Using Web 2.0 tools to support knowledge management at Janssen-Cillag Australia

1. About Janssen-Cilag

Janssen-Cilag is one of the fastest growing, research based pharmaceutical companies in Australia. It has more than 300 employees, split across Australia and New Zealand with around half based in the field. It is one of 250 Johnson & Johnson operating companies, which total about 121,000 employees across 57 countries.

2. Intranet history

In 2006, Janssen-Cilag completely replaced our simple, static HTML intranet with a Wiki solution. Over the 16 months since its launch, it has dramatically transformed internal communication and continues to increase in both visits and content contributions each month.

3. Intranet requirements gathering

The culture at Janssen-Cilag is highly consultative and relationship based. As such, gathering information and buy-in is often achieved through a series of conversations and discussions, building a coalition of support.

Requirements for a new Intranet site were collected through 27 interviews with a variety of people from all levels of the business. Three themes emerged:

1. We need a trusted source of information
2. Whatever we do has to be simple
3. Just do something!

Each conversation varied widely in focus, but the format usually went as follows:

1. The floodgates open with a dump of information the user considers vital for the Intranet, which lasts about 15 minutes. (What can I get?)
2. They highlight search as a key requirement.
3. I would steer the conversation to questions about how content should be maintained. (What can you give?)

4. Pitching a Wiki to the business

With many years of experience building one of the first large scale completely open collaboration platforms for the web and then building heavyweight enterprise CMS systems for large organisations, I’ve personally come full-circle to the idea that the best collaboration systems are incredibly simple and open. Wikis are a powerful starting point for any organisation, but latent demand at Janssen-Cilag created the perfect environment.

As such, I used the requirements gathering session as a chance to pitch the idea of a Wiki as the solution to our Intranet problem. After bringing the conversation to understand our content maintenance requirements, I’d talk through the Wiki approach and how it may work for Janssen-Cilag. My sales pitch went as follows:

• We need a system where editing is immediate and very simple.
• Getting people to contribute at all is hard, so we need to concentrate on letting people do things rather than worrying about what they shouldn’t do.
• The risk of letting anyone change anything is low, since we’ll keep a complete history of changes so we can quickly undo mistakes and we can hold irre­sponsible individuals accountable for anything improper. (Reactive moderation rather than Proactive moderation.)

In general, the response was incredibly positive. Predictably, the main argument against this system was fear of improper changes to content, particularly for
information subject to regulatory control. I would counter this argument in two ways:

• There are two ways to control people’s behaviour: social forces and technical forces. Currently, we successfully rely on social forces to control a wide range of things like who calls or emails the CEO with their latest crazy idea. Technical forces are powerful, but with each technical feature we increase training and raise the bar against collaboration. Surely, we can see if social forces will be enough for all but the most critical of content?
• Anyone can choose to monitor any content that they are concerned about (e.g. automatic email alert with changes). So, they can quickly jump in and correct any mistakes.
• For exceptional cases, we may choose to lock down critical content and define clear ownership and responsibility for its maintenance.

At the end, showing people around Wikipedia was an incredibly powerful way to seal the deal, particularly since they have often used it to find information in the past.

There were no major objections to trying a Wiki-style concept.

5. Implementing a Wiki for your Enterprise Intranet

We purchased, customised and launched a pilot Wiki Intranet within two weeks and with a budget of $11,000 AUD. This included all graphic design and single sign on integration.

After evaluating a wide range of alternatives including MediaWiki, Twiki and FlexWiki; we selected Confluence by Atlassian. Our main concerns were support for a hier­archy of pages, strong attachment capabilities, news features, LDAP integration, high quality search and a decent rich text editor.

Our customisation focused almost completely on usability. People shouldn’t know or care that they are using a Wiki. All that matters is that they can easily browse, search and contribute content. (In fact, after 16 months, only a small set of Janssen-Cilag staff would think of our Intranet as a Wiki. To them, it just seems natural that Intranet software would have evolved to something this simple to use.)

6. Here were our implementation decisions:

Integration with LDAP and use of NTLM for automatic single sign on is essential. We even hacked someone’s starting point and open sourced our improved version.

Rich text editing must be available and as Word-like as possible.

Users like hierarchy and structure, the Wiki should not feel disorganised or completely free-form. (Confluence supports this with an exact page hierarchy capability.)

