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Need to use a SharePoint intranet due to internal policies, company transitions, or legacy systems? When all the available information is overly technical or negative, where do you turn? Enter Fresh Perspectives: Living in the reality of SharePoint intranets. We provide useful, jargon-free insights and real-world examples to help you maximize the benefits of SharePoint intranets and tackle its challenges. Pro-SharePoint but realistic, we debunk misconceptions and share product management insights from Fresh Intranet.
David Bowman [00:00:14]:
That was a sneaky introduction of the Fresh Perspectives mug there, Jarbas.
David Bowman [00:00:18]:
I like that.
David Bowman [00:00:19]:
It was good.
Jarbas Horst [00:00:19]:
Yeah. You know, we're getting sponsorship. The more viewers we have. It's more than two now, David, as we started, you know, like your mom, your dad and, you know, they want other people as well.
David Bowman [00:00:30]:
I think they might have given up in episode two, to be honest with you. Welcome to Fresh Perspectives. I am David Bowman. Jarbas.
Jarbas Horst [00:00:37]:
I'm Jarbas. Yes, I'm Jarbas Horst or Jarbas Horst. Yes. Working here at Fresh as a student product manager.
Jarbas Horst [00:00:44]:
And we're David.
David Bowman [00:00:45]:
Yeah, we're joined by a special guest, Cai from Swoop Analytics. Cai, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself?
Cai Kjaer [00:00:52]:
Well, hello, everyone. Yeah, Cai, originally out of Denmark and thanks, Jarbas, for the Danish flag I can see you have on your desk. Thank you very much. I moved to Australia 25 years ago in chase of sunshine. And 10 years ago we started Swoop analytics, which is a analytics company that really analyzes internal employee communication. And I've spent many years looking at internal collaboration in various aspects. That's where the passion comes from.
David Bowman [00:01:17]:
And, Cai, I'm really pleased to have you on today because I also get a chance to say thank you for your support over the last couple of years, particularly and how appreciative I am of your team, particularly Gemma and Coco, who always look after me when I'm out in the us. Coco was my personal Uber driver while we're in Seattle as well. So that was really good.
Cai Kjaer [00:01:35]:
We're good conference buddies.
David Bowman [00:01:37]:
Yes, yes, yes. We're usually placed next door to each other. Team SharePoint, Team Britain. With Gemma there as well.
Cai Kjaer [00:01:44]:
Exactly.
David Bowman [00:01:45]:
All right, thanks so much for joining us because, you know, I think this topic of measurement in the workplace, which is the thing that we're going to talk about today, this is a huge topic. We could cover all sorts of ground. We're going to try and rein in the scope a little bit today. But, Cai, you know, you've built a very successful business and set of products in this area. Why is measurement important? What does it mean? Give us a bit of an overview about your take on this topic.
Cai Kjaer [00:02:10]:
Well, it comes from a really basic starting point. If you don't know where you are, it's hard to find out where you're going and how fast you're going to get there. So typical analogy would be a gps. You might know where you're heading, but Cardino, you can get there. There's different ways to get a destination. Unless you know how far you've gone and where you're heading. It's really hard to adjust the course. So that's the whole purpose, this whole driver is to get where we want to get, but get there in the most fast and most efficient way.
David Bowman [00:02:38]:
Yeah. And understand, you know, we've talked a number of times in the past that delivering employee engagement and being able to measure employee engagement, this is not a cheap or low risk thing to be able to do. And if you're spending a lot of money on something, you're going to need to know what your return on that investment is going to be. So there's a kind of really tangible link back to we're putting an investment into some digital channels. Maybe it's an intranet, maybe it's a community based system, social enterprise product, those kind of things that comes with some capex, some OPEX costs as well. If you're spending the money, how are you delivering a result? What results are you getting?
Cai Kjaer [00:03:14]:
And you're right, there's the whole OPEX capex cost of actually putting in an employee engagement and employee communication platform. But there's an even bigger I guess challenge above that was well, why are we putting that platform in there? Well, we might be facing some challenges in our organization. It could be strategic change and you know, if the CEO wants to do A, but people are doing B, then we have lack of alignment. And I think that's the biggest cost is like how to be sure that people aligned to the strategic vision and objective. It's not just that that really high level like overall objective, it cascades all the way down to the organization. And if people are not doing what is really the organization would like them to do. That's the whole thing about employee, not just the engagement bit, but also change communications, ensuring that people have the right information to do their jobs, ensuring that they know what they're supposed to be doing, that they can raise valid concerns about how implementation is going locally. And if those things aren't happening, the cost of that going wrong is far, far, far greater than the cost of the platform itself that you use to implement these communication channels.
David Bowman [00:04:19]:
Yeah, absolutely. And you know, I guess kind of the other dimension that's probably worth adding in here is that attention spans for employees, this is a kind of tough area as well, isn't it? And being able to measure how much of employees attention spans are being used in different areas, how long are people staying in the intranet, are they using these? There's something that needs to be tracked there as well.
Cai Kjaer [00:04:40]:
And it is a fight for. It's a fight for eyeballs, to be quite honest. I only met yesterday with a very large company and they were telling me how the CEO is sending out comms. The. Well, the next layer down is sending out comms. The next layer is sending out comms. And if you're an employee, you're the recipient. You know, like all these different things that are sort of saying the same thing in different ways.
David Bowman [00:05:00]:
Yeah.
Cai Kjaer [00:05:00]:
So we can see that. We did a, published a benchmarking report on the use of SharePoint intranets last year. And, and we looked at a lot of data. We looked at data from 177,000 people and I think it was more than 50,000 intranet pages and news pages and content pages. And while people are spending on average 15 minutes on the intranet per day, it's really only one minute on the news part of it. And they're reading about one article per week on average. You know, can you imagine if you're sending out like all these things at the same time? You. The challenge is that the employees have, you know, let's say eight hours a day.
David Bowman [00:05:33]:
Yeah.
Cai Kjaer [00:05:34]:
You can't extend that to 10, 15 and 24 hours just because you have more content, more things for them to read. So you have finite set of time where people can spend on the Internet, yet you have an almost infinite amount of people that would like to tell them things. And those two things are, I guess, can sometimes collide unless you have good analytics that helps you understand what are people reading, how much we're sending out, is this a good time to send it out?
