DorjeM

Value of leadership and paradox

noreply@blogger.com (Dorje McKinnon) — Tue, 03 May 2011 01:54:00 +0000

Working as I do at a University I sometimes get the chance to see speakers I'd otherwise only find in the virtual world.

An hour ago I was able to see Sir Paul Callaghan (New Zealander of the year 2011) speak on his vision for how New Zealand could have it's cake and eat it too by looking at where we as a nation want to be "as rich as the Aussies" and then thinking smart about how that can be achieved within the constraints that we have as New Zealanders.

But what does it have to do with intranets ?

To me Sir Paul's talk, which was very similar to the one I've included above, reminded me that the key to success for any venture requires:

Having a vision
Providing leadership
Knowing your landscape
An ability to take the road of the statesman rather than that of the politician

Intranets as we all know are tricky beasts to do well. We can any one of us throw up a few pages of how to, and move the refernce documents from the file server onto the intranet. But adding organisational value takes quite a lot more.

Paradox is how Sir Paul brings these key aspects required for success togeather using examples of Abraham Lincoln resolving the American Civil war, the Wizard of Oz and Jane Austin. As intranet professionals it is our professional duty to be able to do this within our own organisations.

Sir Paul's talk reminded me that with my Intranet hat on

Wpending time with users, at all levels within my organisation is valuable.
Helping all staff understand that the simplest thing (sending an email) isn't necessarily the best thing to do.
Providing everyone with your dream for what the intranet could be, and the stepping stones along the way to reaching that vision is invaluable.
Saying no to some requests rather than letting the loudest ideas become those that are undertaken.
Walking the walk, by being the very best you can be and not contradicting yourself through words or actions.

Comment and let us all know the things that remind you how to be the best intranet professional you can be.

Dorje

Viral video intranet style!

noreply@blogger.com (Dorje McKinnon) — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 07:37:00 +0000

Well here we are then , long time no see.
Yep back in the saddle after ten months, two earthquakes, my boy starting school and just the hint of work. Nothing big really.

Are you keen on getting your intranet videos to go viral ?

Surely you jest I hear readers from intranet land ask. But no I'm serious.
I've been listening to a pod cast since starting my new job at a local university, the 45 minute commute each way pushed me over the edge. IT conversations has a terrible website, so don't bother thinking it might lead the way to cool intranet innovation, which does exist. What IT conversations has in spades is serendipity and liberal interpretation of what IT is.

If any of you have read Carmine Gallo's the innovation secrets of Steve Jobs, or heard his interview on IT conversations, you'll know why serendipity and broadening your horizon's can be valuable. Suffice to say looking over the fence into other IT areas, or out the window and into another person's world can work wonders for your intranet.

[Tip if you're after a great book resource, free shipping to New Zealand, and exceptional prices I'd recommend http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/ a friend of my partner's put us on to them and we haven't been able to justify buying anywhere else, other than our local London Street books]

But hang on what about Viral video on my intranet !
You said! you promised!

OK so here it is, a viral video case study and how it applies to your intranet.

Executive summary for those in a hurry:

it needs to be SHORT
vary the image that you use to advertise it, to appeal to all the audiences you care about using your intranet
make it visible, this may even heaven forbid, mean printing it out and putting it up in the tea room with a suitably cryptic title.
[ if you're lucky enough to have a smart phone toting staff demographic put up a QR code and see what happens. The flattr guys talk about blurring the real and virtual using QR codes.]
make it easy to share . . . . .
No seriously even if it is as little as a MailTo href link or the equivalent of the share button under every YouTube video, that gives users a simple URL they can copy and paste.
leak it don't blast it. Depending on your organisation's culture (which you know because you're the intranet person . . . . right ?) tell the cool folks, the influencers or the gossips a day or two in advance of the home page news item. They'll appreciate the chance to show off an you'll get a BUZZ going prior to go live. Don't forget to mix it up with a different title and image on release day so you get the folks who meant to click on it but just didn't get around to it yet.
plan for and record metrics, where appropriate make them visible to your users.
This will be one of the corner stones of justifying the time and effort you've put into getting your intranet video to go viral within your organisation.

Finally : Have a plan. Too often I've seen intranet managers have an idea they think would be cool, or some tool/technology etc they want to use and then come up with a project that suits it. Sit down first and decide how you're going to put a dent in the universe within your organisation. If a viral video is the right tool for making that dent then go for it. If it isn't, smile and move on you've broadened your horizons by reading this far.

What about that that viral video case study ? I want the real oil, it want detail I hear you cry.
Well here I have to come clean, while many intranets use video I've never heard of one where there was even an attempt to make one go viral. Not documented publicly anyway. What I do have is how a video, that I have some knowledge of, went viral and how that experience informed my executive summary above. If you've got an intranet case study that you're willing to share guest blog it here, or send me the link and I'll get the word out.

CASE Study - Mels hidden talent
By 18 April 8:46pm NZ time this video had :

207 Google links to this video from other sites
382 Yahool links to this video from other sites
On YouTube 1,212,040 views , 13207 likes , 252 dislikes , 13459 ratings, 4251 comments and 6431 favorites in 5 days (13 Apr - 18 Apr 2011)
Oldest tweet is 14 April. 4 of first 30 tweeters have 7500 followers, the other 26 have approximately 100 each

The key aspects of this case study are when the video was posted (13 Apr 2011 US time), where it was re-posted (reddit.com, mashable.com, YouTube home page, huffingtonpost.com), and who re-posted it on each site.

Time line

Video posted to YouTube 13 April 2011
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qcVFM4X7OSg
It appears on Redditmedia.com (reddit’s distribution website for reddit.com)
then to
joemonster.org (Polish site for boys, polish FHM equivalent) 162 comments 3:30pm NZDT 18/apr
http://www.joemonster.org/filmy/34437/Nasladowanie_glosow_zwierzat
then on to
Mashable Posted on a Thursday
http://mashable.com/2011/04/14/youtube-animal-impression/ (35 comments 3:30pm NZDT 18/apr)
by http://mashable.com/author/brenna-ehrlich/ who is a senior staff member at Mashable.
Then on to the
YouTube home page
http://www.youtube.com/
where even at 3:30pm NZDT 18/apr Mel’s hidden talent is the second link under three of the Recommended for you highlights.
Then Reddit appears, though in the YouTube listing
http://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/gq23x/a_girl_i_went_to_highschool_with_makes_animal/
But when you look at this listing the first of the 993 comments was posted “3 days ago” probably the day after the video went on to YouTube.
Posted by
http://www.reddit.com/user/khinigeetaht 1545 link karma / 129 comment karma
First comment was by
http://www.reddit.com/user/feb192011 7 link karma / 3263 comment karma
Then the next day on to
The HuffingtonPost http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/04/15/girl-animal-noises-video_n_849711.html at 12:29pm ET on 15 Apr
They have 67 comments on their page
then to YouTube.com/videos
http://www.youtube.com/videos where it is no longer highlighted
then to
A Vietnamese site http://dantri.com.vn/c728/s728-473416/co-gai-lam-nao-loan-youtube-vi-gia-tieng-dong-vat.htm

How does this compare with other viral videos ?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQSNhk5ICTI
Took off after HuffintonPost mention
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IReU3XaRC5c
Took off after Mashable mention

Summary
No matter the size of your organisation, or even if most people have speakers on their PCs you can make use of what we've learnt here:
First - make sure you've spent time on a video that puts a dent in your organisation's universe. By this I mean make sure it serves a purpose which furthers the goals of your organisation, or at least the key staff within it.
Second - the topic may be dull, but the delivery should be fun and or intriguing to get the viral buzz.
Third - spread your sights. If no one in your organisation has speakers, do a silent video (21 million views can't be wrong. . . . or is it ?)
Fourth - get the word out to the people who are the influencers, gossips and leaders in your organisation. With them onboard the viral bit begins.

