WHITEPAPER /
Webtrends for SharePoint 2010
Using Analytics to
Measure Your Intranet
®
At a Glance
Business Trend
Intranet 1.0 was often about document management and one-way communication from the top down. Today, companies are revisiting their intranet and collaboration tools, and we are beginning to see the emergence of the social enterprise—the evolution of yesterday’s intranet into a more dynamic, user-friendly environment for employees to easily access information and people. Regardless of the new tools, these strategies and systems often struggle with the same difficulties of intranet systems, most common among them being how to drive adoption and engagement that drive ROI.
At Issue
Intranets were first developed when few standards were in place or available for optimal user engagement, and few put in place any measurement strategies for success. As a result, adoption and usage around corporate intranets/portals remained low, and poor habits have perpetuated.
Today, employees are using more social technologies in their personal life, and aren’t expecting anything less in their professional life. This bottom up approach is moving organizations to revisit their internal collaboration systems and policies. At the top, the C-Suite sees the move towards a social enterprise as an opportunity to be more innovative and efficient through collaboration.
But adding new social technologies will not alone eliminate the problems and poor habits associated with Intranet 1.0. A successful internal collaboration program requires a well-designed strategy for content, design, adoption and promotion. With this comes the need to understand and measure key success metrics – what works and what doesn’t – in order to truly recognize the business value that a robust intranet solution can provide.
Business Solution
The most successful companies in the world use intranet business productivity tools and processes to improve collaboration and communication across the enterprise. Establishing best practices and implementing a measurement strategy around critical success factors will help organizations increase intranet usage, their organizational maturity, realize business value, and gain a return on investment of their intranet investments.
From Old Habits, Bad Practices Remain
Prior to the emergence of the intranet, collaboration took the form of document ping-pong and occupational spamming—multiple email strings with numerous people copied. Both of these activities resulted in information being lost, files being stored on individual computers, version control issues and problems with timeliness. These tactics are counter-intuitive to collaboration and drive frustration across the organization, yet they remain in practice today.
Impact of Poor Practices
Bad Practice Impact on an Organization
Document ping-pong Documents fly back and forth with versions crossing paths, and version control is mostly non-existent.
Information hoarding Data, documents and other important information reside on a singular person's computer. If that person leaves the company, so does the data. Communication bottlenecks Information is not shared in a timely manner, or
there is no established method for sharing it. Occupational spamming Multiple emails and replies are sent to groups of
people, even those with little interest in the topic.
Build It - But Will They Come?
Rolling out a technology platform and expecting it to be widely adopted is a common practice in
organizations, but as many companies have learned, technology alone is not the answer to a problem. Value to the user has to be demonstrated – as it is not always apparent – especially if a current solution or pattern of communication is already integrated into daily workflows.
For a business collaboration solution to succeed, a strategy must be in place that includes ongoing leadership, nurturing, user engagement, training and optimization. Once an intranet is adopted and integrated into workflows, organizations can continue to take fuller advantage of its potential. And then as intranet maturity increases, so does its value.
Stuck in Stage One
Most companies remain in the early adoption stage of intranet maturity, typically using their intranet for communication and information sharing. Unfortunately, communication tends to be one-way – top-down to employees – not collaboration or conversation. Often, as a result, adoption remains low, which not only inhibits the intranet's value but also the ability to secure the funding and organizational support needed to evolve internal collaboration systems.
Increasingly, organizations are taking steps to evolve their intranet to more effectively manage content development and improve collaborative communication. But the real opportunity to drive business value occurs when organizations understand how and who use their intranet, and then leverage this information to drive adoption and incorporate new technologies that provide value to the users.
Value can take any shape or form important to communication, whether it is aggregated content delivered in personalized digital dashboards, or collaboration tools that make it easy to share and like information. Key to the evolution and realization of the full value of an intranet solution is in embracing best practices, one of which is measurement. Measurement empowers organizations to understand the behaviors of their users in order to provide relevancy and drive adoption.
Five Best Practices for Driving Intranet Success
In order for the intranet to prove value, users must be educated about its capabilities and be able to easily find what they want. When they see its power for collaboration, they become more encouraged to adopt it. Intranet success starts with a five-step strategy:
1. ENGAGE AUDIENCES
To be an effective communication tool, the intranet must engage users with relevant content. Using analytics to track downloads and usage provides insight that helps content creators develop more relevant content, which in turn, will drive greater adoption and stickiness. For instance, are more users clicking on videos than pdfs? This data can help content owners focus on what is adding value and driving more demand.
