"Man looks in the abyss, there's nothing staring back at him. At that moment, man finds his character. And that is what keeps him out of the abyss," Lou Manheim (Hal Holbrook), Wall Street.

It's a telling and provoking quote that is an expansion on the famous quote from Friedrich Nietzche: "When you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you."

While I'm tempted to debate the various interpretations, positions and philosophical arguments and positions for both, you're likely reading this not to read Toby Ward the philosopher, but to understand the connection to the intranet. And where the hell is the woman while man is lazing about at the abyss?!? No doubt, she's too busy running the world.

The essence of the philosophy is the nature of the mind's eye, and our subjective interpretation of one's self, and the world in which we operate (and shape, in part).

I'll cut to the chase on the relation to the intranet: the intranet is a reflection of the organization, and the direct and in-direct team, including the man and/or woman who runs it. More importantly, the success in its current and future form is subject to the person looking at it (or into the abyss).

Another way to frame this picture or paradigm is to say that as great as IBM or Cisco's intranet (or any other impressive intranet), they are not great in the eyes and minds of other organizations, and other employees. In fact, I test intranet designs, layouts and information architectures all the time, and frequently I'll test the IBM design or Cisco design versus smaller, less complex intranet designs and the results are nearly unanimous every time: IBM sucks (it's far too busy, with far too many links, and its far too complex). And yet, the IBM intranet is arguably the best intranet on the planet.

This is to say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder - or the mind's eye. The IBM design is fantastic for IBM, but it doesn't work for too many other organizations. But it doesn't have to; the IBM intranet design needs to work for only IBM's structure, culture and employees only. Every organization is different, has different needs, different structures, different cultures and different employees with different backgrounds, needs, expectations and tolerances. Therefore, while it is valuable to know what other intranets are doing, to adhere to best practices and to cherry pick winning ideas from those trailblazers that have preceded you, you cannot do so in the absence of input from both management and employees.

More to the point, here's the crux of the mind's eye: every organization is an ensemble of different cultures, structures, values and motivations, with different subjective interpretations of the world, the organization, and the intranet. Of course, even more granularly, every single person has their own culture, values and motivations. So it's important to understand their mind's eye and their subjective needs for design, navigation, content quality, etc.

Understand the benefits and best practices of IBM and others, while taking the time to understand the needs and motivations of both management and employees, and you can't help but be successful with your intranet (taking into account all of the above, not the least of which is governance).

Woman looks into the abyss and sees nothing staring back at her. At that moment she knows man is completely over-rated and that she should be the rightful owner of the world (and the intranet). What's in your abyss?

IBF24 ran a contest during the 24 hour marathon webinar on intranets called "My Beautiful Intranet." The winner: The European Space Agency.

The runners-up: RSA, CapitalOne, NATS and AMP.

William Hudson, IBF's Director of User Experience judged the competition. Congratulations to all the winners and thanks to everyone who took part.

You can see all the screenshots here (members of www.ibf24.com only), if you are a member. Some great designs for sure. For the life of me I could not locate the screenshot of the European Space Agency on that confusing site, but it must be pretty darn special to have beaten out Capital One and Schwab which both look to have outstanding intranets.

If any of the winners want to share their screenshots to a wider audience then please send them along and I'll post them with any quotes or background you'd like, I can also do likewise to the Intranet Global Forum Facebook community.

There was lots learned by the recent IBF24 marathon. A lot of talk on innovation and leading intranet applications, etc. I believe IBF is going to sell the CD or DVD of the presentations, and I would highly recommend the ones on the IBM intranet, the Nissan intranet, and the one on Nokia (it was under the Enterprise 2.0 segment, and had absolutely zero to do with Enterprise 2.0, but it is a strong intranet and I like how they've integrated text messaging (like Nissan) into their intranet portal home page.

One intranet manager, Kurt (I'll not divulge his full name nor his organization for the sake of fulfilling his confidentially obligations to his organization) informed me that one of the most popular features on his company's intranet (a financial services organization of more than 10,000 employees) is a ‘jumpword' application. A jumpword tool is attached to the search engine and allows people to seek out the best results which are manually coded to a specific keyword search.

"One of the areas we have issues on is our navigation and providing more service to the employee on our intranet," says Kurt.  "The jumpword application allows people to enter something like "performance" and it takes them to the performance management site, which is highly popular. It's a good tool but has festered into over 2000 jumpwords which is a heavy indication that the navigation is not helping people get what they need."

The jumpwords application is written in .NET with a backend SQL database. Employees fill out a request form (attached to the online application) requesting their jumpword and the URL they want it directed to. When a user types in the jumpword it does a lookup of the jumpword file and has logic that redirects them to the site associated URL. If there is no jumpword it brings them to the front search page.

This organization uses the FAST search engine - which is really quite good and highly rated so you get an idea of why manual jumpwords or ‘best bets' should be a priority for any organization. The search engine can only do so much, and in the absence of a detailed taxonomy that requires mandatory and rigorous meta tagging, the search engine's potential can be highly limited.  