References not otherwise linked to:
http://techcrunch.com/2007/11/22/the-secret-strategies-behind-many-viral-videos/
http://techcrunch.com/2007/11/24/follow-up-to-the-viral-video-post-dan-wants-another-word/
http://www.dan.ag/
http://www.sharethrough.com/

IBF24 Yammer and Sungard

noreply@blogger.com (Dorje McKinnon) — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 22:38:00 +0000

I've just been got on to the IBF24 intranets live event and the very first thing I find is David Sachs - Yammer founder - citing my old stomping ground SunGard and how Cris Conde appreciated the organisation flattening value in Yammer.

I am lucky enough to have benefited directly from Yammer putting me directly in touch with Chris despite being about 10 managers seperated from him in the Org structure when I was working for SunGard.
His comments directly to staff made a huge difference to the culture of the organisation - one of the really very valuable aspects of tools like Yammer.

Who says serendipity doesn't play a part in the world ? :-)

More on the benefits of Yammer I've previously posted

2010 IBF intranets 24

noreply@blogger.com (Dorje McKinnon) — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 20:41:00 +0000

I've been asked to present a Live Intranet tour for the Intranet Benchmarking Forum's 24 hour event in a couple of days.

I've blogged about the IBF intranet's live online meetings previsously, this time I'll be presenting for their second (I think, correct me if I'm wrong) Intranets 24 hour event. Over the span of 24 hours the IBF team will be hosting a huge number of world leading intranet live tours and a large number of intranet thought leaders.

Interestingly they've adopted the "digital workplace" as a sub title for the event. This is a theme of web workplace or digital workplace was originally raised by Jane McConnell on her blog Globally Local and Locally Global. It is great to see because the term intranet is so far from the reality for many organisations in this day and age.

Attendance is FREE and I'd highly recommend anyone with an interest in intranets attend.

It is on 2nd and 3rd of June so SOON.

For your free ticket to attend you do have to let IBF know about the role you play within your organisation as far as the intranet goes but it isn't too detailed or onerous.
To do so go to
http://www.ibforum.com/?ibf24what

then click the "online now" link

then click register

Fill in the details to register your attendance

The programme
As I live in New Zealand I've translated the programme into NZ times.

From Noon London time on Tuesday (11pm NZ time on Wednesday the 2nd) the 24hr round the world intranet event begins.

You can dip in and out as you see fit.
http://www.ibforum.com/?ibf24who

The British Telecom (Mark Morrell) intranet will be very interesting Between 11pm Wednesday the 2nd and 5am Wed the 3rd NZ time.

5am - 11am Thursday 3rd NZ time - US Nokia intranet (Angela Hoffman talking through changes since I last blogged about Nokia's intranet), Steve Krug - "don't make me think" author

11am - 5pm Thursday 3rd NZ time - US east coast intranets

4pm - 8pm Thursday 3rd NZ time - Australia / New Zealand intranets - I'll be presenting the Lincoln Univeristy live intranet tour

8pm - 11pm Thursday 3rd NZ time - Aviva , British Airways and BBC intranet tours.

I hope some of you attend.
I've seen many of these intranets and they provide great inspiration for those of you out there making your web workplaces better.

Information Management Summit 2010

noreply@blogger.com (Dorje McKinnon) — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 23:46:00 +0000

IMSNZ10 Chair outlining summary of day 1

After two great days in Wellington, thanks Brightstar and Julian Carver, here are the key points from my presentation.

Key points of my presentation about "Social computing - organisational collaboration and engagement"

Don't jump in boots and all
Have a strategy
Ensure the strategy has goals, actions, measures [I really like how Carmine Porco of Prescient Digital Media puts this]
Ask the hard question "In spending time and $$ on this social computing tool what aspect of our organisation's goals are we helping to achieve ? and how will we know it's working?"

I've created a list of resources I used to come up with my presentation tagged on Delicious with IMSNZ10.

I'd like to thank the large number of people who asked questions during the summit, and particularly those who queried my presentation.

One of the interesting questions asked that struck a cord with me was

"How do we begin to ensure social computing use is compliant with the New Zealand Public Records Act (NZ PRA) ?"

With many social media tools being ephemeral this is a great question and I don't profess to know the answer. There are a couple of potential ways to begin dealing with this issue though:

Where the social computing tool interactions are exposed to the web, Twitter search for example. Tools like wget could be used on a regular basis to take a snapshot of the search page results. These files could them become a record in the PRA sense.

Where an SMS text message needs to be recorded things get a bit trickier but are still manageable (usually via phone sync or email duplication, a processes staff "MUST" follow).

I've got togeather a few resources about social media and how they can be recorded in a way that works towards being PRA compliance but would love you to comment on ways in which your organisation is solving these issues.

How are you making social computing tools PRA compliant ?

Social Media: the unwanted child

noreply@blogger.com (Dorje McKinnon) — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 07:24:00 +0000

Tim Bernes-Lee gives birth to Social Media [while trying to resolve Knowledge management at CERN]

Next week is the 8th annual New Zealand Information Management summit (hash tag #imsnz10) and I'm stepping into the lions den with my social media hat on.

Until I started preparing for this event I'd not realised the degree of rivalry that exists between some sectors of the Knowledge Management world and the Social Media world. Outlined particularly by Venkatesh Roa and Robert Swanwick but also reinforced by the extensive articles on the development of KM by Nancy Dixon.

With this forewarning I’ve been collating what I can , in expectation of a number of curly questions from the audience, using delicious. These links and an interesting article in the Harvard Business Review I came across about the benefits of giving up control will I hope see me right. Together with some useful lessons from social media usage where I’m working now I’m looking forward to IMSNZ10.

What do you think ?
Are social media and knowledge management rivals ?
Are they mutually exclusive ?

SharePoint governance - a Parliamentary perspective

noreply@blogger.com (Dorje McKinnon) — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 02:25:00 +0000

Recently I've been thinking about Governance for intranet sites, SharePoint and intranets as a whole.

Earlier this year I was lucky enough to present alongside some great folks from Telcom NZ, The department of Transport NZ, and NZ Parliament.

The team from NZ Parliament have come up with a governance structure that works really well for them in a very technically, politically and legally complex environment.

I talked to Tracy Parsons from NZ Parliament recently and she outlined what the force was that drove the move to this structure and the benefits they derive from it.

Originally the governance structure was setup quite differently. Large web site and intranet development projects were initiated and resulted in very project - focused governance structures being put in place. The projects transitioned form implementation to work as usual, this highlighted how project focused governance structures don’t suit work as usual operations.

The two senior business owners, who had spearheaded the strategic vision and delivery of the projects, found themselves involved in ever increasing numbers of meetings and levels of detail. “I’ve had enough!” was the point from which, a new role was created to oversee the day-to-day project and operational activities . This new role freed the senior managers to continue with their strategic work while providing the continuity required for business as usual operations.

