Social Intranet :: life in the trenches

10 Steps to a Social Intranet

2010-10-28T14:15:00.000-04:00

Another great presentation by the guys over at Prescient Digital Media. You can watch the video here or review the slides below:

10 Steps to a Social Intranet

View more presentations from Prescient Digital Media.

Perks for your small or zero intranet budget

2010-09-29T21:30:00.000-04:00

Great article on jboye.com "Why having no intranet budget can be a great thing".

These are my pros and cons for not having an intranet budget...

Pros:
- easy to change technologies due to no monetary investments (just time)
- open source software is your friend!
- writing you own applications is more flexible and often faster that setting up high dollar software/hardware solutions

Cons:
- having to plead for a thousand dollars to buy a charting control for a project
- no training or conferences other that blogs, whitepapers, and free webinars
- no budget usually means no help...being a team of one can be a bummer some times

User Experience: FAIL!!

2010-08-13T16:03:00.000-04:00

As seen on a recent Adaptive Path post:

OK. I get most of it but what are the two before "Don't Feed the Squirrels"?

Design Patterns for Social Experience

2010-08-13T14:12:00.000-04:00

Yes...I know...it has been a long time since I have posted anything in this space. Let me just start out saying that I have been really busy! I am still the sole intranet resource for my company (of 4500 employees) and I am doing the job of 2 or 3.

That being said, I have been working on revamping our "People Finder" application and finally adding some more social features such as two way connections, status updates, and activity feeds.

I have been doing quite a bit of research and found this really great article on Human 2.0 titled Design Patterns for Social Experience.

This really spoke to me:

...social experience design is about the interaction between people rather than the interface between the human and the computer – and that while you can fairly well control one person’s experience with a system, you cannot predict or control how people will choose to interact with each other.

As such, when you design a social experience, all you can really do is provide a framework. You can set the basic rules and capabilities, but the participants will finish the design for you.

Even though this article is about as old as my last post, I think it is worth a read for any intranet manager working on social projects.

What makes a successful intranet manager?

2009-12-07T08:52:00.004-05:00

Just found a very interesting podcast on what makes a successful intranet manager of Catherine Grenfell by Jane McConnell of Globally Local. Check it out here: http://www.netjmc.net/globally_local/2009/11/catherine-grenfell-on-successful-intranet-managers.html

Don’t miss the boat!!!

2009-08-21T14:24:00.001-04:00

The annual “Global Intranet Trends” survey closes in just a few days (10 to be exact).

If you run an intranet make sure you take the survey! Oh, and by the way for doing the survey (took me less than an hour) you will be send a free copy of the 2009 report!!

So don’t miss the boat!

http://www.netjmc.net/intranet-trends/how-to-sign-up-for-2009-survey.html

Just finished the Global Intranet Survey…have you?

2009-08-11T15:53:00.001-04:00

If you are involved in your company’s intranet and have not yet taken Net Strategy JMC’s Global Intranet Survey 2009, you should. Just head on over to http://netjmc.typepad.com/globally_local/2009/06/2009-global-lntranet-survey-goes-live-participate.html to sign up.

Cheap recognition

2009-08-11T14:22:00.002-04:00

These days it seems like everyone is trying to save a dime and companies are obviously no different. The problem is in corporate America, employees tend to get a little sore if they loose all the little recognition perks they have been so used to getting.

At my company, we have been working hard this year on putting in a few little features into our intranet so employees and leaders can provide no-cost recognition to peers and subordinates.

P.R.O.P.S.

P.R.O.P.S. or People Recognizing Other Peoples Success is a little tab on our employee yellow pages that allows employees to send a quick message of encouragement or congratulations. The message is posted to the employees profile page where the whole company can view the success (unless it is marked private).

Employees can send up to 10 of these little gems per month. We limited it so each time a kudos is sent, it really has some meaning behind it: “I can only send 10 of these out this month, I’d better make it count!”

eCards

The other little project completed this year was a branded eCards site. This simple site also allows employees to send a message to other employees (or out side of the company for that matter) a branded image and message.

Messages include Happy Birthday, Congratulations, Thank You, Job Well Done, and the like.

Unlike P.R.O.P.S., eCards are privately sent only to the intended recipient.

I hope you can see that it does not take too much effort to provide creative solutions to employee engagement and recognition. A few simple tools strategically added to your intranet can turn it from dull business site to socially engaging intranet!

Run an intranet??? Take a survey!!!

2009-07-22T13:41:00.004-04:00

Jane McConnell of netjmc.com is running an intranet survey through the end of August. For your effort, you will get a copy of the 2010 "Global Intranet Trends" report. That reminds me....I still need to take the survey...thanks for extending it Jane!

The 4th annual Global Intranet Strategies Survey opened at the end of June and will stay open until August 31. All participants receive a complimentary copy (pdf) of the " Global Intranet Trends for 2010" report that will be published in the second part of October.