Sacrifice power and flexibility for simplicity. For example, our page design is fixed into a title, alphabet­ical list of subpages, page content, alphabetical list of attachments. While it would be nice to be able to change this at times, or order the attachments, or change the look and feel; it’s far more important that everyone can contribute and clearly understands how things work.

Remove as many unnecessary features as possible.

For example, labels are a great idea, but we already have hierarchy and most users don’t really know what labels are.

7. Launch & user training

We started the new site as a pilot, launching as the source of information for a relocation of our head office. (Nothing drives traffic like the seating plan for a new office!) Information around the relocation was fast moving and changing daily for the two weeks between announcement of the move and our actual relocation.

Building on that success, we obtained executive approval to replace the existing Intranet. Over the next two weeks we worked with key content owners (most particularly HR) to show them how to create pages and migrate appropriate information. We made the decision to not automatically migrate any content, mostly because it was so old and trust in the existing intranet information was so low.

Our launch was timed with an informal head office monthly meeting, where around 100 people stand and listen to an update from senior management. We switched the site to live during the meeting, and had 5 minutes to present:

• 1 min: Highlight the desire for a trusted source of information that was simple to use.
• 3 mins: Full training that showed how easy it was to view, search, edit & maintain.
• 1 min: Point out that responsibility for building that trusted source is now in your hands!

That launch presentation remains the only formal training we’ve ever provided on how to use the system.

Continuing training has been provided through short one-on-one demonstrations (we only show, we never do) and a detailed help section (I’m happy to show you now, but for future reference here is the help page).

8. Adoption, statistics & business impact

The adoption of JCintra has been remarkable. After only 3 months, 111 people had contributed more than 5,000 Q changes. After 12 months, we had 18,000 contributions from 184 people within the business.

Most significantly, our contributions per month has continued to grow since launch. People are engaging and collaborating more with time, they are not losing steam as you might expect.

To drive adoption, we’ve primarily focused on owning the flow of new information. Early on, we established a policy that all announcements must be on JCintra. When necessary, they may be sent via email in addition to posting as news on the Intranet. Today, announce­ments ranging from major restructures to new babies for employees flow through the news page without clog­ging up email inboxes.

Owning the flow of news has established JCintra as a trusted source for the latest information. This trans­lates into an expectation that the stocks of information (e.g. policies) will be available and up to date. Own the flow and the stock will come.

Business information that was previously scattered in email (e.g. Business Planning presentations) is now collected into a permanent, secure online space. We have a growing reference and history of information to build on and make available to newcomers. Knowledge management, previously a big concern, has moved off the agenda for the time being.

9. Content ownership model

For many Intranet owners, the model for content owner­ship is a key point of focus. With JCintra, our philosophy (successfully so far) has been:

1. If someone isn’t willing to maintain a piece of content, it can’t be that important to the business.
2. We happily show people how to do things with the site, but we don’t do it for them.
3. Occasionally we highlight sections of the site on the home page, which is a great way to drive the defacto owners to clean it up a little.
4. We encourage people to have high expectations for content on the Intranet. If something is missing, please report it to the appropriate area of the busi­ness, or better still, add it for them.
5. The answer to verbal queries for many departments has become, ‘it’s on JCintra’. This reminds people to search first and ask later.
6. In the end, the quality of content in an area is a reflection on the defacto department owner, not the Intranet itself.

As a result, we’ve seen some departments embrace the Intranet in a big way, while others don’t update content as much as we’d like. As expected, service areas of the busi­ness have been strong adopters, which means the main areas of Intranet content have been well maintained.

We’ve not yet adopted a formal content review process, but believe this will become more important in the next year of the site’s life.

10. Keeping momentum & next steps

The primary barrier to continued success of JCintra remains the same as our initial barrier: encouraging a culture of collaboration and transparency. Some areas of JCintra have been highly successful in this regard, while other sections have never gained clear ownership or momentum.

JCintra works best when it is established as the source of truth for information and becomes the place where the work is done on a day-to-day basis. While the Intranet is a place that has to hold a published copy, it will remain as ‘extra work’ and struggle in the competition for people’s time

Source: Dave Chaffey (2010), E-Business and E-Commerce Management: Strategy, Implementation and Practice, Prentice Hall (4th Edition).