It was at this point that the two agencies involved, the Parliamentary Service and the Office of the Clerk, engaged help to come up with a governance model that would work within the constraints of the agencies and stakeholders involved. Through this process the two agencies and their staff came to the solution you see here.

The solution to their governance issue was to have two separate groups connected by the two people in the new role. This new role manages the agendas for the monthly Website Governance Group (WGG) and the bi weekly agendas for the Website Management Committee. This new structure means no more project specific steering committees, less meetings all round, as well as greater awareness amongst all staff of the overall workload and organisational drivers.

This governance structure isn’t without it’s issues, project managers new to the structure and the Agile methodology (used by the entire web team at NZ Parliament) do find it hard. It is no longer possible to promote the importance of the project you’re working on over other projects by lobbying senior management. The coordinating role between the business as usual level and strategic level is able to mediate these issues. Similarly the structure provides a way to help resolve the competing requirements of the two agencies which support Parliament.

The result of having this structure is that more work is done at the right time, delivering the best outcomes, for the right reasons than ever before.

With Tracy’s words of experience in mind I set out to come up with a governance structure for the small part of our corporate SharePoint site that I have responsibility for.

My goal was to put in place a governance structure and processes that didn't demand too much time from senior staff, engaged all the stake holders and ensured buy in from the content / business owners [if you didn't win jargon bingo in that last sentence , you're not concentrating]

I also needed to keep the barrier to entry for setting this up as low as possible so the whole thing was labelled a management process, rather than a governance structure.

This is what I have proposed, it has yet to be confirmed as our way forward but I thought it useful to share. I'll share the outcome and what we finally put into practice at a later date.

The roles and accountability stack up like this

For those of you familiar with Toby Ward you’ll notice that I’ve used the same wording he outlines in his ‘how long is a piece of string post’ which to my mind distils out great definitions of

Vision
Goals
Objectives

I've added in tasks to take the process right through to the actual things that people do to achieve the measurable objectives. Possibly this is going too far but it works for me :-)

What do you think ? What black holes do you see opening beneath our feet ?

Many thanks to Tracey, the Parliamentary Service, and the Office of the Clerk for help sharing their experience.

DorjeM

Kiwi Intranet shin dig

noreply@blogger.com (Dorje McKinnon) — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 05:57:00 +0000

It's that time of year again and together with BrightStar we've got a great Intranet conference for all those New Zealand Intranet folks, starting next week.

For those of you who may be following the action in the alternate channels I thought I'd post the Agenda and the hash tag for everyone to use Monday and Tuesday next week.

I've had a hell of a couple of weeks so I'm really looking forward to seeing some great presentations, hearing some super questions and learning a lot.

James Robertson of StepTwo designs is giving the key note, so expect to be challenged.

Hash tag for the event #nzIntSum09 - looking forward to your blog and twitter posts

Agenda

9th Annual Strategic Intranet Summit

Day One, Monday, 31 August 2009

9:00am Opening Remarks from the Chair

Dorje McKinnon, Intranet Overseer

SUNGARD SYSTEMS NZ LTD

9:10am Keynote Address: Building Momentum for the Intranet Team

James Robertson, Managing Director

STEP TWO DESIGN PTY LTD

10:00am CASE STUDY: Realising the Vision of the Intranet as the Workplace

Helen Rayner, Information Manager Policy & Strategy

TELECOM NZ LTD

Nadine Burnett, Senior Consultant

THE SYSDOC GROUP

Ruth Miles, Information Manager Intranet Roadmap

TELECOM NZ LTD

10:50am Delegate Insights

10:55am Morning Break and Refreshments

11:20am Web and Enterprise 2.0: Governance Strategies and Techniques

Darren Wood, Senior UI Designer

MARKER STUDIO

12:10pm CASE STUDY: A Business Application with no code - just using SharePoint OOTB

functions to achieve business outcomes

Tracey Lyon, Process Improvement Analyst

KIWIBANK

Chandima Kulathilake, Director, SharePoint Consultant

KNOWLEDGE CUE

1:00pm Lunch

2:00pm Roundtable 1: Improving Working Processes with Web 2.0 Applications

Darren Wood, Senior UI Designer

MARKER STUDIO

Roundtable 2: Gaining Senior Management Buy-in

Dorje McKinnon, Intranet Overseer

SUNGARD SYSTEMS NZ LTD

Roundtable 3: Getting Organisational Value from SharePoint

Steph Beath, Interaction Designer

COMSEN LTD

2:50pm Online Collaboration: Delivering Benefits for Organisations and Participants

Dan Randow, Chief Wrangler

ONLINEGROUPS.NET

3:40pm Delegate Insights

3:45pm Afternoon Break & Refreshments

4:05pm CASE STUDY: Governing in the Context of Organisational Culture

Ellen Fitzsimons, Team Leader, Content and Website

PARLIAMENTARY SERVICES

Tracy Parsons, Resources Manager & Info. Managment Development Manager

PARLIAMENTARY LIBRARY

4:55pm Exposing Intranet Insecurities

John McColl, Security Consultant

SECURITY-ASSESSMENT.COM LTD

5:25pm Closing Remarks from the Chair, Followed by Networking Drinks

Dorje McKinnon, Intranet Overseer

SUNGARD SYSTEMS NZ LTD

9th Annual Strategic Intranet Summit

31 August & 1 September 2009

Duxton Hotel, Wellington

Day Two, Tuesday, 1 September 2009

9:00am Opening Remarks from the Chair

Dorje McKinnon, Intranet Overseer

SUNGARD SYSTEMS NZ LTD

9:10am What is Your Intranet Really Worth? How to Demonstrate ROI to Strengthen the

Case for Investment

Hayden Sanders, IT/Marketing & Communications

HEALTH SPONSORSHIP COUNCIL

10:00am CASE STUDY: Vodafone NZ Intranet Recovery Project

Mark Harrison, Intranet Manager, Corporate Comms

VODAFONE NZ LIMITED

10:50am Delegate Insights

10:55am Morning Break and Refreshments

11:15am CASE STUDY: Being Branded: How the Use of Branding and Interface Design Has

Given AMI’s Intranet an Identity without Killing its Usability

Kaye Churches, Content Manager

AMI INSURANCE LTD – HEAD OFFICE

12:05pm CASE STUDY: The Milkyway Story - From Zero to Hero for Fonterra's Global

Employee Intranet

Sandy Cobussen, Project Manager

COBUSSEN & COBUSSEN LTD

12:55pm Lunch

1:45pm Mini Workshop: Turbo Charged Solutions for Resolving Your Issues through Group

Work and Information Sharing

Dorje McKinnon, Intranet Overseer

SUNGARD SYSTEMS NZ LTD

2:40pm Acting as an Effective Conduit between Technical and Non-Technical Teams to

Allow for Greater Intranet Functionality

Vaughan Robertson, Manager - Beca Applied Technologies

BECA

3:30pm Delegate Insights

3:35pm Afternoon Break & Refreshments

3:55pm Open Forum Discussion: Applying the Key Learnings from the Summit to you

situation

Dorje McKinnon, Intranet Overseer

SUNGARD SYSTEMS NZ LTD

James Robertson, Managing Director

STEP T WO DESIGN PTY LTD

Mark Harrison, Intranet Manager, Corporate Comms

VODAFONE NZ LTD

4:40pm Summary Remarks from the Chair and Conclusion of Summit

Global Intranet Strategies Survey

noreply@blogger.com (Dorje McKinnon) — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 20:49:00 +0000

Jane McConnell has asked me to remind you there are only a few days before the 4Th Annual global intranet strategies survey will close, at the end of August.

