name of “Careers, Health and Wellness”. She secures it so that end users won’t be able to see it until Heather has signed-off on it.

Eva starts to build the sub-site by creating the navigation menu. Eva uses the navigation tool from the actions toolbar to add in applications that will become the site’s navigation. She does this with one click, which creates the applications in seconds.

Employee Services
This is a Documents application to store policies, procedures, and forms for the credit union’s medical, dental, 401K plans

Job Center
A dedicated Jobs application for HR to post new job opportunities within the organization and for employees to apply with their online resumes

Career Workshops
This Training and Registration system will allow employees to sign up for career development courses

Community Events
A Calendar tool showing upcoming community events, both internal and external

News & Views
A News application for announcements, bulletins and news pertaining to career development and health

Earthquake Safety
A Blog application focused on safety procedures and earthquake preparedness for all branches

Health & Wellness
A Knowledge Centre for FAQ and health and wellness tips

Healthy Recipes
An area for employees to share their healthy recipes with the rest of the organization

Once the tools have been added, Eva posts starter content in each area to give the end users and content managers an idea of the information that will be stored there. Eva designates open publishing for the following areas:

Community Events
News & Views
Health & Wellness
Healthy Recipes

Open publishing allows for all employees in the credit union to contribute content and help grow these areas. For Community Events and News, Eva sets up approval notification so that she can review posts and approve, or request changes, before the items are published.

Heather would like a mash-up of all the latest information from the navigation applications, pushed to the site’s home page, so Eva adds a “What’s New” widget. This will display advertised events, new workshops, tips from the knowledge center, blog posts from Earthquake Safety, the latest news and views, and advertised documents and forms from Employee Services. Eva calls the widget “Six Top Snippets” and sets the widget listing to show the top 6 advertised items from the various applications.

Heather had also requested that employees be able to see all the upcoming month’s events from the Careers, Health and Wellness home page. Eva pulls in a feed from the Community Events Calendar and chooses the mini-calendar format, placing the mini-calendar below the navigation menu. Employees can now see which days have events scheduled and hover for more information. The mini-calendar widget will rotate every month automatically, showing new events as they are added.

Happy with how the design of the home page is shaping up, Eva moves on to create more content feeds from the Employee Services Documents application, and creating a widget to always display the latest RSS feed from a leading industry blog, the Open Source CU Blog. Bringing in an external RSS feed will help to keep employees up to date with thought leaders in the credit union sector. Eva also builds a content box with links to other popular credit union blogs and resources.

Almost done with the first draft of this new site, Eva quickly adds a message box at the top of the home page to announce the goal of the Careers, Health and Wellness site, and another message box to display herself as the manager of the site in case employees want to contact her with questions or feedback. Eva adds her photo and contact details into the box, and links to her employee profile in case anyone wants to send her an instant message through the intranet chat feature.

“Not bad for one afternoon of work” thinks Eva as she uses chat to send Heather a link to the new Careers, Health and Wellness site she created for the Buzz. Heather chats back that she will take a look, and asks how difficult would it be to create another similar site for an upcoming HR initiative to be launched next quarter on the Buzz. Eva lets Heather know she can clone the existing Careers, Health & Wellness template and have an instant site to build off of. Heather is thrilled, and Eva closes up her office for the day feeling like a million bucks.

“A Day in the Life of an Intranet” is a blog post series by Rachel Lai of Intranet Connections that explores how employees at the fictional company West Coast Savings Credit Union interact with their intranet, The Buzz, during the course of a day at the office

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Brent Myers is a Member Services Rep and part of the Communications team at West Coast Savings Credit Union. Brent is often involved in content development for The Buzz intranet and is currently in a project update meeting that is coming to a close.

“Great, well if no one has anything else to add, let’s wrap this meeting up”, says Kelly Bristow, the Intranet Manager. “Brent will put his notes up on The Buzz for reference.” Brent flashes Kelly a smile as he gathers up his notepad and pen.

Back at his desk, Brent brings up The Buzz Intranet in a new web browser and heads into the documents area in the Communications Site. He expands the tree navigation and clicks on the “Intranet Meetings” folder where they log their notes and action points for the intranet team to share. Another click and he’s ready to create his web doc for this morning’s meeting notes. A few formatting changes – bolding action points and changing the font color of the due dates to red, and he’s done.

Brent knows that the other members of the intranet team will receive an alert in their hubs, letting them know of the new meeting notes so he saves the web doc then leaves a comment on the document telling the other content managers to feel free to edit the web doc and add any additional points he’s left off.

Next Brent checks his email and sees that Kelly wants him to re-work his internal communication post so he goes back into The Buzz and opens his hub to access the declined content and view the feedback Kelly has given him. Another busy morning as Brent digs in to make changes to his communications post before sending it back into the approval process.

“A Day in the Life of an Intranet” is a blog post series by Rachel Lai of Intranet Connections that explores how employees at the fictional company West Coast Savings Credit Union interact with their intranet, The Buzz, during the course of a day at the office

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Heather Jenkins is the HR Manager at West Coast Savings Credit Union. She is a key member of the intranet team and oversees 3 content managers for their intranet The Buzz. Heather is currently fiddling with her laptop in the 3rd floor conference room and mumbling under her breath. She checks the clock on the south facing wall. Everyone’s due to start arriving for the 9:30 intranet team meeting and her laptop and the projector in the conference room are having a minor disagreement.

Heather tries to get the projector working once more and pressed for time, decides that she’s going to need the big guns to help deal with the problem. Using the speakerphone in the conference room, she dials the extension for the Support Desk but the call goes straight to voicemail. She hangs up and opens The Buzz from her laptop, thanking the stars above for the “Chat to Your Support Techs” box on the intranet home page. Brent Myers, a fellow Communications team member, contributed that idea in the intranet suggestion box to help reduce call volumes on the IT help desk, and it’s precisely in times like these when intranet chat comes in handy.

Scanning the list of Support Techs, Heather notices her buddy Jack online. She clicks on his name, opens a chat window and types “Help! Meeting in 2 mins and my laptop and the projector in the conference room hate me.” Jack responds immediately with “LOL. Is that 3 times this month now? I’ll be right there.” Heather breathes a sigh of relief knowing that help is on the way.

“A Day in the Life of an Intranet” is a blog post series by Rachel Lai of Intranet Connections that explores how employees at the fictional company West Coast Savings Credit Union interact with their intranet, The Buzz, during the course of a day at the office

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