2. DEVELOP STANDARDS
As sites are established, it is important to develop design and content consistencies that can be applied across intranets and extranets. This is particularly important if your company has offices in multiple countries, and where company decision-making is decentralized. Standards should also include templates and production procedures.
3. SIMPLIFICATION
Information from an intranet needs to download quickly, even for those with the slowest access speeds due to travel situations or remote dial-in. Don't overload pages with Java or Flash animation, or fill with media-rich content, and don’t have every page loaded with hundreds of links. Instead, keep the site design clean and simple, with easy to find content.
4. MEASURE SUCCESS INDICATORS
Measuring the performance of your intranet is vital to its long-term success, continued budget support and return on investment. Ideally, measurement strategy is planned before launching an intranet initiative. Even if it is already launched, decide on goals now: what business value do you expect the intranet to deliver? These success indicators can be both quantitative and qualitative. Without analytics, organizations have zero information by which to gauge the success of their internal programs.
5. PROMOTE
Organizations often fall into the trap of building a solution and expecting it to catch on organically. Deploying a technology solution without training employees or communicating its business value is essentially dooming its usage and torpedoing its potential for improving how the organization does business. Every intranet needs to be promoted and supported by business leaders so that staff members understanding its value and are motivated to use it. Promotion makes a big difference in how people adopt and engage with the intranet.
Measurement: The Key to Increasing Value in the
Social Enterprise
For years, organizations have been tracking customer content consumption and behavior on their websites in order to fine-tune marketing initiatives and generate revenue. Now, organizations are recognizing the value of understanding employee behaviors. Value is ultimately defined by the organization, and can include greater efficiencies, better collaboration for improved innovation, or improved employee engagement for
The social enterprise builds on the promise of the intranet. While a measurement strategy can help
organizations evaluate success and areas for improvement, adoption, power usage and cultural shifts don't happen overnight. It is an evolution designed to get the organization working better together. The intranet is not just about sharing documents; the intent is to break down walls between people, groups and
departments in order to leverage the wisdom of the crowd.
Recommended Intranet Measurement Areas
How an organization defines its measurement strategy is often aligned with its business objectives. The biggest challenge to an intranet environment is adoption rate, but if you're blind to how people are using team or project sites, or how people are navigating the intranet, it's hard to improve adoption. Measurement helps you understand power users and experts, and offers insights on how to tap into their influence and knowledge to the benefit of the entire organization.
By working with hundreds of organizations, Webtrends has identified four primary areas for intranet performance success indicators:
1. MEASURE ADOPTION TO IMPROVE ADOPTION
Find out who uses what and how. Measure usage by employee, department, geography, organizational hierarchy, team site, project site or MySite. Also, measure content usage by factors such as downloads, shares and rating systems, and measure behavior, such as patterns of navigation. These metrics will give you the insights to help improve usability.
2. MEASURE TO CONTROL INFRASTRUCTURE SPRAWL
Many organizations complain that their intranet is out of control, with many sites being spawned and generated. This results in multiple sites being used for the same purpose, and it creates confusion. Measurement offers data on site usage, helping identify least-used sites, where documents are being accessed, and if geographic locations are using the intranet in different ways.
3. MEASURE TO IMPROVE GOVERNANCE OF KEY CORPORATE INITIATIVES
Knowing how employees and departments use and complete corporate training material, download corporate policies or access compliance programs helps determine how successfully compliance is understood and whether it is being met.
4. MEASURE SOCIAL NETWORKS
In the report, "Making the Business Case for Enterprise Social Networks," (Li, 2012) Charlene Li of the Altimeter Group identified four ways social networks drive business value: encourage sharing, capture knowledge, enable action and empower people. With a measurement strategy, businesses can unlock the data that provide insight into the value of social networks.
• Encourage sharing: An organization may encourage employees to share, but do employees really do it? Analytics provides data about what is being shared and how the organization shares.
• Capture knowledge: Analytics can identify expertise and experts within the organization by
understanding whose content is the most downloaded, shared and read.
An Enterprise Social Network is a set of technologies that creates business value by connecting members of an organization through profiles, updates and notifications. Altimeter Group,
Making the Business Case for Enterprise Social Networks. Feb. 2012
• Enable action: Is the intranet making it easier for your employees to access information and streamline processes? Analytics helps determine time to value by identifying user behavior of key stakeholders that can improve the intranet experience.
