Granted, in a secured network environment, there are less unknown variables for Web metrics analysis than for Internet sites that can be accessed by anyone, from any browser in the world. Yet because of these assumptions, many corporate cultures still do not analyze Web metrics to help their intranets succeed. When organizations develop and support a metrics-driven intranet, they can understand better how their employees use the intranet, align it with corporate goals more effectively, and plan future content and services using metrics as part of the business case.

Corporate cultures may often resist gathering intranet metrics because of additional costs, lack of understanding or lack of expertise. Yet Web analytics can help organizations determine return on investment for each employee who uses an intranet site by providing figures on improved customer service, increased conversion rates (sales), reduction of paper costs, and improved productivity. To help promote a culture of intranet metrics within private and public sector organizations, the following scenarios illustrate how Web analytics can benefit intranet operations and planning.

Intranet Redesign Projects

Intranet redesigns are, by necessity, a collaborative multi-departmental effort that spans various internal interests within the organization. Competing objectives can lead to complex governance, strategy and content management issues for an organization, e.g. Who makes the final decisions about what kind of intranet we should have? Who owns the intranet and its content? Who is responsible for managing and updating content? Intranet analytics can help business decision makers prior to an intranet redesign as well as afterward, when steady state governance guidelines are in place to help the organization oversee the daily management of the site.

If an intranet is being redesigned, an intranet metrics analysis can inform business executives and stakeholders about how the intranet was being used in the past, such as what its most popular and well-visited pages and downloads were, and what were the peak business hours when employees were using the intranet the most. (This can be especially useful if the intranet supports customer service or client-related applications, and a spike in usage might indicate a staff reliance on the intranet to help them perform business functions.) When an intranet site is redesigned to improve its usability, Web sites can increase their desired metrics by up to 100% (Source: Jakob Nielsen, Return on Investment for Usability, 2003).

After the launch of a new intranet site, or after a major intranet redesign is implemented, it’s critical to the success of the project to be able to gather hard measurements to provide a counterweight or reality check against the subjective responses. A new intranet or redesigned intranet almost always attracts a lot of attention within an organization right after its go-live date, and often a fresh new site also garners praise from internal users who are excited about it and eager to use it. Thus, initial feedback gathered from surveys, polls, focus groups or other subjective evaluations may mislead the owners of the intranet into thinking that their project was an unqualified success. However, checking metrics such as usage patterns, clickthroughs, bail-out rates, length of sessions, top pages/documents and other criteria can provide a more balanced view and help stakeholders analyze what’s right – and even what’s wrong – about the new site.

The Online HR Office

The Human Resources department in any organization often owns the intranet or at least is one of its primary stakeholders. Many intranets also have an HR site for managers as well as an HR site for employees. Intranet analytics for these online HR “offices” are not only important to determine how many employees are using the HR site(s) and how often, but also to link key intranet metrics with training, retention and recruitment initiatives, to name a few.

For example, any online registration for courses or eLearning modules can be tracked through site metrics, and intranet analytics can tell HR management and training leaders whether there are corresponding numbers between the number page views and the number of actual registrations for courses. If page views are high but registrations are lower than expected, management will know that the site is doing its job but the courses themselves may not be drawing interest, for any variety of reasons. HR leaders can also survey employees in advance of curriculum planning efforts to determine which courses would receive the most uptake, and which courses should be dropped from the course calendar.

Employee retention and recruitment efforts can also be determined and reinforced through Intranet analytics. While employee retention or employee job satisfaction is often considered a “soft benefit” because it can’t be measured, intranet analytics provide a way to measure its impacts. An analysis of employee usage for the IBM intranet site showed that 80% of IBM employees access the intranet daily, 68% view it as crucial to their jobs, and 52% are more satisfied to be an IBM employee because of information available on the intranet (Source: Liam Cleaver, IBM, From Intranet to the On Demand Workplace, 2005).

Recruitment initiatives can also be analyzed. Providing new and younger employees with current technology, including a best practice intranet site, has been found to be an important incentive when recruiting. Intranet analytics can demonstrate the value of such incentives by tracking new hires by login ID and analyzing their intranet usage patterns. As well, activity on new content and applications can be reviewed to determine different usage patterns between veteran employees and new hires. New employees may themselves be interested in seeing overall site stats to give them an understanding of how the online community is using the site.