David Bowman [00:05:58]:
Yeah. And as the poor person that's got to manage the intranet or the digital channel in question, when you're confronted with all of these people that want to say all of this stuff, and often you're a team of one. If you've got no analytics to be able to say to people, you know, look, basically you've got about 15 minutes on a Tuesday morning in which to capture all of this information. For the majority of the organization, there is no point in sending them a 10,000 word monologue on your topic of choice, Right?
Cai Kjaer [00:06:30]:
Yeah. I think there are two things that make it really hard if you have no data. One is it's hard to come back to that person and say, listen, this is how much time we can afford to take up because of all these other things that we pushed out. So it's hard to push back. That's one thing. The other thing is also really hard then because I Think there's a building expectation that the more that I publish, the more that I produce, the more successful I am. And my bosses are sort of saying, well, how many things did you push out this week? And if I say five, that's not as good as if I say 10.
David Bowman [00:07:00]:
Yeah.
Cai Kjaer [00:07:01]:
So without the data, you then end up in this really uncomfortable place where you're being forced or feeling it could be. I'm not saying explicit implicit expectation that more is better.
David Bowman [00:07:11]:
Yes.
Cai Kjaer [00:07:11]:
And you think that more is better, but actually from the audience perspective, more is worse.
David Bowman [00:07:17]:
Yes.
Cai Kjaer [00:07:18]:
And if that's you in two ways.
David Bowman [00:07:20]:
If that's the only data point that you've got right. Is number of things you've done this week that you know you're sort of heading towards a loss overall, there aren't you.
Cai Kjaer [00:07:28]:
And that's actually the easy thing. You can always. That's kind of easy to measure for yourself. You can say, how many things did I publish? You know, that's not hard to measure. The difficult thing is like, so what did reach the right audience? Because again, what's the point of publishing lots of things that people aren't reading? And I think one of the challenges, almost like we got to be very careful with, is that generative AI is of course making it increasingly easier for us to generate content in many different forms. So the blog post we can turn into something else. And press release, we can turn into an Internet article. And, you know, you might have seen what's the.
Cai Kjaer [00:08:00]:
It's a really cool offering from Google where they turn something into a webinar podcast. You know, maybe we should just stress that this is not an AI generated podcast. We're real people. Yeah.
David Bowman [00:08:11]:
We're not consistent enough for anyone to believe it. So.
Cai Kjaer [00:08:13]:
No, too many outcuts. But there's to be A.I.
David Bowman [00:08:18]:
Well, look. Yeah, and I think the. Our ability to generate high volumes of crap is pretty good these days. Right. You know, we can generate an unending amount of this stuff.
Cai Kjaer [00:08:28]:
Absolutely. But that's the challenge. Right? So if I feel that I'm being measured on volume and my bosses have this implicit expectation that more is better, I can now use AI to make their worst nightmare come true. Because I can publish endlessly, lots of stuff. But the people, our colleagues, though, do not have endless time to read things. Actually, I was talking to a really large organization in the US yesterday, and they said their main objective was to limit the amount of time people spend on the Internet. Right. Because less is more.
Cai Kjaer [00:08:56]:
So then they're supposed to come there, read exactly What? Or do things that are just enough for them to get their job done and then back to work on this. Like the Internet is the work, you know, where there's forms of things that are integrated and things where you at work is actually, you know, is actually using the Internet. In that case, of course, if you like more, it's better. But I think for most people, if they come in and they read procedures and things, less is better.
David Bowman [00:09:19]:
Yes. I remember having a fascinating conversation with a customer a long time ago now that having looked at their analytics, they were saying, look, we're a bit disappointed that people aren't spending very long on the homepage. Well, that's a good thing, isn't it? You've got a well structured content page that people are going to find what they want very quickly and move on to the next thing. Do you want people spending hours.
Cai Kjaer [00:09:39]:
Exactly.
David Bowman [00:09:40]:
Reading your homepage?
Cai Kjaer [00:09:41]:
I've heard people saying that there's a couple of metrics that have been so well talked about over years in I guess in website statistics. One is page views like, oh, the page is loaded. Look, my page is popular. And that's really deceptive metric because it takes not a lot. And who's actually refreshing that page? You know, is it the same person doing it 100 times? You know, is it even the right audience who's doing it? Well, we don't know. We're just capturing. It's like a, it's a very kind of faulty metric. And the other one is bounce rates, you know, like, oh, like how come people stop, wait, they, they didn't do after, after they came to this pace, they didn't do anything else.
Cai Kjaer [00:10:16]:
Well, per your point, David, maybe they just went to the homepage, did exactly what they had to do and that was it. And that's fine. We're not a website where we crave for people to spend, you know, 15, 20, 30 minutes on the site, ending up putting something in the cart and then buying it. That's not necessarily actually often not what we want the Internet to do.
David Bowman [00:10:35]:
Yes. Okay, so we're going to get into some of the details on some of the technologies that are available for our common platform. Because, you know, I guess the common theme for us, Cai, is that you and I are building for and creating experiences within Microsoft 365 US primarily in SharePoint, you in SharePoint and with Viva Engage, which we want to talk about a little bit. Tell us a little bit about where your product set works in Microsoft 365 and why you're Targeting those areas.
Cai Kjaer [00:11:03]:
So historically we started within what was then called yammer years ago, now called Viva Engage. But it's always been about the employee engagement, the conversation, the conversations bit, what are people talking about? Who's talking about it? How can we help organizations establish better dialogue between leaders in the front line? Create more knowledge sharing connectedness, which is really the value proposition for Viva Engage. And then we evolve that to say, well, let's have a look at the intranet. So let's have the content and the conversation so we can have a look at both. And then we're also looking at, wouldn't it be interesting to see more of those communication channels that people are using? So where else do people put content? Where else do they have conversations? And that of course brings us into Microsoft Teams. Then we also have a look at, well, what's the best balance you can have in using these different tools? Like what if you spend all your time in chat and that's the way you communicate, but you actually don't really seem to be visiting the intranet? Or what if you spend all the time in email but you don't have a lot of meetings? So this is whole thing about working synchronously versus asynchronously, working collaboratively or on your own and all that sort of. We developed that set of what we call the seven collaboration habits that allow organizations to, I guess, more solve that problem of when to use what, where and how, which is an ongoing challenge because there are so many different ways that Microsoft allows a person to engage with another person.
