Ensuring Success of Intranet Implementations Through Behavioral Changes

The thought of the day: the ROI of Intranet implementations can be measured by changes in behavior.

As a consultant, I've witnessed and participated (guilty as charged) in numerous Intranet projects that were initiated and executed without a clear understanding and definition of KPIs, which would define the ultimate success or failure of the project. When the economy was good, companies could afford some inefficiency, and healthy revenues were sufficient to cover pet projects, projects related to performance reviews, or “everybody else is doing it” projects.

Welcome to 2009. Sales are flat; layoffs hit the best of the best, and analysts are cautiously pessimistic. For a savvy consultant, this is an excellent opportunity to demonstrate their thought leadership to the clients and assist with choosing projects that will deliver measurable value.

I already wrote about the importance of thought leadership for a professional services firm as one of the enablers to charge premium rates and avoid “who’s cheaper” competition. During an economic downturn, the thought leadership in helping choose the right projects by defining KPIs and identifying a clear path to reaching the targets is how you can carve out a niche for yourself; instead of having to beat competition in a bidding war, you will create your own playing field and will be the only player on it for a while.

Another way to look at this is to go beyond cost and ability to execute as selection criteria for vendors. It is very hard to sell a $100,000 project to a client unless you can make a clear case that the project will save or earn as much, with a relatively short payback period. With a sold proof of expected ROI, your client will have a much easier time selling the project to their boss and will also earn some points as a strategic thinker with management skills written all over them.

Now, here’s the challenge. Defining KPIs for Intranet projects is tricky. It is something that the best of the best struggle with, as I’ve personally witnessed. One of the reasons for this struggle is that Intranet projects aren’t directly tied to revenue or cost reductions. You build a new Intranet portal for an organizational group or department, and in the end the same number of folks are doing the same jobs with the same level of efficiency, bringing in the same kind of revenue.

The second challenge is that simply saying that Solution X will save every user 10 minutes a day or Y millions of dollars a year falls on deaf years. While the savings may look impressive, the cost of labor doesn’t change, and the client still has to figure out as to how to translate the 10 extra minutes to more revenue or lower costs. Unless you can help them and come up with a clear plan leading to improvements in the bottom line, your solution is half-baked.

Let’s take a step back and forget the technology. Instead, let’s focus on one of the key success factors of any project – a change in behavior. When something new is introduced in an organization, the natural expectation is that somehow it’ll change the behaviors of people affected. This new factor could be a new strategy, a new process, a new organizational structure, or a new information technology. Before the new element is introduced, the company identifies the behaviors it seeks to change and creates a vision for the future behaviors it wants to form through the change. When the injection of the new element is completed, the outcome is very clear: the new behaviors are either there or not. The Intranet implementations should follow the same rules, and here’s how you, as a consultant, can help your client with Intranet implementation and help yourself win more business.

Identify the behaviors your clients should promote. This is your chance to show your knowledge of the client’s industry and bring to the table some best practices that exist, or better yet, will exist in other organizations or other parts of the company. You don’t need to engage in a complex business process re-engineering exercise (sounds old school, doesn’t it?). The client is not paying you for this; unless you are trying to sell millions of dollars worth of technology services, your sales budget will be fairly limited. The good news is that organizations in a particular vertical or market segments have lots of similarities so you won’t need to re-invent the wheel on every engagement. Instead, you want to identify a handful of key, fairly generic behaviors that would be applicable in 80% of the situations. Examples of these behaviors might include:

• Seeking help from other people in the organization. Every organization has a lot of tribal knowledge. Documenting this knowledge takes time and can be expensive; in addition, a quick phone call with 1-2 questions is often all the help seeker might need. Therefore, you want to encourage a behavior of finding an expert in a particular area and instantly connecting with them.
• Sharing knowledge with co-workers and/or clients. I blog, because I believe I have some ideas that could benefit others. I get satisfaction from knowing people read my blog posts. I blog, because I am building a thought leadership image of myself that ensures that my clients feel good about paying premium rates for my services.