The Employee Community

The impact of the “Web 2.0″ movement on Web sites has run deep and wide through the Internet. While the concept of an intranet community has been promoted since the 1990s (e.g. Amy Jo Kim’s book, Community Building on the Web), the last few years have seen an increasing expectation on the part of users that sites should be built by an online community, for an online community.

Yet intranets cannot simply pay lip service to community-building. Organizations with intranets may want to build not only an overall sense of community for the site, but also use Web 2.0 functionality to create and measure sub-communities within each division, department or business unit. Blogs, message boards, forums, chat rooms, shared space for virtual project management, event calendars, classified ads and other community-builders not only generate content but valuable Web metrics. A survey of intranets found that the most important metrics they tracked were not just page views (71%) and unique users (79%), but also community posts (67%) and registrations (63%) (Source: Forum One Communications, Online Community Metrics, 2006).

Intranet analytics are especially important for building a model of community activity patterns. Ultimately, the purpose of community-building on an intranet is to advance specific business objectives, such as enhancing information sharing and knowledge management. By tracking patterns for topics, streams or threads on a blog or forum, for example, senior management can obtain valuable data on the nature of internal business discussions and employee activity relating to specific business issues and changes.

As well, some content management systems use intranet metrics to push the most frequently accessed content and/or the newest content to top level pages so users are always aware of which content has just been posted and which content pages are most popular. This can be especially useful on forums where topical discussions drive user-generated activity and content.

The Customer Service Toolkit

On the Internet, the most important metrics are related to conversion rates – sales, transactions processed, clickthroughs, customer service support requests and customer satisfaction analyses. On an intranet, however, customer service success can be measured by intranet metrics in terms of how effectively it can be used to support the business activities, such as the ones above, for the organization. Customer service support on the intranet can be achieved through knowledge management tools, decision-making support tools, user forums for customer service staff to share information and post solutions to problems, and customer relationship management systems, to name a few. All of these can generate hard numbers that can be interpreted through intranet analytics.

Existing or new systems can be measured to help determine staff efficiency gains and diagnose minor customer service issues before they escalate into serious problems. As well, intranet metrics can help determine softer benefits such as employee morale, consistency of information and communications and customer perception of internal processes, i.e. it seemed to be easy for the company’s customer service staff to answer questions/process a purchase/resolve an issue, therefore the company must be well-managed. A research report on employee portals states: “The Employee Portal may help your sales team respond quicker to customer queries. The customer perception of quick and reliable service may lead to increased sales. However, it may not be possible to attribute the exact increase in sales as a result of this initiative.” (Source: Tan Shong Ye and Thyag Venkatesan, Going Beyond ROI, CIO Asia, 2006).

Intranet metrics for customer service pages and applications can also be shared with staff, not as a way to focus on shortcomings or dismal numbers, but to help find solutions and identify successes.

Conclusions

Intranet metrics should be linked to business drivers as well as to targeted performance figures for the site. On intranets, organizations know specific variables that may not be as easily available to Internet sites – who the users are, the maximum number of users who will visit the site, the type of browser they will be using, and when usage rates will drop off entirely (after office hours). Given that some of these variables are fixed, it is reasonable for organizations to set targets for their intranet metrics based on business objectives. Intranets are a substantial internal investment.

The methodology for intranet analytics should be revisited and audited regularly to ensure that the metrics are not being misinterpreted, but overall most organizations can benefit from sound analytics practices for their intranet metrics. Increased automation and customization offered by Web metrics tools and intranet applications provide greater control and accuracy to the figures they generate. As well, intranet metrics should be strategically shared with all members of the organization, including management and staff, rather than just the Web team or I.T. department. An analytical understanding of how people use their intranet is the most important way business leaders can learn how to improve their intranet and its return on investment.

Originally article by Garth A. Buchholz published by the Web Analytics Association.

What if you could share your own private network with the people and organizations you trust, exclude all other Internet connections (Web, email, etc) unless it passed your own criteria for inclusion, and could police your network by blocking any sites or emails that violated your rules in any way? What we think of as “the Internet” could fast become “the Intranet (capital ‘I’)”.