David Bowman [00:12:29]:
Yeah, tell us about those seven collaboration habits then.
Cai Kjaer [00:12:33]:
So I'll do very briefly. One of the promises, I guess when teams first rolled out was that we won't have this email overload problem anymore. Like it literally go away because now we can work much more efficiently in Microsoft Teams. Well, it just turns out when you analyze, you know, data for thousands and thousands, actually hundreds of thousands of people, you find out that that's actually not the case. Actually the more you use teams, the more you also send emails. So those two things actually go together. We should just be aware of that. Another thing is that we can also see that there seems to be a bit of a pattern, I like to call them the knowledge orders versus the knowledge sharers.
Cai Kjaer [00:13:06]:
So there's a set of behaviors that tend to go together. If you have a strong preference for email, you also have a strong preference for chat and using OneDrive. Whereas if you're someone who is more a strong user in SharePoint, you're more likely to also be using engage and using teams channels. So can you see those are the more where you work together in a more it's all within the company but you working more openly, more transparently where the other ones are more like oh, I'll just have it here with you and me first and then we can tell the others afterwards. So it's interesting where you can sort of see those dynamics, how they play out. And I think there's a really big thing around digital literacy that's in this as well. If you don't really use these tools very much, then you're probably just going to be stuck. Not stuck.
Cai Kjaer [00:13:51]:
You could probably end up just using email or maybe having some meetings and maybe. But there's a way in which you're the use of the tools come with using them more and more and more and then you sort of you, you pan out into different tools as you start to use them more and more and more.
David Bowman [00:14:07]:
Yeah.
Cai Kjaer [00:14:07]:
So the 7 Collaboration Habits is helping an individual or people that are working in change and adoption with helping them educate people about the different preferences and how they just happen to work. Are you someone who is addicted to email or maybe you're not addicted to email anymore, but now you just got this chat overload problem. So we got these seven collaboration habits about being email overload or suffering from that. So we the positive version of that is being email liberated, being chat liberated, being a community contributor, being a file sharer. So we sort of try to accentuate the positive behaviors and then give you data behind that that shows you how close you've come to that. And then we're giving you based on our global benchmarking some goals for how close you've come to achieving that goal based on what the people, real people in the real world have achieved. So it's a bit like the 10,000 steps per day. You know, how close are you to your 10,000 steps? That's what we're doing with the collaboration habits.
David Bowman [00:15:00]:
Really nice. And you know, I guess the history on how you've come to developing this kind of methodology framework habits this is because you know, effectively you're in the middle of the use of a lot of these platforms for some pretty big organizations across the world. Right. So you're kind of synthesizing all of these behaviors from these organizations that are measuring and taking action on the measurement that they're seeing and being able to play this back, you know, not only to your customers but to the wider community of Microsoft users.
Cai Kjaer [00:15:28]:
Exactly. I have to pay Tribute to one of our three founders in Swoop and Dr. Lawrence Lockley, he's our chief scientist and when we started Swoop 10 years ago, he said we need to benchmark, we need to be able to show people how they're performing. And then we want to educate people about what good looks like and establish benchmarks. Because whether it's for intranet, whether it's for Viva Engage, it's M365. People are really keen to find out what does good look like.
David Bowman [00:15:52]:
Yeah.
Cai Kjaer [00:15:53]:
What is kind of normal. And I know that there can be all sorts of issues with benchmarking, you know, like, oh, but you can't compare this with that. And we in different industries, but you can start to see some really interesting patterns about what does Frontline look like compared to people that are office based. You know, there are some things where we have some building some assumptions that, well, surely given that we've been spending so much money on building mobile friendly intranets, surely we have a high proportion of people that are using, they're accessing the intranet for mobile. And then we do the benchmarking and we find out it's just under 2% that are accessing the intranet for mobile. And when you get those numbers, you got to go, well, that's the global stat. What does it look like for my organization? And I bet you that most companies probably wouldn't be very far even if they ain't from that. So I think the benchmarking and putting numbers out there allows you to stop and go on.
Cai Kjaer [00:16:42]:
My assumption about how this, we thought this would work might not be true. And I think there's a lot of assumptions that people are jumping to about how people are using the intranet, how much time they're spending on them, the value they're getting from them and the thing that we've engaged in M365, that when you look at it, it's just not backed up by the evidence.
David Bowman [00:17:02]:
Yeah, yeah. And I think there's a tendency for people that are running kind of digital channels, roles, comms, intranet managers, community managers, digital champions, even that a lot of the time they're doing these things as a kind of team of one and not really having a lot of people in the organization to bounce off ideas with. Right. Or to kind of test their own theories. Because when you've been working in digital for a while, you get a sense as to how things are going. But there is nothing like actually having some data points to back up your hunches and your Assumptions, Right. Yeah.
Cai Kjaer [00:17:32]:
And it gives you credibility. If you're sitting with a senior executive and you say, I think we should do this, and then they say, why? You say, well, because of this.
David Bowman [00:17:40]:
Yes.
Cai Kjaer [00:17:40]:
Then you can point to three data sets and say, I think we either. Let's say, for instance, that you do have a large workforce, that actually you built the intranet because you wanted people to access it on mobile. You find out that 2% and then you can say, there's something that's getting in the way. Like we had an ambition. The whole business case was based on. We had, you know, whatever, 15, 20% of people accessing on mobile. Now why aren't they? Is it a tech issue, is it a usability issue or what is it? And then you can go and say, I want to spend X amount of money exploring why this is the case. Because, senior leader, there's only 2% and we thought it would be 15.
David Bowman [00:18:14]:
Yes.
Cai Kjaer [00:18:15]:
Without those numbers, you're flying around blind. You don't really know. And when you're being pressured on why do you want to do A and not B, you're finding it hard to argue.
David Bowman [00:18:23]:
Yeah.
Jarbas Horst [00:18:23]:
Do you seek many of your clients using Engage and SharePoint for communication?