• Empower people: Are your social technologies empowering your people? What is the percentage of employees who use your intranet – daily, weekly, monthly? Analytics tracks what they share, their satisfaction with content and level of contribution.
Measuring SharePoint
The leading intranet business collaboration solution in the world today is Microsoft’s SharePoint 2010. It's designed to support companies as they mature beyond initial stages in their use of the intranet. For instance, companies can develop digital dashboards as a rich environment for sharing business intelligence and real-time measurement of marketing initiatives. Or they can use it to manage governance and oversight of company performance at all levels. The most mature intranet users integrate every digital artifact in company through a single interface, even mobile components.
SharePoint is one of the growing platforms for medium to large-size organization for powering social media and the next evolution of the intranet. According to data in the Social Intranet Study (2011, conducted by the IABC Research Foundation and Prescient Digital Media), SharePoint is now deployed as the main intranet technology platform in nearly one-quarter of all organizations; 55% of organizations that have social media on their intranet (61% have at least one social media tool on their intranet), use SharePoint to power their social media (Ward, 2011).
Many SharePoint customers have increased their intranet maturity by integrating Webtrends analytics. Webtrends is a Microsoft preferred solution for SharePoint 2010, a Gold-Certified Partner in Digital Marketing and a certified provider of SharePoint Deployment Planning Services. Webtrends has extensive expertise in measuring SharePoint initiatives across hundreds of customers.
Webtrends has developed a unique data collection process for SharePoint 2010 that ensures that the right data is captured, enabling comprehensive reporting with little effort, including SharePoint-specific reporting on web parts, onsite search, breadcrumbs and more.
Webtrends is:
• SharePoint Specific • Cost-effective • Comprehensive • Easy to implement
Two Webtrends customer case stories show how measurement is used to engage employees in SharePoint collaboration and to enhance business value.
Webtrends for SharePoint Business Cases
Siemens Grows SharePoint Engagement
and Readership
Siemen's SharePoint intranet serves more than 18,000 employees in the U.S. When engagement and readership waned, the company turned to Webtrends On Demand to track internal content and campaigns. The software added tags to the intranet and e-mail newsletters. The internal communications team could then measure user downloads, uploads, edits, PDFs, PowerPoints, videos and other documents. They captured data at the aggregate level for each document, in line with their corporate privacy policy.
Siemens used the data to create a more community-centered site, adding videos, contests and chances for readers to contribute. Readership grew 162%, and employees started contributing content, making internal communications more effective overall. Now, they have 450 trained SharePoint leaders who help keep site sections current and relevant.
Emerson puts Analytics for SharePoint
into Action
Emerson Process Management is one of the largest businesses of Emerson Electric Company. They adopted SharePoint 2010 to create a sales portal as a solution in which marketing and sales collateral was stored, managed and accessed. Emerson wanted to use analytics to improve its site performance, so they decided to employ a measurement strategy using analytics.
Metric benchmarks were determined and included factors such as pages viewed and visited, files downloaded, path to pages, referring sites and pages, and the browser version used. This last metric helped the IT team troubleshoot browser issues.
The team also included metrics for identifying top users and what are they looking for, which documents are being accessed, and interaction with social media, such as blog postings and MySite activity.
This measurement strategy helps Emerson understand usage in order to enhance and improve the SharePoint experience. Next-step indicators include how groups of users interact with content - do they use the intranet and
“Webtrends and SharePoint gave us the tools to bring content and collateral to our marketing and sales teams in a collaborative, efficient environment.”
Edward Tasch
Web Developer, SharePoint Implementation
Emerson Process Management “From a content perspective, Webtrends has allowed us to see what employees are most interested in, which plays a huge role in the stories and news we publish on the intranet.”
Amanda Nevels
Communications Manager, Employee & Leadership Communications Siemens
In Conclusion
Without a measurement strategy and measurement tools, organizations are flying blind on intranet value. At the end of the day, it is about an organization’s level of commitment to their internal knowledge center and the resource that can power their workforce. Webtrends has the team and technology to unlock the value of your intranet and help you make that move toward a social enterprise.
It’s your data – what would you like to learn from it? Call us to find out more.
To learn more about Webtrends for SharePoint visit http://sharepoint.webtrends.com or email [email protected].
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