Keyword IT

Jacob Nielsen's latest usability article "10 Best Intranets of 2011" includes some encouraging evidence that intranets are getting increased traction as platforms for sharing knowledge - using simplified features to deliver long promised knowledge management benefits.

It is also interesting to note that over the winning organisations, the average number of employees is 37,900 and the average intranet team size is 14.

The Best Service is No Service by Bill Price and David Jaffe is an excellent book that ought to be compulsory reading for all companies with a customer service element, mostly because so many of them are so very far from providing even reasonable service.

Note: their use of "No Service" in the title is a misnomer - their book is very much in agreement with John Seddon's work, that you need to focus on the service that provides value to the customer, and provide that service well.

The book gives clear, practical advice and loads of examples of where service has gone wrong and of best practice (plenty of examples from Amazon and first direct for instance in this category).

A few of the most significant points they make are:

• Good quality self service has major benefits, making it easier for users to do what they want, when they want and significantly reduce operational costs
• Get rid of unnecessary reasons for people to contact you ("dumb contacts" is the phrase they use in the book) - eliminate contacts that have no value to the customer and no value to the organisation
• Value those contacts and relationships that are most important to you and have the greatest benefit to the organisation
• Gather metrics on what people are trying to find out about, both on the website and through calls
• "Service" is not just the province of a contact / service centre, it is equally important across the whole operation
  

It can be difficult to decide when it is the right time to deploy an Intranet, particularly because of the hype that surrounds the topic. As in most cases, it is more helpful to look at the benefits to the business rather than be swayed by the hype.

The main business advantages come when a company or organisation is large enough that some of the following are useful (typically when you don’t know everyone in the company, or there are shift patterns / geographical spread):

• directory lookup including more than just the Active Directory type information, listing areas of expertise, etc
• news group / forum type features for sharing expertise or solving problems
• information resources that are updated relatively frequently, such as HR, quality system, standard purchasing list (there can be a problem here of staff not being aware of the latest HR policy though)
• useful applications, perhaps a purchasing system with workflows, linked to the purchasing list
• where some internal communications are relevant to a subset of the staff (perhaps a division or special interest group); it can be more helpful to have this available on a "pull" basis by the user, rather than a "push" email to all
• email summaries can be sent at user selectable intervals of what's new and what's changed with the detail on linked pages
• as an extension to document sharing, particularly when SharePoint is used

Considering these can avoid investing in a white elephant that no one looks at.

Today's high court injunction blocking the strike by RMT signallers was due to inaccuracies in the database they used for polling members. As reported in the Telegraph, there were "serious inaccuracies in the RMT ballot" with problems including votes taken from 11 signal boxes that no longer exist and 23 signal boxes left out of the vote.

The RMT's defence was that the union had gone to considerable lengths to ensure the accuracy of the database, but this argument was obviously not convincing to the judge, who ruled out any appeal.

The implication is that if the errors are not corrected, then repeat ballets would also be ruled unlawful, so there may not be a rapid fix to their problems.

This is a high profile example of the cost of data integrity problems, but similar problems cost many businesses and organisations much more than they realise. Thomas Redman, a leading expert on data quality, estimates that poor-quality data costs organisations about one-fifth of their revenue.

To tackle these problems, organisations need to ensure they have regular management reports of data quality measures, together with business processes for making improvements to the integrity of their databases.