Cai Kjaer [00:18:29]:
Yeah, absolutely. We actually, in the last report we put out, we can see that the two actually go together quite nicely. We know that Microsoft has had a vision that the two would sit nicely together, but it's nice that the data actually supports it. We can see that people that are accessing the intranet are also active on VivaEngage. So from a user perspective, in a way, I don't really. Of course, I'm not Microsoft, so I don't own their product strategy. I look at what people are actually doing.
David Bowman [00:18:56]:
Yes.
Cai Kjaer [00:18:57]:
And so I'm not commenting on how good or how bad the product integration is. I'm just looking at are people doing these things. And that happens to be the case. People that are very active on SharePoint, also very active on Viva Engage, so they sit nicely together.
David Bowman [00:19:09]:
Yeah.
Cai Kjaer [00:19:10]:
We can also see, when you look at the data, we say, well, on Viva Engage, for instance, you know, people often say, what's the difference between that Microsoft Teams, you know, isn't that the same thing? It's got, you know, like, isn't it all about discussions and like, it's in the message, message. But when you look at what people are actually doing, you can clearly see that on Microsoft Teams, the teams that people create are typically much smaller and then they're private. And on Viva Engage, they typically the membership is much larger and the groups or the communities are open. So it becomes very apparent what people are actually doing. Which sort of takes away this. Oh, we are confused about this and that. Well, when you look at the data, people aren't really that confused. It's just a case of almost like just saying, hey, you're already doing this.
Cai Kjaer [00:19:51]:
Let's just all agree that that's.
David Bowman [00:19:52]:
Yeah. There's a lot of nuance in this conversation about confusion over what to use when in the Microsoft suite of tools, but I think once you start using the products, it becomes fairly obvious pretty quickly that you're trying to smash a square peg into the round hole. Yeah, I guess often the most confusion here is probably in smaller organizations where actually you could use teams in the same way that other organizations use Viva Engage. But at scale, teams doesn't work in the same way.
Cai Kjaer [00:20:19]:
Oh, yeah, that was actually a very important point you make, Dave, because we deal mostly with medium to large enterprise and our benchmarking has mostly log data on medium to large enterprise. I have spoken with organizations where there might be 100 or 200 people, and in that case, I totally get it. Maybe you can run the whole thing on teams. I can't really comment much on that because the datasets we look at, as I said, are typically for large organizations.
David Bowman [00:20:43]:
Yeah. There's a lot of functionality these days that you're missing out in Viva Engage, in particular, some of the analytics. And I think, you know, that's really where Viva Engage probably comes into its own these days, with a lot of additional functionality that Microsoft have provided, but also being able to use tools like yours, which, as well as producing reporting and data, are also producing a lot of insights and actions to take on the things that you're seeing. In particular, one of the things I really liked Gemma showed me when we were at an event in the US last year, is a relatively new addition to your product called Dr. Swoop.
Cai Kjaer [00:21:16]:
Yes.
David Bowman [00:21:17]:
Which I really like as a kind of AI buddy for people that are using these tools. Right. Because you've got, you know, again, team of one. You're looking at data, you're looking at measurement, you're looking at analytics. Often it's not always obvious which actions or recommendations or practices that you should take with this data. So, you know, presumably that's why you got the product.
Jarbas Horst [00:21:37]:
Kind of continuing the discussion based on what David mentioned. And the question I have here is like, you know, when are the analytic options in Microsoft 365 not enough for the clients? Because everything is kind of not everything. But there are some elements of analytics in Engage and SharePoint. But when is that not enough for the clients?
Cai Kjaer [00:21:57]:
Yeah. So we always say to customers, make sure you check in on Microsoft and see what you can get, ideally for free. Right. Then Microsoft has in recent years started to include more of these premium offerings. You know, SharePoint premium teams, premium. A is premium. So it's always good. Some of those have some additional analytics capabilities.
Cai Kjaer [00:22:17]:
So it's always good to see what do you get for free and then what is it that you have to where you pay extra for Microsoft and check out what those are. Microsoft are good at explaining of course what they do. Customers that come to us are well aware of that have looked at and said those offerings, whether the free ones or whether it's the paid ones, are for whatever reason not meeting our needs. So we've been doing this for the last 10 years and you know, it might sound a bit harsh, but we kind of like a one trick pony, you know, like we do analytics around communication.
David Bowman [00:22:46]:
Oh, you're focused. It's different.
Cai Kjaer [00:22:47]:
Yeah, focus. That sounds better than a one trick pony, doesn't it? Yeah, that's right. So we really focus wholeheartedly on analytics and we've been doing that within Swoop analytics for the last 10 years. But before that, for the last 20 years I've been working in the intranet portals, collaboration, social network analysis space. And the people we have that, whether it's product development, whether it's R and D, have a long background in digital workplace. So we know this space really, really well. And that means that when we are doing metrics, we know from our own experiences what are the things that really matter. And that's why I said when we did this SharePoint intranet analytics for instance, we knew that page views, we need to show it, but it's not the thing that people should really be focusing on because it's such a vanity metric.
Cai Kjaer [00:23:31]:
Whereas it's a lot more healthy to look at visitors. And it's not just the visitors, it's who are they? You know, is it the right audience you're targeting? And in the last product update we did we even enable our customers now to remove the homepage views because we know that. Well actually a lot of browsers the intranet is the default style page. So that means that if you're just counting page views and you go like, oh look, my Internet has like, you know like 99% of the people using it. Well no, you have 99% of your people that are accessing a browser. You have like page views can be really deceptive. Even the visitor metrics can be deceptive in that case. And so once you really know this space well, then your analytics will start to look different.
Cai Kjaer [00:24:13]:
And now if I focus on SharePoint, for instance, Microsoft also, I mean we have a very good relationship with Microsoft. They have to serve like a vast audience of people that are using Microsoft SharePoint for so many different purposes. Right. One of them is intranet. But SharePoint has a huge, like an enormous user base for all sorts of use cases and therefore it's impossible for them to do analytics that'll meet the needs of everyone, you know. So that's why I say we are very focused as you're saying, David, not one trick ponies, but we say, well, what's important from an intranet? It's not important if you are a law firm and you have a whole bunch of presets stored in a SharePoint library. Yeah. It's totally different things you might care about.
