Call for a Holistic Approach to the Use of Social Intranets

1 The user perspective – misunderstood and neglected

Many of us thought social technologies would flood businesses following the patterns of their private use: bottom-up, outside-in. The expectation was that the social wave would eventually reach every company, and your only option would be to surf that wave, since it would come like a natural force you couldn’t stop. Generation Y, the digital natives, would simply demand that the ways of communication and connectivity they grew up with, would also be available within their business environment. And if you wouldn’t give it to them, they would use a cloud service to create a parallel world to your business where they could communicate how they wanted. After all, providers such as Yammer made it easy for them, they could even use their work e-mail address to register for the service for free. As a result, you only seemed to have two choices: Either watch the viral, uncontrolled growth of an external service and then finally buy the software to have it at least installed on your own servers. Or offer a social platform within your intranet in the first place, so that employees wouldn’t see the need to use an external one. The rest would basically happen by itself. You wouldn’t have to worry much about the users, you just had to give them what they wanted (more precisely, what you thought they wanted).

However, while I have seen a few of these scenarios play out as described, in most cases the user perspective and dynamic was completely different. From my experience, the age of users is not the most important issue, neither is the viral participation in external platforms. The most common issue is that you build a social platform, and employees won’t use it. Because the question that really bothers them is: what’s in it for me? And in a business environment this means: how relevant is this to my work? They are not hungry for new channels, social or not, as long as these just add to the noise rather than saving them work time.

The digital universe has reached 4.4 trillion GB in 2014 and doubles every two years (EMC 2014) while the human ability to process information stays the same. With this information glut in mind communication scientist Marty Kaplan pointed out that we live in an economy of awareness (Kaplan 2012), and the intranet has to compete in this environment for the awareness of the user. How do we get it?

2 A holistic view on usability

Project experience taught us that there are four factors needed to put the social intranet on the user’s work agenda: business, culture, technology and communication. Each of them is necessary, but no subset of them is sufficient. All four are needed to allow for success. As a result, we need a holistic view on usability integrating all four perspectives.

Creating value for the business is the factor to begin with. Both management and employees have to be convinced that involvement with social technologies actually improves productivity. What needs to be shown is that it fosters behaviours with commercial impact. For example, does it reduce the time it takes to find information within the organisation? Or does sharing ideas across the business indeed speed up product development? Employees will find the social intranet useful, if and when it saves them time on a personal level and at the same time supports the overall business goals.

Yet, even the best business rationale is of no usability value to a social intranet without a determination to achieve a culture of open communication and collaboration. This kind of culture does not have to be fully developed right from the outset, but management must make it clear that this is the direction in which the company is moving. Only then will it be possible for social technologies to become part of the work process und thus have a commercial impact. As long as employees feel culturally out of line when openly sharing information, they won’t do it. Hence, usability tests do also need a radar for cultural barriers to users.

But even commercially tangible effects and a culture of transparent collaboration are not sufficient to guarantee high usability of social intranets. Also needed is a technology infrastructure that is easily accessible and intuitive to use. It must have appropriate interfaces to the IT system environment to ensure, for example, that documents are not stored in different places at the same time. Technical barriers of entry must be low, in particular when there is a use case demanding a large number of people involved.

Finally, if business, culture and technology are to work in harmony for a common cause, a great deal of attention must be paid to internal communication. Social intranet projects require a high level of coordination, as they affect practically all business functions. In order to develop an appropriate workplace culture, it is also necessary to inform and educate the employees. Once this culture is established, community management must then ensure that the relevance of the activities is maintained. Lack of communication can mean for the user that she doesn’t know or learn the what, where, when and how of the features she’s supposed to use. Usability should therefore not only be a question of the user interface, but also of the wider context of use. Communication has to provide this context.

Again, all four perspectives, business, culture, technology and communication, must come together for social intranet success. Of course, they all do exist within the organisation, but the issue is to bring them together in an established workflow. Working through use cases is the most natural way to integrate them on the subject matter level. But we also need people representing these perspectives throughout the project.

3 Conclusion: the Social Intranet Board – a New Body for Integration

While it works to have the social intranet project lead representing only one success factor – say technology or communication –, the other three must have a regular platform for contribution. Unfortunately, we currently don’t have organisational bodies with this profile, at least when it comes to social intranets. When working on projects, we had to set them up and gave them names like “Social Media Steering Committee”, “Social Intranet Center of Excellence” or “Social Business Group”. For the purpose of this argument, let’s call them Social Intranet Boards. Depending on the most important use cases for the intranet, the members of this board will have to be adapted.

E. g. if the business rationale is to overcome silos and align multiple intranet infrastructures across business units and territories, you might want to have representatives for both central and local business perspectives on the board. In terms of cultural diversity and need for change, you might want to have delegates from HR involved to see how the project can possibly benefit from synergies with change management activities. HR usually also has a plug-in to the work council who will be interested in privacy aspects of social intranets which again can have a huge impact on usability questions. Specific IT delegates might be needed to understand how usability profiles change, depending on features that are technically only available in specific regions. Finally, communicators certainly should have a seat on this particular board, since there will be a lot of information and dialogue needed to break with the habit of operating in silos.

Other use cases will call for different delegates on the Social Intranet Board, but there will always be a need to represent the four perspectives of business, culture, technology and communication, since the adoption by users depends on bringing them together. You might want to give the Social Intranet Board a different name, but I do expect that we will see more of these bodies of integration in the future.