The key themes this year are:

- The workplace: Are intranets catching up with what people need to do their jobs?
- Collaboration: How does the online workplace support virtual teams and communities of practice?
- Social media: To what extent is social media being used internally and for what purposes?
- Search: Is enterprise search still a perennial problem? What strategies and resources are being put into place to optimize it?
- Ownership, governance and strategy: Who owns the intranet and what operating models and strategies are in place to drive business value?
- Measuring value: What indicators are being used to measure the value the intranet brings to an organisation: adoption, usage, satisfaction, workforce coverage, reduction of risk, business value?

Instructions for applying:
http://netjmc.com/survey/sign-up-JMC-global-intranet-survey-2009-2010.html

More information: 2009 Global lntranet Survey goes live! Participate!
http://netjmc.typepad.com/globally_local/2009/06/2009-global-lntranet-survey-goes-live-participate.html

You can contact Jane McConnell (jane@netjmc.com) directly for more information.

My Twitter Experiment

2009-06-05T09:22:00.002-04:00

No, Twitter is not really strictly intranet related. But everyone is doing it right?

I have been seeing all kinds of websites talking about how to increase your business through Twitter. Some even suggesting you can get 17,000 followers in a month! So I just had to try it for my little handcrafted pen business I do on the side, The Norsk Woodshop (http://www.NorskWoodshop.com).

A lot of these methods say to follow as many people as you possibly can or at least as many as you can find that are somewhere in your target (buyers or co-artists in my case). So that's what I did. Last night, I started a dedicated Twitter account for The Norsk Woodshop. And started following my guts out. I have found 171 people to follow so far using a really neat tool http://twitseeker.com that you can search for terms and then automatically follow those people.

Out of the 171 I have followed, I so far have 6 followers. Not 17,000, but it is a start, especially considering it took me months to get that many for my personal Twitter account (I guess I am just not that interesting).

I will keep at it for at least a month and report back my progress!

You can follow The Norsk Woodshop at http://www.twitter.com/norskwoodshop.

Intern Wanted!

2009-05-21T15:11:00.002-04:00

Are you a college student working towards a 4 year degree in Computer Science or a related field? Do you live in the St Petersburg, FL area (or know someone that does)? Can you get credit from your school for an internship? Have a passion for usability, clean code, and ASP.NET?

If so, I want you!

I am currently looking for a summer intern to help work a on few intranet related projects here at HSN. Go to HSN Careers and search for job #0802182.

Patrick

Why are we afraid of employee comments?

2009-02-18T13:04:00.003-05:00

I am currently working on an internal blogging package for my company. Besides the standard blog pieces, it contains some special communications features such as digest and on-demand emailing.

I have been fighting for allowing employee's to comment on items posted through the site. However, there is a great fear from our HR group. To help, I have made comments disabled by default and can be turned on by message, however right now, I am also working on a moderation option.

So why is HR, or executives for that matter, so afraid of employee's having the ability to comment on company news? What ideas do you have to help sell having open comments always turned enabled on our site?

I would love to hear from everyone!

Pooped for Performance Management

2009-01-02T14:22:00.002-05:00

It's a new year and time for new projects!!! We have just completed our new Performance Management system and its up, running, and doing quite well.

Our new system was all built from scratch using ASP.NET 2.0 with a Microsoft SQL Server back-end. The new site includes some cool for us but pretty industry standard features including a visual process map so it's harder to get lost during the process, a task based system that lets employees and leaders know what needs to be done and when, as well as a new spiffied up tab/wizard interface for each major process including goal planning and evaluation writing.

That being said, it is now time for some new projects!! Yippee!!! I also have grand hopes of writing a bit more in this space about what I am currently working on, big wins, and some notes/thoughts of my current research.

See you more through the new year!

Wiki Works - the workhorse of any social intranet

2008-10-26T20:17:00.003-04:00

Blogs are cool, social bookmarking sites are neat, but I really think wikis are the big news in the intranet 2.0 space.

At our company, we launched a wiki last fall (almost a year ago now...wow!) and it has mostly become the internal wikipedia. The wiki contains a lot of glossary terms pulled from all over the company from different business unit's websites. This has made it much simpler to find what the specialized terminology of our business means.

However I want more! I have been using the wiki for all my intranet documentation, support lists, application change logs, etc. But how do I get other people interested?

I see one problem with our setup, a slightly modified version of Screwturn Wiki, has no security. Sure it tracks who wrote what, but I would love to have a bit more partitioning, like the Workspaces concept in Socialtext's workspace concept, allowing separate work areas for projects teams, wikipedias, and onboarding, to name a few.

So what are your thoughts for wikis in the social intranet?

Building a better "Employee Chooser"

2008-10-21T15:31:00.004-04:00

I have been faced with a UI design problem on our Performance Management system that I am currently building.

There is one area within the site where leaders have the ability to choose another employee within the company to request feedback for one of their direct report's performance review. This is simple stuff, except the UI bit for picking what employee to send the request to.