David Bowman [00:24:58]:
Yeah.
Jarbas Horst [00:24:59]:
So this data, sorry, the data is disconnected. Like so you have analytics in SharePoint and that's kind of the silo. And then you have the data then in Engage and you have like also this other style.
Cai Kjaer [00:25:10]:
I think that's, well, that's why. So first of all, organizations are now they're starting to open their eyes for, I think you call it omnichannel and being able to look at things from the whole, like the whole breadth. So looking at if we're doing a campaign, how it's tracking on Engage, how is it tracking on the Internet, how is it tracking on email, how is it tracking on lots of different things. So we fulfill a part of that. Not all of it. It's our goal to do all of it. But where our customers that come from, there has been a team that owns Viva Engage, which led us to then build solutions for Viva Engage. Then there's another team that owns Intranet and they historically done that.
Cai Kjaer [00:25:46]:
So we built a product for that. And now the next obvious thing for us, which is we're in the middle of doing now, is to being able to bridge all these data together so you can have one view.
David Bowman [00:25:55]:
Yeah.
Cai Kjaer [00:25:55]:
And that's actually where our AI helper, Dr. Swoop, as we call it, really helps people that are probably, we like to say we do analytics for people who are not analysts.
David Bowman [00:26:06]:
Yes.
Cai Kjaer [00:26:06]:
And by that we mean that it's people that are. They don't sit like, you know, there's not like a dedicated analyst function. They Sitting out in the business unit and they might go in once a week or once a fortnight when they publish an article and they want to get a sense of how that has gone and it can be quite hard for them to remember. What do the metrics actually mean and what do they look like both across SharePoint and then across UV Engage. And you know, I know the difference between a page view and a visit and a visitor. But most people, they forget by the time they've been there. I mean, I mean even job. No, it's not their full time job.
Cai Kjaer [00:26:39]:
Right. I know a lot of financial metrics because I have to, because I use them every day. But most people do not know, so we know that. Right. So Dr. Swoop is then helping people to start. If you get confused about why is it we don't care about views? Again, like you just say, why is it that, you know, views are important? And you come up and say, well, clients, why? Yeah, I'll tell you why it's important. What does that metric mean? Why is that important? Or you want to increase your.
Cai Kjaer [00:27:02]:
For instance, you have a senior leader and you want to help them with a content calendar. Well, why don't we just go in and have a look at, you know, what have they published on Viva Engage over the last three months? And then Dr. Swoop will find out what are the things that really did well and you'll just say, you know, like, so can you help me do a content calendar for the next three months based on what has worked well for the last three ones? You know, so it's kind of like you taking the data and helping you understand the data and then take action on the data to help you get your job done.
David Bowman [00:27:31]:
Yeah.
Cai Kjaer [00:27:32]:
Faster.
David Bowman [00:27:32]:
And I think that that final point there, Cai, that you just made is something that really resonated with me because, you know, in lots of conversations with customers and they talk about what analytics can we, you know, do we get out of SharePoint, out of your product? Often when you say to them, okay, great, you've got these analytics, what are you now going to do? What action are you going to take on this information? Because you've suddenly got all of this data that's available to you, what action are you taking? And again, because a lot of the time people are performing this job on their own, no big team around them, no analysts available to them of actions that I could take based on the things that I'm seeing in the analytics, what I really liked about what you'd done there was you've trained this on your best practices data, on reports so that people can have a conversation with this thing about what action should I take to produce Result X. Yeah.
Cai Kjaer [00:28:21]:
And unlike if you ask ChatGPT where you don't really know what the sources are, I guess it's a big, big Internet and we have if you like sanitized peer reviewed articles, insights that are based on biscuits practice organizations because we've been doing benchmarking for the last 10 years.
David Bowman [00:28:39]:
Yeah.
Cai Kjaer [00:28:40]:
We found out what the best organizations are doing, what response rates. You should be looking at all those things we have specifically for SharePoint intranet and for Vivian Gage. That means that when you ask Dr. Swoop, you're tapping into 10 years of experience. That's evidence based. I should ask. It's not just, you know, it's not just like, oh, maybe do that because you know, that worked my previous job. It's far, far more reliable than that.
David Bowman [00:29:02]:
Focused.
Cai Kjaer [00:29:03]:
Yes, that's right.
David Bowman [00:29:04]:
All right, let's get into some specifics then. Let's talk a little bit about SharePoint intranets. Now, you know, you and I again, Cai, we've had lots of conversations about Microsoft SharePoint and we accept that there are mixed views out in the market about whether SharePoint is a good intranet product, a bad intranet product, whether it's an intranet in a box, whether it's not an intranet in a box. Again, kind of experiences that you've had with customers that are using SharePoint having success. Why is SharePoint a good platform for intranet? First let's start there and then we'll talk about some of the analytics.
Cai Kjaer [00:29:36]:
I think years ago I remember talking to organizations where they felt that they needed to have like a third party consultancy coming in. It became quite technical to get SharePoint up and running. So many things have happened in the last, even just in the last five years making SharePoint something that works far better out of the box. Now you know that with Fresh, it's still lots of things that it doesn't do as beautifully and as easy. And there are third parties. Like we are doing better analytics than what you get out of the box. Fresh is doing, you know, a better user experience. You can do more things with Fresh, you know, on top of it.
Cai Kjaer [00:30:10]:
So there's some third parties that are enriching the SharePoint experience. But like your tool is pretty much, you know, it makes it a lot easier for normal people to use SharePoint. Our tool is, you know, you click a box, you know, and you install it doesn't require a lot of technical setup to do this. So I think organizations are now saying that actually we can probably do a lot with this. Like that's out of the box with little few bits and pieces and then we have something that works quite well. And if you rely on the SharePoint as like the backbone of it, you're benefiting from, from all the improvements that Microsoft are throwing into the tool over time. You know, the old days when it was SharePoint, you know, whatever year. And then you're like, oh, I'm like on premise and I'm stuck with this now.
