In the Lord of the Rings, Sauron (baddie) tries to hunt down the hobbit Frodo Baggins (goody). Despite dispatching nine undead warrior-kings, armed with magic swords and mounted on dragons, they fail to find the diminutive bumpkin, travelling on foot on first trip outside his village, with only his gardener for protection.

Why?

Apart from making a very short story where Evil triumphs over Good, it was because Sauron depended on assumptions: that people would always use the features of his product – a magic ring, conveying invisibility and all round magical artefact to be used by the wearer’s to bring about world-changing events. But Frodo didn’t want to use the ring (much).

The same can be said of websites and intranets:  features sound great and they cost money so they’re poured in, papering over the cracks of uncertain design; vanity content waffles about the extent of the fabulous products and welcome messages with grinning, gurning director’s portraits make grinning, gurning directors feel warm and fluffy.

Result is users can’t find the things they need, content and pages begin to spread to cover all possibilities and your competitor’s site is only a back button away.

Another example of assumptions (outside Middle Earth) comes from a supermarket chain who wanted to sell more baby products. The chain assumed the demographic was young women, full-time mums, shopping during the day time and thought of moving baby products near whatever was selling to women. After some research they actually found the main buyers of nappies (diapers) were men, aged 25 – 35, on their way home from work. Change of thinking? Hell yeah – the nappies / diapers were moved nearer to the alcohol, and beer sales sky rocketed. Clever business people … gullible Daddies.

Before you build your website based on weeks of sniping between marketing and IT, while the graphic designer doodles on paper and wonders about iPods, do these things…

• Remember Columbo gets the murderer by asking questions, not by telling his boss he’ll grab the first dodgy looking guy
• Find out about current and target users (these may be different groups)
• Find the middle point between business objectives and user needs: objectives definitely won’t be met if users’ needs aren’t
• Find a way to get out of doing things because they’re the director’s ideas (medicine that works is based on science – the rest is just pot pouri and placebo water)
• Don’t start with big design ideas or funky tech solutions, go back to the basics of what you’re trying to do and for who and work up from there
• Try out your ideas while they’re still on paper before developing beautiful and expensive failures
• Don’t always try to think outside the box … people need and like boxes
• World-conquering Lords of ultimate Evil should hire fewer magical henchmen and spend the gold pieces saved on hobbit-centred research
• Never … never assume you’re right

The Long Dog

 

 All I have to say on the matter is…

Must convey offering + personality + everything U know <= 140 chars. #I’veGotSoMuchMoreToTell_Ireallyhave

 That’s it.

Well – apart from saying that I was trying and failing to write and upload a much longer post, from a moving train, on an intermittent mobile connection that properly summed up the need for short bursts of clarity – ‘Needs must when the Devil drives’ (Oh … and this is a metaphor – he wasn’t really driving the train I was on … probably).

Summary: Keep it short and clear, but project your ’self’

The Long Dog

Her wicked sense of humour doesn’t conceal her no-nonsense attitude and she’s a true digital professional, able to move between the often immiscible worlds of tech, comms and business strategy. She’s run intranets for some of the worlds best known brands, is a keen sportswoman and all round fun person to be with. Ok … that’s her ego massaged enough – here’s 60 seconds with one of best Intranet Managers I’ve met:

LD: How long have you spent working with intranets?
CS:Since about 2000. I’ve been an Intranet Manager since 2005.

LD: Do you have a technical, communications background or something else?
CS: Maths! I did Maths at University which then led onto HTML training. For anyone who knows me they’ll know my laugh wouldn’t really suit an accountancy environment.

LD: How many employees has the largest intranet you’ve worked on served?
CS:Reuters intranet served 25000 staff and had about 1.5 million pages. And as all things go, it was the smallest team I’ve had.

LD: Top three key things an intranet must do, to be a success?
CL: (1) Have a staff directory on it, (2) be consistently available (and by this I’m referring to serving all offices and avoiding outages), (3) have at least one tool the staff can brag about.

LD: Top three common points of failure for an intranet?
CS: (1) Intranet builds led by people who only care about technology and not what the user actually wants from it, (2) not getting investment into good servers and even more importantly backup servers, (3)
Wikis – That’s totally un-pc of me to say but I’m not a fan at all: Making it easier for users to add content doesn’t mean they’ll maintain it.

LD: Jakob Nieslen or Jacob’s Cream Crackers?
CS: Cream crackers – is that a description of me?

LD: If you weren’t managing intranets what would you rather be doing?
CS: Pro Tennis player

LD: Did you set out to be an intranet manager?
CS: No! I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. My second job was at Unisys and I was randomly picked within the team to go learn HTML and build the financial services marketing team a website. It was love… [I suspect 'love' to be an exaggeration of sorts - Long Dog]

LD: Top three challenges for running a good intranet?
CS: Buy-in, budget & lack of control. It probably all really comes back to buy-in. It really shows that in the current financial state of the world those senior managers who have seemed to be bought in still look straight to the Intranet team for cost cuts.

LD: What do your friends and family think you do for a job?
CS: It varies, I’m not sure anyone really gets it! I try and tailor my answer and obviously stop talking as soon as they glaze over. I have been known on occasions to say I’m a PA just to avoid further questioning! I have several friends who refer to me as their clever friend, very flattering. I think maybe it translates as we don’t understand what you’re saying so it must be clever.

LD: Who should manage an intranet: IT, Internal Comms, HR or someone else?
CS: I think if you’ve got a person leading it who has both IT knowledge and comms/strategy knowledge then you can run it from IT or Internal Comms. My advice to anyone though is never never run it out of HR. Ideally if you have a company strategy team the Intranet would sit within it.

LD: Top three survival skills for intranet managers?
CS: (1) I bake cakes and give them to IT – it’s definitely helped me get a few databases built faster or for free! (2)
The ability to stop, clear your mind and try to imagine how a certain user would deal with something or want something, (3) Patience …

LD: What do you look for in someone working for you, on an intranet?
CS: Drive and personality. You’ve got to be able to talk to anyone and everyone if you’re going to succeed in such a cross functional team. I think drive is key to delivering and keeping the customer happy. I want people in my team that I can send to a meeting on their own and know they will represent the team at the same level I would.

LD: Software or information architecture - which is more important?
CS: Ooh that’s a hard question! I guess if you’re IA is great you can kind of cover up for useless software but if your IA is bad it doesn’t matter how good your software is.

LD: Best or worse intranet story
CS: We were clearing old sites off the intranet by backing them up onto an external hard drive and then deleting them. Highly technical method obviously. We managed to deleted a site which turned out to contain a buried folder with the sales figures database in it. This was their daily reporting tool and held everything!!! I found out the next day it was missing, had that moment where your blood runs cold, re-uploaded the site and looked at the data. Only to find the data was miraculously up to date, to the minute … we never did figure it out …

LD: Finally, any tips for struggling intranet workers or managers?
CS: Go out and see as many intranets as you can. And don’t be afraid to say no to a senior manager

More about Claire on her Linked In profile.

The Long Dog