I’ve worked with Jane on this for a couple of years [Disclosure: I have helped, unpaid, Jane improve the report by being an opinionated fellow from across the sea] and can highly recommend participation. If you fill in the survey you get a free copy of the Trends Report, Jane’s analysis of the data. It is really great material and helps with many aspects related to running an intranet.

How to sign up to participate this year

http://tinyurl.com/lmrsxh

Some preliminary findings:

- The intranet as the single point of entry into the online workplace is beginning, with approximately 15 % of the organizations saying this is already the case.

- Home pages are primarily news-based (60 %) versus navigational or work tool-based.

- Social networking applications (such as Facebook) are still rare, existing in fewer than 15% of the organizations. However, another 20 % are experimenting!

- Internal blogs exist in around 45 % of the organizations.

- Approximately 35% of the organizations attempt to measure the value the intranet brings to the organization, business and staff.

http://www.netjmc.net/

Yammer and puddles

noreply@blogger.com (Dorje McKinnon) — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 22:28:00 +0000

Recently I was asked

" What are the top 10 points you think are important to get across to staff at all levels in an organisation about Yammer? "

My initial reaction was "Tough ask", mainly because I've seen great write ups on what organisations get out of Yammer but very few that talk directly to the user benefits. Many articles give the usual cop out "users can't see the point, until they get it"

I admit I was in that boat when I started using Twitter, a public micro blogging platform. But just like they said "once I used it I got it". What they didn't say was that it took a while and it suits certain people better than others. So as with all things in the social media space, be aware that culture change not the technology may be your biggest challenge.

So what does Yammer, a microblogging platform for organisational use, do for real employees that is compelling enough for them to spend the time to "Get it" ?

First off Yammer is setup to be for anyone who has the same email address as you.
What does that give you ?

It gives you an instant level of trust with the other people also using Yammer from your organisation. Many people won't notice this implicity trust between members of the same organisation, but if you ask about it you'll find it exists. It all has to do with a shared experience all employees have with the organisation.

Trust is important in this system that is why I mention it first.

Yammer benefits you the staff member

1 - Yammer means you are able to benefit anyone in the organisation.
You can either reply to questions asked of all staff, asked of groups you’re a member of, or asked of you. Others may ask you directly, because you've filled out your profile with details meaning other staff are able to find you or because what you say via Yammer is of interest to them.
During performance reviews you can use your Yammer contributions to illustrate the tangible value you're delivering to the organisation.

2 - Yammer means you will have less email to deal with.
Email can go back to being for 1 to 1 interactions or specific requests. No more everyone.xyzproject@mycompany.com emails to deal with. No more CC everyone "just in case". Create a yam, tag it with #xyzproject or post it to the project group on yammer, and everyone who knows the project can find it again.
See Bill Winer's outline of how Yammer like tools help project managers and team leaders specifically.

3 - Yammer increases your productivity.
You check Yammer when it suits you. Yammer doesn't interrupt you.

4 - Yammer helps you find experts.
Unless you know an expert in the field you need you can't find them easily. Yammer gives you a way to find them by searching profiles. You can then see if they're real experts by looking at what they've got to say, what they have Yammed, then you can make your own mind up about the value they deliver.

The Question is at the bottom with replies sequentially up the list [reverse chronological order]

5 - Yammer involves you in the organisation as a whole.
Yammer gives you a window onto the entire organisation and what they're collectively thinking about and working on.

6 - Yammer gets you answers fast.
When finding the answer any other way would take a lot of effort Yammer can get it for you quickly.

Yammer benefits the organisation too

1 - flatter
Yammer gives those who participate the opportunity to benefit from the knowledge of all the other participants.
Yammer gives the organisation the benefits inherent in smarter faster better decisions being made and work being done.

2 - Sharing
Yammer facilitates sharing and thus benefits the organisation.
Great diagram of what sharing leads to.

3 - Serendipity
Yammer provides a way for opportunities within the organisation to be grasped rather than lost.
How serendipity helped elephants

The Question is at the bottom with replies sequentially up the list [reverse chronological order]

4 - Speed
You get responses quicker.
The image at right covers an interaction that would have taken days of effort, or a very lucky break, to resolve prior to Yammer.

5 - Reach
Yammer lets individual staff tap the abilities of ALL the organisation's staff, not just those they know.

6 - Trust
Yammer helps build trust
"Your staff can create value within your business if you let them - or outside of it if you stifle them"

7 - Connectors
Yammer lets organisation see who those staff are that connect the organisation. Meaning organisational value of those staff that connect the organisation can be recognised.

Some other benefits of Yammer

Yammer helps staff get to know and help other staff across business units / segments / timezones and continents.
Yammer helps staff to brainstorm and get immediate responses.
Yammer helps to leverage the creativity of it's staff, as Delloitte have done for advertising tag lines
Yammer helps to fill the communication gaps between meetings and email, especially useful for staff in multi location/timezone teams

Yammer is to organisations what rain is to puddles.
With rain puddles form and then overflow into each other creating a stream.
With Yammer the human networks and communication channels within the organisation come together so that any individual can add value to the organisation. It is no longer a matter of being on the right committee or the correct email group, or known to the movers and shakers.

It isn't all sweetness and light though - as with any tool, social media or otherwise, it is A TOOL. use it for what it is good for within your organisation, don't use it if it doesn't help. My goal with this post was to shed light on where and why it can be useful. Guidelines, ambassadors and examples are also improtant in ensuring your organisation gets the most value from any tool, including Yammer.

What makes microblogging valuable, and compelling, for those within your organisation ?

Intranet incentives

noreply@blogger.com (Dorje McKinnon) — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 21:46:00 +0000

From TheBookShelf.co.nz

The following is one of the many ways of "influencing" those you need on side to do intranets well!
It is also great for those folks that help you out with paper prototyping and usability studies, I bake mine in muffin tins so that I can give each participant one.

Edmond's Banana Cake
Add the ingredients to a bowl in the order listed, mixing constantly
125g (4oz) butter (soft, or part melted)
175g (6oz) white sugar
cream together
2 eggs
2 mashed bananas (we put brown ones from the fruit bowl in the freezer and use those)
mix ingredients

Put two tablespoons of full fat milk in a cup and boil in the microwave. Ass Add 1 teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda. Mix till mixture is frothy.

Add frothy bicarb/milk to the main bowl.

Add one teaspoon of baking powder to 225g (8oz) white flour, sift into the mail bowl of ingredients

Mix well.

Bake in muffin or cake tins at 180 degrees Celsius (350F) for 20 mins or until brown and skewer comes out clean.

How do you incentivize participation in your work with Intranets ?

DorjeM

Revolution

noreply@blogger.com (Dorje McKinnon) — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 21:11:00 +0000

Photo by hoyasmeg

"Revolution doesn't happen when society adopts new tools, it happens when society adopts new behaviours"
Clay Shirky www.usnowfilm.com

The organisations we manage intranets within serve institutional societies.

Delivering benefit to the organisations intranets serve requires that we as intranet managers provide the tools, that provide the opportunity for behaviours to change. The changed behaviour delivers benefit to the organisations we serve.

How do you facilitate changes in behaviour by the members of your organisation ?

Share you highs and lows.