Cai Kjaer [00:30:53]:
The innovation that comes out of Microsoft, you sort of get all the benefits of that as that and that comes in. And I think they are moving quite fast. They're adding your AI features in for. And that's of course everyone is doing that now. Certainly I can see with our customers they have a very good integration story as well about how SharePoint and Bwake fit together and how it fits into M365 in teams and meeting people where they are and all those sort of things. So I think they have a quite a nice story. And then they're big, they're ugly, they've been through security and all that. It's something that it is comfortable with.
Cai Kjaer [00:31:23]:
It just makes the whole thing just like probably just a lot easier.
David Bowman [00:31:27]:
Yes. Particularly I think for heavy regulation industries, you know, healthcare, retail, government. It's a solid and reliable choice, but there's no reason that it has to be bad. I think that's the impression that people have about it, that it's a tool for it, by it and you're not going to have an enjoyable experience. And I think the fact that we're both here and there's a kind of ecosystem of other vendors that are able to build products on top of the Microsoft 365 platform demonstrates the power of its versatility.
Cai Kjaer [00:31:54]:
Yeah. It's also the reason why we exist and we have an integration with SharePoint is because it is the biggest thing around. Yeah.
David Bowman [00:32:01]:
And you know, kind of thinking about analytics specifically then for people that are using SharePoint intranets, what recommendations would you make? You know, if you're kind of just starting out SharePoint out of the box today for kind of things that people should be looking for as success measures in their SharePoint intranet. Have you got any recommendations that you could make to people out of the box?
Cai Kjaer [00:32:21]:
There's a few things, not that much you can get. And as I mentioned earlier, I think it's because Microsoft had to satisfy such A huge variety of use cases. So if you're looking at it from an intranet perspective, you're going to hit some limitations very, very fast. So on a page you can see things like, you know, amount of views, something about visitors for the last, you know, and then a couple of defined periods. You know, I think something like 30, 90 days or something like that. And then what you have to do then if you want to find out, well, what do we do over the last year, then you sort of got to get a screenshot of it or export it and then build your own thing in Excel. Now you can do that if you've got no money, your team of one and you've got time in your hand. You might be lucky enough to have an intern, right? But it's not going to take long.
Cai Kjaer [00:33:07]:
Like I meet customers all the time and they've taken this to absolutely as far as they can. And they go like this spreadsheet breaks all the time. It's not reliable. You're like, I'm spending too much time on this. I'm finding myself now being a Mr. Excel pivot table lookup sort of person. And I never get to sit there and actually talk to people how we make the intranet better. And I think that's the worst case when you just become an Excel junkie and not someone that's actually really working with your business units on making their, in this case, making the Internet better.
David Bowman [00:33:37]:
Yes.
Cai Kjaer [00:33:37]:
So you're going to hit a limit, right? The next thing then I know many organizations have looked at is of course that what can I get for free? I would do the same. Like I, I'm a cheapskate myself, go out and look one year for free. And Google Analytics has been the one. You go like, let's get Google Analytics then, right? That doesn't cost anything. Well, let's take aside the technical bit where you put a service request into it and then they say, well, we have to charge you for the time we spend. So there might be some intern internal cost associated with this. Now GDPR has then gotten in the way and said, well, maybe we're not allowed to use Google Analytics anymore. Some people are saying, well let's get some open source tools like Metamorphos.
Cai Kjaer [00:34:14]:
You might say, well let's. Or maybe it's Matomo, maybe I get the pronunciation wrong. But you know, like there's some of these open source tools. You come in and say I get that. Or maybe there's also other people saying, well, we have a good relationship with Adobe we get the Adobe Experience analytics for free and we get that in. So I think depending on the size of your organization, it might be things you can get for free. Maybe you run into issues with privacy and security. And at some point anyway, when people come to us, it's because they've exhausted those things.
Cai Kjaer [00:34:43]:
Either it doesn't meet their needs or it's been too much of a hassle. And the intranet, by the way, they've invested, you know, sometimes it's hundreds of Thousands and some $7 million, millions of dollars on rebuilding intranet because they all won, hadn't been maintained. And then they're going like, if we're spending this much money on intranet.
David Bowman [00:35:02]:
Yeah.
Cai Kjaer [00:35:02]:
Should we not make sure it's actually being maintained this time?
David Bowman [00:35:05]:
Yes. And you know, I remember in a conversation some time back, you used the expression visitors overviews was something I distinctly remember you saying to me that, you know, as a kind of basic KPI, you know, Absolutely.
Cai Kjaer [00:35:17]:
And at least do that because otherwise we could be, see here hitting refresh, you know, like, oh, the whole commerce team is saying, let's just hit the refresh button a few times and look how popular we are. So it's such an easy thing to fake these views, at least with visitors. You know how many people are actually using it. But as I said, once you then start to say, all right, we have to focus on visitors, the next thing is they say, well, but who, so who are these people? Are we actually hitting the right audience? And immediately after that, you have to think about segmentation of your audience and finding out, is this piece of content hitting the right people? And without good use attributes, you're going to find that very difficult.
David Bowman [00:35:57]:
Yes.
Cai Kjaer [00:35:58]:
And in my experience, some organizations, they've nailed their user attributes. And for some organizations, the analytics getting a platform like Swoop then becomes the thing where they go, like, we really got to fix those use attributes now to really understand whether or not it's hitting the right audience.
David Bowman [00:36:11]:
It's rare to find an organization that says, we are 100% happy with our user profile attributes and our user profile data. That's an unusual scenario to find, isn't it?
Cai Kjaer [00:36:21]:
Yes. Kind of more case of like, how bad is it? From a little bit to a lot, but it is a hard one. You know, even defining what is an employee? Like, oh, what about this person we had to contact from our parent company? Is that an employee or they're not. That's a content. What do we do? What's full time? What do we really need? I Understand, it is really hard. Yeah, it is really hard.
David Bowman [00:36:41]:
So visitors overviews.
Cai Kjaer [00:36:43]:
Yes.
David Bowman [00:36:43]:
Understanding your audience, user profile attributes and data and I guess in terms of next places to go to for measurement is on kind of governing the freshness. I'm going to use the expression.
Cai Kjaer [00:36:56]:
Yes.
David Bowman [00:36:56]:
Governing the freshness of your content.
