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Targeted Investment: The Key to Employee Portal Improvement

by Michael Rudnick

In many organizations, when economic conditions improve, funding becomes available for investment in internal communication technologies. While the potential expansion of budgets is welcome news to communicators around the globe, capitalizing on it requires careful, thoughtful prioritization of still-precious resources.

So what type of focused investments should communicators consider? Intranet and employee portal improvements should be high on the list.

Why Portals?

Most intranets and portals were initially developed in the late 1990s. Grassroots-driven and developed with what was then fairly unsophisticated technology, they required far more staff to maintain than most, to this day, have ever imagined. As a result, many employee portals simply languished in the post-dot-com bust era because of resource limitations and information overload.

Today, the timing for intranet enhancement or the transition to a portal is right for several reasons:

• Employee expectations and demand for fast, accurate information have rapidly grown as usage of the Web in society has significantly increased.
• Awareness of the types of information that can be effectively provided via portals has dramatically improved along with governance and content management capabilities.
• Portal technology has become easier and far less expensive to purchase, deploy and maintain.
• Employee portal usage rates will continue to be limited unless information overload and confusing navigation systems are corrected.

Targeted Investment is Necessary

Two portal investments in particular have substantial potential benefits for communicators.

1) Personalization

Portals use role-based personalization to display information based on the user’s identity. By integrating with a company’s HR information system, IT network log-in database and/or other data sources, the portal acts as both a filter and router to provide employees with content and access to the applications that are relevant to their specific job, department, business unit, location or personal circumstances.

The benefits of personalization are three-fold. First, it gives employees the information they need without requiring them to sift through irrelevant materials. Second, it allows communicators and others in the organization to focus more on strategic initiatives and less on routine administrative activities. Third, it enables organizations to effectively target communications and messaging to specific employee groups, while reducing the number of redundant, independent web sites set up to serve these separate audiences, thereby producing tangible labor and financial savings.

2) Smart Searching

What’s the most frequent complaint from employees about their organization’s portal? “I can’t find what I’m looking for.”

As a communicator, your job is to get content in front of people in the way that makes them most likely to use and act on it. This means ensuring employees are able to find the information they need, when they need it, with a minimum of effort. To accomplish this, portals need to have strong, “smart” search engines in place.

Every search engine works differently, both technically and contextually, and communicators need to understand the differences in how search engines index content and return search results.

Take the case of an employee interested in browsing open job listings within the company. She goes to the portal and enters “jobs” in the search box. Smart search engines will understand that employees entering the term “jobs” are most commonly searching for job listings and will return those first. Less effective engines are likely to return a mass of unrelated web pages or documents related to “jobs,” such as an outdated press release on layoffs. This means the employee will have to sift through reams of irrelevant material before finding, if ever, the information she sought.

Smart searching capabilities also give employees access to related information. Just as consumer sites such as Amazon.com return suggested links for additional products or areas of interest based on a user’s search, employee portals can direct employees to other information related to the employee’s search term or the page the employee is viewing.

How to Make it Happen

One of the best, most cost-effective ways to introduce personalization and smart searching into employee portals is to leverage existing investments in Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, content management systems and server platforms. Today, many of these systems and solutions have portal options, and vendors are increasingly eager to bundle their portal product with the purchase of, or previous investment in, their core application. All of the major ERP vendors, for example, have a portal product that they often provide at little additional cost to their installed base of clients.

To leverage existing systems, communicators will need to partner with colleagues in HR, Sales, Operations, Finance and IT to identify available systems and software with the potential to support an employee portal. Partnering to leverage investments is a “win-win” situation for both sides. Communicators obtain lower-cost access to portal technology with superior capabilities, and the primary purchasers in the other groups have an added benefit to point to when making the business case for investment to their organization’s leaders.

Conclusion

The bottom line is that companies should approach portal expansion strategically and focus on tools that create efficiencies and help align employees with organizational objectives. Personalization and smart searching are two areas that promise solid return on investment (ROI). Cooperation between communicators and their colleagues in other functions in their organizations may give them cost-efficient access to portals that meet their requirements.

Michael Rudnick is National Intranet and Portal Leader for Watson Wyatt Worldwide. He can be reached at 203-977-6206 or at michael.rudnick@watsonwyatt.com.