Closing the feedback loop

noreply@blogger.com (Dorje McKinnon) — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 23:58:00 +0000

Photo by MrHayata

My recent post on intranet profiles elicited a comment from Adriana Beal of 2wtx consulting.

Out of that I accepted her invitation to provide 2wtx's user centered design blog "It's Broken" with a guest post. Adriana originally asked me to talk about the difference a well designed intranet could make, having looked at "It's Broken" and taken a stab at the audience I wrote about closing the Intranet feedback loop.

This is a topic that I've been wrestling with recently. Many of the requests that come across my desk have great planning, lofty goals and real organisational benefits but no feedback mechanism. No way to ensure, that if the solution isn't quite right, that the users of the system have some way of initiating improvements.

Take search for example - I've done quite a lot of work trying to improve search by analysing the log files I've got our search engine to create. I've got best bets, I look at the top 50 / 100 search terms I know who is searching for what, I even have a rough way of tracking an individual users search experience from first search through subsequent searches to the results pages that the users visits.
The only definitive knowledge I can get from this analysis is :

I know when staff have done a search and got NO results.

In which case I contact them via email and ask them to reply with where they found the solution so I can update best bets. Staff love it but it still doesn't help me with the other outcomes of search:

Did the person find what they were looking for ?
Did the person have a disaster ? (Find what they thought was correct but was actually wrong)
Did the person get lots of results but no answer ?

Obviously the 'Was this page useful to you - Yes/No/Comment' is how most organisations close this loop. To my mind this isn't good enough. Firstly it relies on staff clicking the Yes / No / Comment button on every page of results they visit, I don't do it why should anyone else.

[Do any of you dear readers have stats on how often staff actually do this ?]

and it still wouldn't capture the Disaster situation I mention above.

To get back to my original point of this post, keep trying to build positive feedback loops into your intranets. Unless we consider it and work towards this goal it won't happen.

Serendipitously RichardDenniston posted this on twitter today

RichardDennison: "Feedback is useful to us but we regret we will be unable to respond to any individual who provides feedback" - from intranet feedback page!

Adriana and her team at www.2wtx.com help large organisations with business analysis consulting and small businesses with web presence strategy. They're based in NYC, Pittsburgh (PA) and Charlotte (NC). And no they don't pay me to mention them but I really like their online presence, obvious professional skills and Adriana's philanthropic work .

Role Title on profiles

noreply@blogger.com (Dorje McKinnon) — Tue, 26 May 2009 21:06:00 +0000

Today one of the people I follow on Twitter asked the following question.

@ChristySeason Asking all #intranet tweeps: Does your company publish employees' titles on your employee directory/look up/phone book?

In following Intranets Live I've been lucky enough to see some great intranets.
As such I was able to reply to Christy with the following

Nokia do

Deloitte do (see the end of the post)

Christy's question also prompted me to document my own intranet's profile page.
The following image is from the view other's get of my profile. When I look at my profile I see every item that is recorded. I'll save you from that, another post perhaps, if you're interested.

DorjeM

PS a couple of Vendors I've been reminded of, thanks Crhis and Carolyn, also have screen shots of their profile pages on the web:
ThoughtFarmer - intranet software - slideshow of screen shots
and
Intranet connections - software solution

Personal post

noreply@blogger.com (Dorje McKinnon) — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 08:22:00 +0000

I'm priviledged to have, and have had, exceptional friends and loved ones during my life. I've not always taken the opportunites presented, to let them know how I feel about them and how much I appreciate their support respect and love. Despite my father's sage advice to do just that.

An autumn night...

don't think your life,
didn't matter

Matsuo Basho

The value of twitter and other social media tools

noreply@blogger.com (Dorje McKinnon) — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 00:51:00 +0000

Serendipity

Thanks to staff within my organisation (BR) and people like Chris Brogan, Cairo Walker and James Robertson the past couple of weeks have been very interesting for me because they've drawn togeather ideas I've been exposed to for a while. I think they've clicked.

The following is the true story of how serendipity helped save elephants - believe me it does relate to social media within the firewall.

“Moses lives in Africa, works for a large global organisation and is responsible for elephant human conflict resolution.

Abraham lives in India, works for the same large global organisation and is also responsible for elephant human conflict resolution.

Moses grew up in the African bush, where there is a kids story that a bee (rather than a mouse) can scare elephants. Moses noticed that those villages who kept beehives had less elephant conflict events than other villages, all other factors being equal. To test his theory he put beehives in those villages with the most number of elephant conflict events. Lo and behold conflict events went down. They went down in every village bees were introduced. The honey was also a money maker so there was a double win.

Now Abraham was commenting on the fact he hadn’t found any reliable solution to human elephant conflict to a visiting consultant, who just happened to have been to Africa and met Moses. Serendipitous, luck, call it what you will the consultant put Abraham in contact with Moses. Elephants people and bees across two continents benefitted”

Social media tools can do this for the enterprise.

That is the business value.

Serendipity

Still not convinced ?
Ask your senior management team why they play golf, or polker or belong to the old boys club.

How would serendipity go down as a social media deal clincher in your organisation?

Managing and Growing your Intranet 2009

noreply@blogger.com (Dorje McKinnon) — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 05:33:00 +0000

Hi team,

I'm putting the finishing touches on my materials for Managing and growing your intranet 2009, training I'm giving for BrightStar, to intranet professionals in Wellington New Zealand 8 - 9 May.

I'm posting this now so that those who attend and would like to follow the conference can do so

http://tinyurl.com/mangrow09may
takes you to a google search for 'managing and growing your intranet'

The hash tag for the event is #mangrow09 if you want to follow or tweet on Twitter

Use the same tag for any of your other favorite social services ;-)

I'm citing my sources for the event using Delicious with the same tag

And for those of you hanging out for the Intranets Live coverage for the past two months - don't worry I'm still juggling processing the screen shots, computer crashes et el.

Big thanks go out to Chris Brogan for very timely tweets and sharing his thoughts on his blog.

And on that note . . . (ellipses thanks to @jonthegeologist of http://imjon.com/)

What is it about the intranet manager / overseer position that you find hard ?
For me at this instant it is being advocate for the staff upwards and being advocate for benefits to the organisation as a whole from on high.

DorjeM

Customer Carewords - Task management at HSBC UK intranet

noreply@blogger.com (Dorje McKinnon) — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 14:58:00 +0000

HSBC UK's intranet is change personified. Natalie Bogos, with help from Gerry McGovern and his team at Customer Carewords, and some of her own team's great ideas is moving HSBC UK intranet to a task based model. HSBC UK's intranet is moving from thousands of new pages a week to content that serves the work staff do.

Slides and a recording of the webinar are available from
www.customercarewords.com

This month Gerry McGovern and Natalie Bogos of HSBC UK provided the best Customer Carewords webinar that I've attended. No spin on Customer Carewords products or services, just a great case study of how to get a large organisation to change it's ways.

A couple of things did strike me though - Gerry McGovern, or who ever prepares his slides really really needs the help of Garr Reynolds and www.presentationzen.com - at the very least join istockphoto.com and spend 20 or 30 pounds for some new images for tools / timber and a workman.

Unfortunately the US changed to summertime over the weekend and that meant some folks had been on the line for an hour already. My recommendation is www.timeanddate.com - Steffan Thorsen does a wonderful job providing accurate time and date information as well as great tools for folks so they and their customers don't have to worry about time and date issues. Steffan's been doing this for more than 10 years and is a great guy to deal with.

Ok so enough with the advice on to what the presentation was like.