Cai Kjaer [00:36:59]:
Yeah. So there are two things here, right. One is who's actually consuming our content. And I get that. You know, we want to find out whether what we're writing and what we're publishing is actually being. Is it of any value? And values, you know, is of course, are they actually accessing and are they doing things after they've read the documentation, are they clicking to the next thing they need to click to or what are they doing? But then that's one thing that's about the consumption bit. But as you're correctly pointing out, what about the content that's in there? Like, how do we ensure that the page that was published, you know, the HR policy page, they'd say that was published by you, David. Yeah, but you left two months ago.
Cai Kjaer [00:37:34]:
So now we have a page that was last modified by someone who's not here anymore. That's not good. Or it was modified by six months ago. And the moment things haven't been touched for a while, people are going to start to question whether we can rely on it. If you look at a HR policy and it was published a year and last modified 18 months ago, I'm sure you're going to go, 18 months ago. Can I rely on that? And then I have to ask my boss and ask around, you start to doubt whether it's correct. And what we found from talking to lots of people is that the moment is from every day. It's after three months, every day that passes, people are going like their nervousness, trust is dropping every day.
Cai Kjaer [00:38:12]:
Right. It's a pretty easy thing to measure. Right. When was the page last? When was the last modified? Is the person who modified. Are they still there? It's also pretty easy to look at things like how hard is this to read? We're using the next score, which is a score that works across languages, that what makes it attractive and it looks at complexity of text. We do get things like broken links and spelling mistakes as well. If you come to a page, you know, and you find out it's out of date, the person isn't there anymore. You know, it's like the link doesn't work.
Cai Kjaer [00:38:42]:
And the link probably doesn't work because David doesn't work there anymore and he didn't Update. Yeah. You can see how all these things, it's tied together. Yeah, it is. But what has been hard is finding out that I think on Internet we can see that on our, you know, benchmarking that there will be loads of content pages. I talk about content pages as opposed to news pages.
David Bowman [00:39:03]:
There'll be lots of other implications to this as well as being able to kind of analyze.
Cai Kjaer [00:39:08]:
Yes.
David Bowman [00:39:08]:
Quality of content.
Cai Kjaer [00:39:09]:
Yeah.
David Bowman [00:39:10]:
This will be having a negative search as well. Right, yeah.
Cai Kjaer [00:39:13]:
Sorry, I forgot. One point, David, is that loads and loads of pages that will have some of these issues on them, but they don't all have to be fixed like now, you know, so once you take that into consideration, the consumption metrics and these governance metrics and you add them together and then you can say, well, why don't we fix the pages that are accessed the most? Because if we have a highly accessed HR policy page that hasn't been updated for quite a while, it might even have some incorrect links. That is far more damaging than having a. I know a finance page that very few people access that have the same issues with it. So the two really go together to help you understand what to govern and to put some priorities of how you maintain your Internet. You have to learn the consumption metrics. Like if you don't have them, you don't know the priority you want to fix.
David Bowman [00:40:01]:
Yes. Yeah. And as you say, you know, I think when you start looking at this data it can feel a bit overwhelming. You don't need to do everything right now. Right. This can become a kind of progressive to do list, but never starting. That's a bad place to be.
Cai Kjaer [00:40:14]:
Yes.
David Bowman [00:40:16]:
Let's talk about the other tool in the kit bag for Measurement on the Microsoft 365 platform of Viva Engage because you published a report recently, Cai, on Veeva Engage usage across your customers. And you know, one of the things that I've seen you and Pete Gemma and co kind of present on, on this topic is this idea of thriving communities. And I really like this as a kind of term of measuring measurement generally in the organization. The idea that you've got these thriving communities and you've got some attributes that make up what a thriving community is. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Cai Kjaer [00:40:48]:
Yeah, of course. I think we also just have to position against SharePoint as the intranet is the place where you're having the content, but then having View engage is the place where you're having conversations and you're saying those conversations happen in communities. I think communities are the. They like the engine room for connectedness in organizations. And it's a very, very important. They sit very, they're connected by the hip, I guess through this content and conversations bit. Now if you go into a community and you go in there and you just joined Fresh and you go into the business development community and the last update was from David or Yavas and it was like four months ago with, you know, you should go like, oh right, okay, four months ago. Really? Is that the last time something happened on the business development front, you know, at Fresh? And you should go like, I think I'm going to tune out of this.
Cai Kjaer [00:41:40]:
So there's something about does it feel vibrant? You know and I think if you go into a room at a social function, you feel the bus in the room, right? And you sort of instinctively know that you can feel the conversations there. That may be some music in the background, you have people on the dance floor and all those things. We've been trying to find out what are the similar characteristics we can find online. Like what will we look for given that there's no music and dance and you know that you can't.
David Bowman [00:42:05]:
It's a shame.
Cai Kjaer [00:42:05]:
Maybe, maybe it should be good VTs. But there are things we can look for, patterns of conversation, patterns of interaction that mimic this. For instance. Yeah, of course when it comes to the post, there should be a frequency of posts in there that should be a post that relatively new when you get in there. But it shouldn't just be posts. We need to have people that are replying to those posts. I mean the second most thing is for me to go into the business development community in Fresh and seeing an update from David every day that says today this has happened. Today there's a training course, tomorrow we are at a conference, but no one is engaging with that.
Cai Kjaer [00:42:42]:
And I'm thinking, is this an intranet? Like isn't it just updates that are being pushed out? Like why am I, why isn't it just one way? And when you talk to. For the benchmarking report, we went out and we talked to lots of people that have done really, really well with reengage. And there was one common thing that bound them all together. Viva Engage is a place to have two way conversations. Okay, From a metrics perspective, how many posts can I reply? But if it drops to less than 50%, we have an issue because there's too much broadcasting going on. Now if you then start to think about, well, like how do we stimulate conversation? Well, there's some pretty obvious things that will happen Everyday conversation that we're having, like this conversation we're having here today is you, David, being a rock star in your business as well in asking questions. And it's the questions that you ask that stimulate the conversation. So what should we expect to see in a thriving community? People asking questions.
