The theory of intranet personalization is wonderful. The practice may be generally harmful: hugely expensive implementations that totally fail; massive maintenance overheads and very little employee uptake.
According to the Jakob Nielsen Intranet Design Annual report 2009: The Year’s 10 Best Intranets; many entries and almost all of the winning intranets offer either extensive personalization features or huge employee base or both. This is certainly not the experience needed to work with intranets. Personalization and portals have delivered enough costs to fill a football field, the size of Canada.
Now, I respect Jakob Nielsen an awful lot but I found his 2009 report somewhat strange. It felt a bit like a 2001 report. Common themes such as the sending / receiving e-cards to other employees, photos of the day, etc are among the reasons many senior managers see intranets are productivity drains not gains.
Tony Ward, an intranet pioneer, once wrote: “Very few organizations have actually enacted or properly implemented user personalization once they’ve purchased a portal product … The difficulty with personalization is that it requires a phenomenal amount of work and planning; the technology component is relatively simple. Organizations that roll-out personalization have to identify and define multiple roles and content and then map all the content to those roles and ensure that the content is provided on an ongoing basis (writing, updating, publishing, formatting, etc.). Even more troublesome is that while employees like the idea of personalization, few will ever use it.”
James Robertson, another intranet pioneer, also takes a somewhat skeptical view of personalization, writing that it is “very much in fashion at present. It is used by vendors to sell their products, and promoted by website and intranet managers as a way of delivering a brave new era of functionality.” However, James goes on to state that, “Contrary to the impression one gets at conferences and when reading technology oriented websites and magazines, portals are not yet a reality in many organizations.”
Martin White, yet another true intranet pioneer, states that, “Over the last few years one of the ongoing issues in intranet management has been the extent to which users need to have a personalized view of intranet content. I have seen some good examples in the case of employee self-service applications, but on a broader level I have yet to see a convincing business case based on a survey of users.”
Personalization is an extremely powerful concept to implement. I believe over the next 10 years, I’m sure the best intranets will use it extensively. Today, it’s still a challenging matter. It’s about getting the basics right. You don’t need personalization to have a high quality staff directory, and that’s what most intranets badly need right now.
Personalization is like building one of those fancy super- yachts. It’s fun, it cool, it’s a challenge. But employees are drowning in a sea of unusable applications, PDFs, and badly written, out-of-date content. They need a life buoy, not a yacht.