I have written a couple other apps in the past that needed to do this type of work, but I really did not like the solutions I came up with, namely some type of a drop down list or select list with all the names listed. Problem is, with over 4k employees...this is a really long list.

I like the idea of a type-ahead search box that could show the name, title and photo of a group of employees based on the search string entered. Something like Google's Enterprise Labs "Search as you Type" plug-in for the Google Search Appliance.

So what other ideas do you all have? Please leave me a comment!

Creating a social media strategy for your business

2008-09-19T13:48:00.005-04:00

I attended a free webinar yesterday put on by JibberJobber.com's Jason Alba and People-OnTheGo titled Social Networking in Action.

The discussion centered around building up your business by using social media sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, blogs, and Twitter. Very interesting stuff and worth checkingo out Jason's slide deck and site @ http://www.jibberjobber.com/.

I am not sure if they will offer up a recording of the webnar, but you might want to watch the People-OnTheGo site.

"Avoiding the intranet dumpster" - Ragan.com

2008-08-27T11:21:00.004-04:00

There is a great new video from the fine folks at ragan.com about how to keep you intranet content fresh and avoid hosting an "information dumpster."

practical content
easy to find
interactive
community

That's what the social intranet is all about!

Low Value Content is Destroying Your Website? I don't think so.

2008-08-04T15:42:00.001-04:00

Is low value content the problem with intranets? I am not sure it is or not. In blog post by Gerry McGovern over at CMSwire, Low Value Content is Destroying Your Website, has some interesting information.

Most data and content that we create is next to useless. Nobody will ever be interested in looking at it again.

He also mentions that the corporate intranet is a dumping ground for company information because companies have no clear standard of where to put this stuff. Well, where does he suggest it go? In my 10 years of developing intranet sites, the reason the data exists is because someone needs it. It may be a loss leader in hits, but there is still a need.

I would rather see a bunch of infrequently used pages exist on the intranet rather than some word doc sitting on someones hard-drive or worse yet, lost forever when an employee is termed.

This seems to me to be one of the best use cases for social networking, specifically the wiki. It gives employees a place to quickly and easily empty their brains and get back on with the task at hand. The other upside, is for you GTD readers, it helps make mind like water!

Tapping into the Cornucopia: Twitter usage in corporate settings

2008-07-23T09:17:00.002-04:00

Check out this interesting post on twitter on the intranet...

Tapping into the Cornucopia: Twitter usage in corporate settings

Disconnected CMS

2008-07-11T14:41:00.004-04:00

Today, I launched a new piece of the puzzle in our intranet, a Content Management System. Yes, I know, we are way behind the times... We have been using a home grown CMS for our external website for years now, but the intranet (i.e. the ugly step sister up till last year) has had it's static content authored in Front Page since the inception.

It took so long to get a CMS into the fray due to the huge amount of work it would take to implement a traditional CMS system that includes page templates and the like. So we created a "disconnected CMS."

This system consists of two parts, a ASP.NET administration tool that allows authors to create content and a JavaScript function that uses AJAX to asynchronously request the data to be displayed on the page.

The administration site is secured by content groups or categories. Each author, which we have about 40, will be given one or more content groups for their sites. These groups can contain multiple pieces of content and multiple authors. Authors are restricted to only the content groups they are a member of. Any changes to the content are stored in a SQL server and versioned (with optional comments) so that authors can review and revert back to older content if needed.

The JavaScript function takes in the GUID of the content item and returns back the HTML string that represents the content. The AJAX call is done via the Prototype framework which allows multiple async calls on each page.

This system should greatly reduce the number of times a day I get requests to publish Front Page content and allows authors to update their websites over time to the new system.

I should have some hard data on usage in the next month or so to determine if this solution can really scale like I think it will.

Creating the buzz

2008-07-08T20:53:00.003-04:00

It is always the last thing you think of, or at least it is the last thing I think of: Creating a buzz around new intranet features.

Our current routine for a new "major" feature is to create a "spotlight" that includes an image and/or screenshot, header, text and link that lives on the intranet homepage for three or four days. We also create a blog post on our "intranet news" blog that gets a few reads ( < 1% of employees ). We try not to send out mass emails since people don't read those from our HR department now (that leads to another future post).

What are your ideas about building buzz around new intranet features?

Life in the trenches

2008-07-03T17:54:00.002-04:00

I know, I know...another blog about social intranet or Enterprise 2.0.

I hope to use this space to discuss "life in the trenches" at a mid-sized new media retail company that up to about a year ago, it's intranet consisted of all static content with a few disjointed applications thrown in.

Today, the intranet has grown to be a bit more cohesive (in look & feel, search, and navigation) and includes a wiki and a socialized employee yellow pages application. Better, but still room for improvement!

So, in this blog I plan on discussing my experiences including technical issues, politics, working with partners, and making sure you spend your time and intranet budget wisely.