Cai Kjaer [00:43:36]:
Right. Because big questions stimulate conversation. And it's actually a pretty easy thing to measure. It doesn't just have to be did they use the question type in Viva Engage? Because some people do that, but not everyone do that. But we can actually what we found is if you just look for this character, a question mark that is ridiculously good at finding out whether a question is indeed being asked. So we look for that question mark in a post or in a reply and say, how often does that happen? And the global average is about, you know, 8 to 10% of messages have a question in them. When they do, you get way, way more responses to your message than when you don't do it. It's like 150% more replies.
Cai Kjaer [00:44:16]:
So thriving conveniences, they have people asking questions, you know, they do not just rely on one single person. So it might. Sorry, picking on you, David. But it's not just David posting in the business development community all the time. It is lots of other people from fresh that are posting. So it's different people posting. It's the sentiment of the conversations. Are we using imagery? Lots of things that will drive conversation and then when those things are in place, you will simply feel that this is a thriving community.
Cai Kjaer [00:44:45]:
You feel the energy in the community. I think it was, I don't too lofty. And it's not like I read a lot of old classics, literature classics, but Tolstoys and Anna Karenina. The opening phrase is that it's something like all happy families look alike, but every unhappy family are unhappy in their own unique way. This makes sense. All happy families look the same, but every unhappy family is not happy in their own distinct way.
David Bowman [00:45:14]:
I think we might have culturally peaked there, Cai.
Cai Kjaer [00:45:18]:
Now what I like about that opening part of that novel, and I think that applies to communities as well, all thriving communities actually look the same, like they have this magic happening in them. But it only takes one thing you take away and suddenly it falls apart. That can be that they aren't asking questions, that it's the same person that's being in there all the time, that they don't do one or the other thing and then suddenly the magic falls away. But you know it, when all those components are there, we don't need to have all those components flying in there for all communities. But I think for the ones that are most strategically important for the business where they say we need to have thriving communities for whether it's for project management, for health and safety, whether it's for risk compliance or whatever is strategically important for the community. The best organizations have community managers in place and their role is to ensure that these communities are indeed thriving through moderation, through helping, assisting, tagging people, bringing people into the conversation. They have a critical role in playing, ensuring that we have thriving communities and the best performing organizations in our benchmarking studies have good community management.
David Bowman [00:46:23]:
Yeah, there's a couple of things in there for me that we were talking to Manash Mystery from Microsoft a couple of weeks ago about Copilot and you know, we were saying there that complex outcomes don't have easy solutions.
Cai Kjaer [00:46:35]:
Right.
David Bowman [00:46:35]:
And I think the same principle applies here as well. Right. That you do need to put some effort into making this work, but when it's working it is delivering tangible benefits for your organization. You know, Microsoft published their work Trend Index report which talked about highest performing companies have high rates of employee engagement. You know, the idea of being able to turn something that feels very intangible like Viva, Engage and communities into something that's really measurable. And I just think, you know, some really simple things that you throw out there, like the instances of question marks and the mix of people that are asking questions in a community, they are things that you can observe by looking at it. But you know, how much powerful is that? If you've got a nice looking report that you can produce on the contribution that your community management is making to your organization's profitability. There's a really good link.
Cai Kjaer [00:47:23]:
Yeah. None of this is really hard on the metrics bit, right? It's not that hard. The hard bit is you have to do it at scale and that's where the spreadsheet starts to fall apart because you can't do that scale and you can't just do a report once a month. People want all the time, 24 7. Yes. And I think that's the part that's. Anyway, that's the part of the problem that we're solving by enabling anyone to get access to this in their own time. So they become more like a pool that you have to push out reports.
David Bowman [00:47:49]:
Yeah. All right. We're about at time today, Jarbas. Perhaps we should do some conclusions.
Jarbas Horst [00:47:55]:
Yeah. The thing that I have been wondering, we have been talking about, about good measurement and so I wonder, do you Think that people underestimate the value of measurement?
Cai Kjaer [00:48:06]:
No, absolutely. I don't think they undervalue it. Some people are struggling with getting started. And where do I go? How do I do this? Like, what do I measure? What really makes sense here? I think that's more the bit most people know. They intuitively know that without metrics, we don't really know where we're going or how fast we're going. Now, I don't know whether you heard about the fear of finding out. You know, this fear of missing out, but there's also the fear of finding out. So I do appreciate that there are some people.
Cai Kjaer [00:48:31]:
And yes, Anderson, if you're listening to this just by accident, yes, Anderson is an AI.
David Bowman [00:48:36]:
I'm sure he's a regular listener.
Cai Kjaer [00:48:38]:
He's regular listener. He's maybe got it from somewhere else. But he told me about the fear of finding out. Some people might actually say, like, I'm actually. I don't really want people to know how my Internet is going. You know, I've got funding, I've got my team. Maybe it is not as good as I think it is, so why don't we just keep quiet Now, I really sincerely hope that that is that very small minority of people. And if that is the attitude, I don't think we'll hang around for very long anyway.
Cai Kjaer [00:49:04]:
So I think the fear of finding out should be replaced with. I think my colleague Pete Johns talked about the difference between proving and improving. So why don't we use the metrics to actually improve what we're doing? So, Jarbas, I think that companies are certainly the people. They come to us because I guess they realize that they've been struggling for years. Maybe the Internet has been falling into a state of decay because there has been no measurement. Leaders are suddenly showing a great interest after Covid employee engagement and go, like, how do we find out how we're doing? How am I supposed to be guiding my company without having metrics and knowing and setting targets and showing progress and demonstrating what I've done? So I think it's not so much the, if you like the value of it, it's more practically, how do I get started? And internal comms and employee engagement is a really special niche area. There aren't any existing finance metrics or other metrics that we have other places that just comes falling down from the sky that I can use. So you got to talk to experts that really know internal communications and employee engagement well to find those metrics.
David Bowman [00:50:05]:
And I like the sort of positive spin on both of those that I heard. The joy of missing out. So I guess the joy of finding out is equally applicable.
Cai Kjaer [00:50:13]:
Yes. Well, without that, how on earth are you going to improve?
David Bowman [00:50:16]:
Yeah. Cai, thanks so much for you joining us today. Really appreciate your time and thanks for all of your thoughts.
Cai Kjaer [00:50:22]:
You're welcome. Thanks for having me.
David Bowman [00:50:24]:
Cheers.