Gerry started out by going over the development of intranets and how he thinks they should devleop as a coming togeather of content and technical aspects.

"Skills of content and code need to be brought togeather to achieve tasks.
The challenge for intranet managers today is this new middle ground.
Content and code brought together helps people to do things that they need to be successful" Gerry McGovern

The suggestion was made that a new group or department should be created, possibly called e-productivity, and that it is this group that should head up the intranet.

Currently Gerry feels that all Intranets are in-efficient.

The way to address this in-efficiency is to identify core online customer tasks - intranet / web should focus on these core tasks and ability of users to complete those tasks.

Gerry points out that the Intranet employee is horrendously impatient. Staff a much more critical of intranets than people are of websites. Probably because less money and effort has been focused on their needs and requirements.
If we don't focus on what staff need they'll only use it as a last resort.

Gerry then gave a brief outline of how intranets have developed:

Intranets moved from a focus on tools - [Gerry really needs to upgrade the quality of his images]
Magically buying new technology e.g. enterprise search just doesn't work - garbage in garbage out.
Intranets then moved on to managing the timber - communicator running an intranet, like a pub to an alcoholic. Creates 100,000 page intranet - indicates a lack of control.
Managing the content fails.
[ again Gerry needs new imagery, these I've seen and commented on before now ]
So efficiency comes by managing the tasks staff need to do to achieve their goals.

Gerry made the comment that there are risks - namely that self service failure has a huge cost within organisations. This is why he measures task completion disasters. That is when the person doing the task gets information that they think is correct but which is actually wrong.

Over the years the Customer Carewords team have analysed 35,000 staff using intranets and the key tasks that are required by all intranets are:

find people
training / learning courses
procedures, policies, guidelines, standards
news
job vacancies
travel (hotel, flight, rail, taxi)
pay salary details
career development
find a location

Finding people is always the dominant task in the testing Customer Carewords have done

Gerry's method is, as I've mentioned before, simple (and thus doable) but hard for people to take the time to do hence his consultancy does well.

To test tasks start with a hypothesis, either a live intranet or using wireframes.
Then test to see if staff can quickly and easily complete a task using the intranet / wireframe and compare the results, quantified, with the hypothesis.

As an example of this, the following image shows how successful staff were at filling in the correct date using the screen shot examples on the left. #1 was the original, and #3 was what the designe ended up looking like after testing with users

[ Gerry's next slide is an out of focus basket of fruit ]

[ Gerry's next slide is a photo of rotton bananas ]

The point of these two slides was that Out of date content is the #1 problem every intranet has.
Continuous quality control is a huge problem.

A Danish company Gerry has worked with came up with a smiley face model next to the name / photo of the person who owns the content in this section. The less up to date the content then the less happy the face shown. For their organisation this was very effective in getting the content owners to own the relevance of their content.

Content should be specific to the audience.
The more time the author spends on crafting their information for the audience the better the value and the lower the wasted time, within the company.
This is very hard for most organisations to act on because traditionally all measures of efficiency have been local not company wide.

Managing the task not the content is where the real efficiencies are available for intranets to take advantage of.

Natalie Bogos, intranet manager for HSBC UK. The HSBC UK intranet recently won an IBF award for usability. Natalie has 3 editorial members of the internal comms team working on the intranet plus 2 other project managers like herself. The technical support for their cms is provided for all HSBC intranets by a corporate team.

Natalie gave an outline of where the site was and then how she and her team, communications, moved to change things for the better.

HSBC UK intranet serves 60,000 staff with 65,500 pages spread over 300 microsites managed by 1700 publishers.

The site was growing 5% per month, that growth was not sustainable.

Publishers had been put first and were recognised for the number of pages they published not their quality or relevance. There was a lack of intranet resources as well, so they decided they would change.

In 2008 Natalie and her team worked with Customer carewords to work out top tasks, and work out what provides the best value to organisation.

Out of this analysis they came up with 100 top tasks.
They then had staff vote on those tasks to get them prioritiesed.

Natalie tracked the voting over 5 days (each column, colors indicate percentage of total votes for that day).
What Natalie found important was that the top 3 tasks were the same every day of voting so even if they'd only allowed voting for one day they would have got the right direction

Staff were also asked what improvements they would like. Responses were all over the show from RSS and blogs to the simple stuff. The most voted for ones (see image above) were those that in Gerry's words outlined a 'cry for help'

The goal was to was make things easier for staff.

So the intranet team did a whole lot of work and bench marked many of the 100 top tasks

Circulars are a key communication medium that has existed at HSBC for many many years. They also showed up in the key tasks staff needed to do - so the intranet team bench marked several tasks.

Locate circulars

by date, staff did OK at this but some couldn't do it in 6 mins, those who couldn't were the ones that used search
by content, all staff used search, only 2 could achieve their goal

In summary - staff were loosing trust in the intranet because many people don't think what they find is correct. To talk the language that would influence managers the intranet team quantified potential savings possible by improving the top tasks. 16million pounds in savings was possible using conservative estimates.

16 million pounds was the clincher for moving HSBC UK from managing content to managing tasks.

Search
Obviously search was one of biggest problems. So Natalie's team analysed key searches, and by manually editing the pages that people should find they got the key ones into the top 3 links on the results page.

This meant that staff started to regain trust in the intranet.

Publishers
Content publishers were measured according to the number of pages they published. So a content management charter was implemented. It had to be agreed to by all publishers.
The directive for this came not from the intranet team but the Chief Operating officer, and had to be signed by all content creators and their line managers. Line managers were included so that they understood that things had changed and number of pages was no longer a measure of value.
Part of the charter is that the intranet team will support, help and asses each publisher's area. Results from the assessment are then tied into publisher's end of year review with their line manager.

Too much content
In conjunction with publishers 20,000 pages were deleted in less than 2 months - but publishers created 13,000 new pages in the same period. So all non-business critical content publishing was stopped. Each publisher and site were assessed, then suggestions made by intranet team on how things could be improved.

Circulars
This key organisational communication medium was costing the company money.
Putting them on the intranet saved HSBC UK a lot of money in printing and distribution. Unfortunately the way they were written didn't change with the move to the web. They were written by the senior management team, were very long 5 pages plus appendixes of 5 to 10 pages.

Getting things changed with such a long standing tradition required illustrating the point. So the team provided an alternate version to the original. This alternate version was written for the web, referenced the original for those that required more detail and was given a soft launch.
Usage was quantified and it was found that 95% of staff preferred the alternate version.
To strengthen case for moving from the old style format reading times were recorded to show potential time saving, which had been such a powerful force with the senior management team.

Sometimes 3 circulars per week were published, and all circulars are required reading for most staff, so there were considerable savings to be made.

The figures got the senior mangers on board and now the old circulars are no longer created. The web optimised version is now used by everyone.

From my point of view this is a great case study. Natalie knew the organisation and what would convince them to make things better - hard numbers and she then set out to deliver benefit to the organisation by illustrating the problems with hard numbers. Just superb.

Gerry and his team will make the slides and a recording of this event available via www.customercarewords.com

What would be a perfect intranet ?
Best answer Gerry has ever had - 'survivors guide to a shitty week'

Intranets Live Feb 09 - BBC Moo beta [part 3]

noreply@blogger.com (Dorje McKinnon) — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 08:53:00 +0000

MOO - the BBC's creative network
Until now I've been unable to blog about Shane's great work at the BBC which I first saw as an attendee of the Intranets Live Feb 09 event.