Also supporting the intranet, owned by IT, with "a lot of the content governed by Employee Communications," is the Interwoven TeamSite CMS platform, and a separate document sharing platform built on SharePoint (WSS, though migrating to MOSS 2007).  Kurt also tells me that content management is distributed or ‘decentralized' with the respective owners responsible for updating their own content. The Employee Communications team provides guidelines on content structure but "due to not having a centralized owner and/or executive sponsor, teams opt many times to build their own sites using funding from their organizations - a major issue and has been for a while now."

Yes, even really strong and innovative intranets have problems, and have much to improve, rework, and reinvent. It's no surprise then that even the ‘most beautiful intranet' is far from perfect and that the journey for most has only just begun.

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Quick, what is the most read and used website on the planet? It's not Google, it's Yahoo!

What is the most read news website on the planet? It's not Google News, it's Yahoo! News.

Despite its position as media darling, Google trails is competitor (and advertising partner) Yahoo! in many respects. Not only does Yahoo! beat them on total aggregate traffic, but its news site has more than three times the traffic of Google News (35 million monthly, unique visitors compared to only 11 million). In fact, Google News sits in eighth spot, right behind the lowly Gannett Newspapers and flounders with the lowest growth of all the top 10 news sites.

Perhaps a key reason for Google's fledgling traffic status when compared to Yahoo! (though they are often rated as the 2^nd most used website on the planet so they're still doing fine thank you very much) may be the nature of its websites. In short, Google lacks original content. While Yahoo! not only compiles news from other sources, it also creates its own content with expert columnists.

Read my full column on Content Matters: Content is still king

But how does this relate to the intranet? Well, for starters, most employees will complain that the intranet is very average, that its very difficult to find what they're looking for, that the search engine sucks, but the content is good. Yes, by and large, a vast majority of intranet users rate the content on their intranet as very good.

Now at most of our clients, I estimate (and this is something we measure for most individual clients, but rather than add them all up and produce an aggregate score, I'll give you the rough estimated average) that the average daily use of the intranet is around 70% of employees. That is to say, 70% of all employees use the intranet on a daily basis. Most may only glance at the home page on the way to the phone directory, or their own specific page or site, but use is still high -- in spite of poor navigation, search, usability and design. In short, the intranet sucks, but the content is pretty good.

Hence, content is still king.

CONTINUE READING:

Auditing your 'king'

Not all content is created nor need be equal

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SharePoint (MOSS 2007) is robust solution, but its not for every organization. Here's some practical advice from Prescient and the authors of The SharePoint Report 2008 from CMS Watch.

Read Advice for SharePoint customers (prospects)

I've had the pleasure to work on or help create dozens of intranets in the past few years, and seen and learned about many dozens of others. I can say with some confidence that IBM has the best intranet in the world. Some like Cisco and Microsoft come close, but not close enough (although the latter two are still fairly secretive about all the workings of their respective intranets, and IBM is quick to show it all).

Two years ago, Intranet Insider World Tour made a stop at IBM's w3. That was before Web 2.0 tools started changing the way organizations communicate and collaborate. Now see the new Web 2.0 IBM intranet with 30,000 bloggers, podcasts (audio & video), wikis, and Beehive, an internal version of Facebook. This highly informative webinar with a look at the IBM intranet and its tools is hosted by myself and Liam Cleaver, Program Director, Collaborative Innovation at IBM.

This insider's look at the IBM intranet is this Thursday, June 12 (see Intranet Insider World Tour Webinar: IBM's w3 - Transforming The Total Workplace Experience or register or purchase the CD here). This is a must attend for any intranet manager or consultant.

"We see the future workplace as ubiquitous; totally integrated; and senses work activity and responds with resources," says Cleaver. The goal of the IBM intranet is to increase productivity, collaboration and innovation of its 380,000 employees worldwide, 45% of whom work remotely in all global time zones.

Here is a sneak preview:

• Blue Pages: One universal employee directory, 50+ applications access & use the directory data, More than 1.5 million hits per day, 65% of employees use BluePages once a day.
• Beehive: Opt-in social networking site from IBM Research, Create a personal page to share interests, thoughts, photos and/or what you do in IBM, over 33,000+ registered members and 41,000+ photos uploaded
• Fringe: Experimental directory and networking site from IBM Research, Find colleagues based on skills, interests or other shared connections,
  see what's going on with the news in your social network through aggregated feeds
• BlogCentral: Opens up collaboration and creates connections across IBM through use of Web 2.0 technologies, 50,000+ users, 1,600+ active blogs
• WikiCentral: Provides easy and effective ways of collaboration in any size group. In April 2008, 3M+ page views, 1.3M+ total visitors
• Jams and ThinkPlace: Open, collaborative and on-going global forum, surfaces solutions to specific challenges, 16,000 ideas submitted since launch, 350+ ideas adopted, facilitates exchange of smaller ideas
• TAP @ work: SmallBlue: within intranet search retrieves experts based on tags and employee profiles recommending best path to connect, gives analysis of social network visually depicts people networks and geographic clusters.

"Google is often portrayed as the technology hipster, rolling out Web applications almost at whim.  But unseen to the public, IBM is rolling out Web 2.0 technologies such as blogs, wikis, mashups and virtual reality technologies to help its employees be more productive.  Inside its firewall, Big Blue looks pretty hip."  Clint Boulton, eWeek.

Register now for the Intranet Insider World Tour Webinar: IBM's w3 - Transforming The Total Workplace Experience