Now that you’ve identified the behaviors you will help your clients promote, let’s take a quick de-tour into the behavioral science. The ABC model of creating behaviors looks like this:

Antecedent -- > Behavior < -- > Consequence

The antecedent is a trigger. Anything that prompts the behavior to occur is an antecedent. For instance, if James the Manager asks her subordinates to actively seek help from other co-workers, that’s an antecedent. An antecedent may or may not lead to the behavior; in fact, antecedents contribute only 20% to the behavior occurrence. The other 80% is driven by the consequence. If the consequence is positive after the behavior takes place, the person is very likely to re-engage in the behavior, and vice versa. If Jennifer the Account Representative listens to James and tries to seek help, she will look at a) whether the help was pertinent and got her over the hurdle she was facing and b) how easy it was to find the expert she needed. Therefore, if your solution paves a smoother road to positive consequences, Jennifer will be more likely to ask for help and thus perform the behavior James expects.

Now that you understand that you need to identify behaviors that will positive affect your clients’ business and tie your solution to the consequences of the behaviors, let’s come up with measurable KPIs for each behavior. Many times I’ve seen situations where a project is started without defining specific and measurable results that will determine the project’s success or failure. As a famous Chinese proverb goes, if you don’t know where you are going, you are unlikely to get there. Unless you know what your Point B is, how will you know that the client has reached it? How will the client be able to communicate to their boss that the project is a smashing success unless the definition of success is agreed upon up-front, without ambiguity?

Using the examples of behaviors above, here’s how your KPIs might look:

• Seeking help from other people in the organization. If your solution reduces time it takes to find an expert in a particular area, resist the temptation of calculate the amount of time you save the company. It is not only meaningless, but also doesn’t show an increase in the behavior the client is trying to promote. Instead, you could use metrics like the number of searches for experts and the amount of time each search took. While the former should be defined together with the client, the latter is part of the value proposition tied to the solution you are selling.
• Sharing knowledge with co-workers. I use Blogspot for my blog. Whenever I insert an image into a post, the formatting gets all screwed up, and I have to go through the text and waste my time manually deleting blank lines Blogspot adds between paragraphs. Then there’s the promotion aspect. I want people to read my blog, and once I make a new post, I go to Yammer and Twitter and tell the world I wrote something new. My KPIs could be the amount of time it takes to post a blog entry and the number of promotional appearances the new entry makes on related sites.

The type of consequences we have discussed above is referred to as Negative Reinforcement. A negative reinforcement occurs when a consequence that might otherwise block the behavior is removed. In both examples, we are removing the inconvenience of spending too much time to complete a useful task.

While the negative reinforcement does lead to a change in the behavior, it only leads to just enough behavior to avoid the negative consequence. In other words, if an employee needs to find an expert to seek assistance from, they’ll be more likely to use the Intranet solution that shortens the path to Point B. The behavioral science teaches that it is a positive reinforcement (adding a reward consequence) that can truly promote the behavior. Hence, in addition to measurable negative reinforcements such as time savings, you need to identify positive reinforcements and develop a program that will promote them to the target audience. Only this way, you will have a truly comprehensive solution that will include technology and a plan to ensure the adoption.

Going back to our examples, the positive reinforcements could take the following form:

• Seeking help from other people in the organization. The reward of this behavior is information that benefits the seeker. So glorify this consequence. Have a communication plan in place to explain the correlation between the behavior of seeking assistance and company goals. Allow for a feedback loop so people can post thank-you notes when they receive useful information. Build a mechanism to convert the tribal knowledge exchanged between two people into searchable content.
• Sharing knowledge with co-workers. Get a rating system in place so people sharing knowledge with co-workers can get feedback on their contributions. Tie the knowledge sharing to annual reviews. Give public praise and acknowledgement to active contributors and exemplify their contributions in front of their peers and bosses.

Summary

Companies have difficulties measuring the ROI of Intranet implementations. A savvy consultant can overcome this challenge by using his industry expertise to identify desired behaviors that will benefit client organizations should they choose to use the consultant’s solution. In order to ensure the client’s success and win the business, the consultant should propose a comprehensive program of antecedents and consequences that will lead to the desired behaviors. Establishing KPIs for consequences to measure and evaluate the outcome of the solution implementation will help the client quantify success; establishing a program of positive consequences and removing negative consequences will ensure the high adoption rate of the solution.