During Intranets Live Feb 09 Shane Samarawikrema, Experience Designer at the BBC, delivered a great presentation on MOO the BBC's new creative network. Boy have these guys get done some cool stuff.

"MOO - ideas you can milk" is the BBC's creative network - the vision was to increase innovation, creativity and collaboration across the organisation. An intranet based training initative for sharing creative techniques and informal education horizontally across the BBC. Vision was from the top, goal was to engage bottom up. Overall the project was commissioned by the Creative Audiences Training team - a "big up" to them for having the vision and desire to see MOO through to what is becoming - a great resource for the BBC.

Andy Tedd (consultant) identified that the audience was primarily creative, therefore social networking was likely to work.

MOO beta is currently intended to add to rather than replace any existing infrastructure within the BBC so it didn't get much budget, 20,000 GBP or 30,000 GBP from what I can recall (damn I wish I kept better notes). But what they've done with it . . . wow!

Imagine some of the cool things the internet has to offer : blogging, bookmark sharing, video, audio multimedia sharing and tagging all bundled up so that you could use them with the other creative types in your organisation ? Not just cool in theory - the very thing Shane and the team at BBC have delivered via MOO.

[Unfortunately the following screen shots lost quite a lot of fidelity due to the web conferencing between myself and the presenter - they still provide a good idea of how slick it looks]

Platform is Ruby on rails - but development is bespoke. "We couldn't use CMS / intranet technologies off the shelf as they didn't do the job. Because Ruby was used the it was comparatively cheap to implement.

Unfortunately Shane suffered the only technical difficulties experienced this month so we didn't get to see or hear quite as much as I'd have liked to of MOO. Suffice to say if I had a large staff of creative types to provide services too Shane's number would be 1 or 2 on my speed dial.

Intranets Live Feb 09 - Land of the Nokians [part 2]

noreply@blogger.com (Dorje McKinnon) — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 08:51:00 +0000

In part one of my Intranets Live Feb 09 event coverage I talked through Nokia's "News hub" front page, news item comments and Nokia's use of the Kyte platform to deliver video for multiple devices/platforms from a single source. I also talked through William Hudson's discussions of image use on intranet pages.

Here in part two I'm going to cover Nokia's personal profile pages.

Nokia Personal Profiles

Angela Huffman from Nokia used the last segment of Intranets Live Feb 09 to share the personal profiles the intranet delivers for each employee.

Angela outlined that the current look feel and functionality was being reviewed and there were plans to "share more information and improve searchability". Angela outlined how the interface was changing from tabs to "FaceBook like portlets".

For Nokians the 'presence' indicators available via the intranet are very very important.

The system draws information from multiple sources SAP, project mangement databases and existing legacy systems e.g. skills

The profile also allows users to enter a large ammount of free text into the 'Person profile' tab. The goal here was to provide a searchable location for less formal information that staff may want to share with their collegues and for information that couldn't be dragged from legacy systems e.g. Current activity / projects the person is working on at present. This was due to the fact that different divisions use different project management software.

Angela was then very kind to address quite a few questions that had come in during her two sessions. I noted only a few.

Overall the intranet is built on a domino lotus notes base
Delivers visibility to information from multiple systems
Photo is from security badge but staff can submit their own, which is moderated to ensure it is a photo and not a cartoon character

Several of the others who were co hosting commented that this was a very comprehensive staff directory and that the personal calendar integration, plus current physical location were very innovative.

In my mind providing information on when the person you're looking for is available, if they're busy, really starts to get to the useful pointy end of presence (busy, free). Because when I want to collaborate with someone it is useful to know that they're busy but it is so much more useful to know that they're busy on holiday for 3 weeks rather than out to lunch for an hour. Great work Nokia.

Richard Dennison, senior manager Social Media at BT, rounded out the event with further great comment and insight. On the topic of 2.0 Richard suggested that when trying to introduce 2.0 into the enterprise go for evolutionary change not revolutionionary change. "Pitch the benefits not the hype". Richard was a great co-host and added a lot to the value of the whole event for me. I had to laugh out loud when I read Richard's post from November 2008, as it is exactly what I've just experienced writing up these two blog posts LOL

Finally for this post a little on the technology that Intranets Live is being delivered with, which I really like.
IntranetsLive uses Microsoft Office LiveMeeting for their virtual events. One of the nice features is that people can listen via the web or phone call in. This does put the web listeners at a slight disadvantage in that they can't easily participate in the verbal conversation and have to use the Q and A panel - which is not that nice an interface, but it does lower the cost of participation substantially - unless of course you've got a SkypeOut account and call one of the toll free numbers for $0. One other nice feature of LiveMeeting that the IBF team are using is hold music prior to the event.

Intranets Live Feb 09 - Land of the Nokians [part 1]

noreply@blogger.com (Dorje McKinnon) — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 10:28:00 +0000

Nokians (Nokia employees) and their intranet landscape were the focus of Intranets live in the first week of this month. The whole event continued it's move upward, building on the best of previous events, while leaving the things that didn't work behind.
Close to 300 people attended this month. The technical hitches were fewer and less disruptive than in the past. Where they did occour was probably a good thing considering what they're responsible for, the UK Department of Defense who were to feature couldn't due to snow and a lack of access from home.

This time round the co-host was Richard Dennison, Senior Manager Social Media for BT (British Telecom), who with Paul Millar (Host and founder of the Intranet Benchmarking Forum) and Paul Levy did a great job of bringing some global overview to the topics that came up.

February's Intranets Live event was dedicated to 2.0, with BT being in the vanguard of enterprise 2.0 Richard offered some very interesting insights.

An interesting aspect of this event was that Wyeth conincided their enterprise wide "2.0 Summit" with the first 1/2 hour of the intranets live event. Wyeth's 2.0 Summit was an internal event both physical and virtual where Wyeth staff, headed by Joanne Jackson of Wyeth Global Web Technologies, joined togeather to talk and strategise about things 2.0
I found this committment by a corporation very interesting, in light of John Chambers's video from Davos in Jan 2008 about web 2.0 where almost a year earlier he was pointing out some of the business cases for 2.0

Nokia
Angela Huffman, Service manager portal and phone book Nokia Texas was heading up Intranets Live visit to the Nokian's home 'News Hub'

Angela initially outlined the way in which News Hub, the home page news, works.
News Hub is seen by all staff but only the communications team are allowed to add news, and generally do so at the request of the news item stakeholder.
Limiting addition of News Hub articles in this way was a conscious decision by the intranet team, the goal being to raise the quality of the news items displayed.
A snippet of the first article is displayed, headline links to the others. Note also that under the "most discussed" heading the number of comments on the item is noted. Most discussed also keeps those items that are still generating comments visible to everyone.

Angela points out that the full article once viewed allows anyone to comment on the article (comments are moderated before becoming public) and rate the article. Angela said that if a Nokian (Nokia employee) rates the article nothing specific happens behind the scenes in terms of notifications or reporting but that they're looking at doing something with that in the future.
For the comments:

about 1 % of viewers comment on the News Hub article

Going back to the News Hub home page about half way down Angela talked about the 'Video Hub' feature where Nokia have used a very cool third party 'universal digital media platform' with some customisations specially for Nokia. One of the key drivers for this was an effort to get all video into one location. Nokians can upload and use themselves, questionable content can be flagged by any employee and dealt with through the normal channels.