While everyone’s still garnering an understanding of what Web 2.0 means, a Web 3.0 could creep up and overtake it because of bandwidth, security and proprietary content drivers.

EXAMPLE 1: BANDWIDTH AND ACCESSIBILITY

SavetheInternet.com is a coalition that has “banded together to save the First Amendment of the Internet: network neutrality.” Their site defines Net Neutrality thusly:

Net Neutrality is the reason why the Internet has driven economic innovation, democratic participation, and free speech online. It’s why the Internet has become an unrivaled environment for open communications, civic involvement and free speech. The nation’s largest telephone and cable companies – including AT&T, Verizon, Comcast and Time Warner – want to be Internet gatekeepers, deciding which Web sites go fast or slow and which won’t load at all. They want to tax content providers to guarantee speedy delivery of their data. They want to discriminate in favor of their own search engines, Internet phone services, and streaming video – while slowing down or blocking their competitors.

Their concern is that the open playing field of the current Internet, where everyone gets equal; bandwidth consideration, will be lost in favor of a Web 3.0 where private enterprise offers a faster, but more exclusive Net for those who can afford it.

EXAMPLE 2: SECURITY AND USABILITY

Personal InfoCloud, by Thomas Vander Wal of InfoCloud Solutions, talks about about how users have a kind of preferred way of accessing information online, what he calls the “Local InfoCloud”:

As the my understanding began to lean toward familiarity as a core component of the definition of Local InfoCloud, the term began to embrace the social and community aspects (I am working on shying away from the term community as it is a broadly used term and I am trying to be a little more precise). Interactions with people, services, networks, applications, etc. that are familiar are means of bringing information closer to us as people with data, information, and media needs. The Local InfoCloud eases access. It eases the ability to find and refind information. It is information that is closer to us, not necessarily in physical proximity, but in the ability to access, in which familiarity is bread. I spent much time considering changing the label from local to community or social, but there were elements that did not perfectly fit that either.

Location-based services may be created by a service, but understanding the mindset, terminology, dialect, and cognitive frameworks that are germane to that physical location the information can be structured to resemble or mirror the social elements of understanding in that place. I will get to a better understanding of this when I talk about the Location aspect of the Local InfoCloud. As well, thinking in the Model of Attraction framework the Local InfoCloud is that which is attracted closer to us than the Global InfoCloud.

What I extrapolated from Vander Wal’s blog is that the Internet, or the “Global InfoCloud”, could become much less appealing for users than their own private network where they could control how they find and refind information, and how they interact with more familiar people, services, networks, applications.

EXAMPLE 3: PROPRIETARY CONTENT AND INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY

Back in the late ’90s when I wrote a weekly Internet column for our local newspaper, one of the things I predicted was that the Internet would become more proprietary, just like how online subscription services such as AOL, Compuserve and so on used to operate a few years earlier. That’s not to say that you won’t be able to access any content on the Net, but any content worth accessing would be fee-based.

In a recent New York Times book review, the issue of digital publishing is given another spin. When all books are digital, it makes it easier to combine and recombine information like never before:

Liberating books from their physical contexts could make it easier for them to blend into one another, a concept heralded by Kevin Kelly in an article in The New York Times Magazine last month. “Once text is digital, books seep out of their bindings and weave themselves together,” wrote Mr. Kelly in an article that was derided by Mr. Updike in his BookExpo polemic. “The collective intelligence of a library allows us to see things we can’t see in a single, isolated book.”

Of course, that should alarm the entire publishing industry, especially authors. Up till now, a book with its two sacred covers was a complete work, a product, a publishing unit of sale, a reference and an ISBN number. But if your book simply becomes a part of the swirling maelstrom of data on the Web, integrated into other databases and chopped into fine bits like the old K-Tel food processor infomercials we used to see on TV, who makes money on it? And who gets the credit if your content is simply hashed up into other dynamically generated pages of material?

Again, that’s where a network of private intranets would appeal to those who want to preserve the integrity of their intellectual properties. You control who can access it, who can buy it, and what they can do with it. I can think of many other reasons why Web 3.0 may happen sooner than we think, but I’d really like to hear from others on this subject. Post your responses here, or email me  and I’ll share your thoughts in this blog.