That ended part 1 from Nokia

Intranet doctor

This month the intranet doctor - William Hudson (User experience specialist) - was talking with Mike Bradley from Kellogs about images. And many thanks to Kellogs for jumping in to be the patient this month, I found it very interesting how Dr Hudson analysed the issues and helped resolve them.

Mike's questions were around the use of images and the use of animations and how they could be improved on the following page.

The Dr pointed out

appropriate images are beneficial especially when used as links, they improve visual engagement and some people find appropriate images can be more quickly found than similar words (No advantage for peoples faces though)
there needs to be a clear relationship between the images and the items they pertain to

The Doctor's guidelines are as follows

be consistent: linked images should have similar appearance and location relative toother page elements. There should be a clear relationship with the item linked to
unlinked (decorative) images should not like linked images, e.g. they should be large and further away from other page elements
accessibility: supply useful alternatives, title and alt tags, for meaningful images
keep animations to a minimum since they can distract
allow users to have control over rotating content, or content that changes on reload
consider allowing animations to play through only once
accessibility: users must have full control in order to be able to use screen madnifiers and similar tools

With these guidelines behind him this is how the Doctor assesed the page Mike was interested in getting input on

Mike also had an HR page that the Dr ran through his guidelines

In this case the question mark would be a tick if the person's face was a link to their profile.

The doctor's second item of business was external documents, those often lengthy and large tomes that are easy for content producers to delivery (they had to send them to the printer anyway) but which just arn't quite right for the intranet.

The prescription for resolving this problem was

for online reading, appropriately structured when size is large, use HTML
for presentation, printing and similar make PDF, powerpoint, word etc copies available for download

Now that is where some of the big price tag tools come in that maintain a digital repository of originals while delivering variations in other formats.

Live chat Q and A

Toby Ward kicked off this discussion which was interesting in context of the event.

Intranet news

This section I'm picking will be the one that changes the most in format for the March Intranets live event. The issues with news I mentioned last month were not as pronounced but still I wasn't wowed or inspired.

As an example one item presented was the following BlogPulse trend comparison for the terms "social media" recession and intranet

The comments I recall, and I'm sorry I didn't write them down, were along the lines of isn't this interesting that social media and recession are tracking each other similarly in the blogosphere.
I immediately thought there was something not right about this and what do you know, if you do a blogpulse for the following terms: recession ceo and stocks

Well how about that they track each other . . . . . . Nothing to do with any real relationship which was sort of implied by the intranets live news item, but to do with US days of the week and public holidays. Weekdays folks blog, weekends and holidays . . . well not so much.
And this really comes back to what I talked about in my Intranets Live Jan 09 posting - The people attending Intranets live are professionals, they're taking time out of their working lives, or personal lives (depending on the time zone) and when they get thrown this sort of thing as 'news' it really doesn't sit well with me.

I hope that the team at IBF read this post and work on the news for next time.

Part 2 of this post will come through tomorrow: I'll talk about the BBC MOO live demo by Shane Samarwikrema and Nokia's phone book personal profiles.

Remember IBF and intranets live are back 7 April 09 focusing on Finability while talking with Adidas and Hess

Intranets Live Jan 09 event

noreply@blogger.com (Dorje McKinnon) — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 09:20:00 +0000

The third in the series of IntranetsLive events I have to say this one was much improved on the first one [notes on it by me]. Very much more professional, snappier and very useful.
Hosting were Paul Miller and Paul Levy.

I took notes this time, rather than live blogging - hence the delay in getting my notes online. Infact so slow that the 4th in the Intranets Live series is in about 6 hours time.

This is a record of what occurred, for those who couldn't attend. It is also a record of some of the great work that has been done by the organisations IntranetsLive profiled in the third event. As always the mistakes and omissions are mine alone. I've posted screen shots, and where appropriate I've removed sensitive material - if you would prefer the screen shots are removed please contact me, I'm very happy to address any concerns immediately.

245 people joined in with this event.

Phillips Healthcare
First up for the new year was Candice Cahill from Phillips Healthcare division (35,000 employees), one of three divisions at Phillips.

Also from Phillips Healthcare was Aida Kenyon consultant with Phillips design.

Aida works in design and strategy execution. she does intranet AI and usability. Phillips has usability facilities that are taken advantage of by the intranet but they also do lost of remote testing.

for Phillips Healthcare Candice says their major goals are to get everyone on the same platform and deliver a new IA. I asked Candice about the reasons for moving to the same platform, the reply wasn't very specific and I didn't have the opportunity to delver further into this. My personal opinion is that this is a nice to have, and often a very expensive one that means intranets deliver less to the bottom line of the business. More on this in another post on the topic of 'same platform mania'.

After talking with Phillips Healthcare Paul Miller moved on to the new section hosted by Nic Price. Nic Talked about the recent news that Telegraph media group were moving from Microsoft applications to Google Apps. A move Gartner research see as happening more and more.

Jane McConnell Global Intranet Trends report
The second major item on the program was Jane McConnell talking about the Global Intranet Trends report she has just produced out of her Global Intranet Survey in the last half of 2008.
226 organisations - 65% private - 24% public with <5000>100,000 employees.
Jane started by pointing out how turbulent 2008 had been for intranets as reflected by the increased numbers of mergers, organisational changes, sponsor changes and new reporting lines that survey respondents had mentioned.

Jane's second major issue to report from her findings was the large gab between reality and how senior management perceive the intranet's improtance.

60 - 80% of staff would be disrupted if the intranet went down for 1 hour - 1 day
40% of C level managers consider the intranet critical.

Even if the respondents were overstating the impact of intranet down time and understating C level appreciation for the intranet, there is a disconnect here.

This again reiterates the need for intranet teams to get better at making the case for and selling the intranet up the management chain.

Jane joined this disconnect with governance and

how low the number of business owners of content there are (36%)
how less than 50% of organisations have communities of practice to support their networks of content contributors

Jane's sees these as low cost areas that can greatly improve intranet quality. This comment fit nicely with the recurring "Recession strength intranet" theme the IBF hosts of IntranetsLive mentioned several times.

Governance was seen, in the study, as the get out of jail card for social media concerns that many organisations continue to have.

Jane was surprised how low the percentages were for optimization of social media tools.
The information correlates well with Toby Ward's blog post [ Intranet 2.0 transformative powers and barriers ]. In it he talks about exec support being one of the main barriers to adoption. Which he then links to, and I agree, a lack of strategy and business case for the intranet. Jane's survey points out larger organisation tend to have better C level support. Toby points out that this support is one of the key things required for intranet 2.0 success. Jane and Toby's survey results appear to support these conclusions. Certainly my real world experience and the anecdotes I've heard support this hypothesis.

Dr William Hudson
The next section of IntranetsLive Jan 2009 was the intranet doctor - William Hudson (User experience specialist)
William was talking to Kurt Jones - MD intranet solutions for Charles Schwab - who show the Schweb (Charles Schwab intranet) HR direct page and talked about how he would like to redesign it so that

it would be easier for new employees to use
announcements weren't so buried
people used the help, no one does now
it is more friendly and viable

For a start William suggest http://www.greekthis.com/ a site he setup which will change all the characters into Greek. His suggestion was to Greek the HR direct page, then show screen shots of it to new employees and have them tell Kurt what each area was for.
William's point was that news items should look like news items that people see on news sites.

William then talked about reading order and how web page gaze is approximately F shaped, i.e. the bottom right of the page doesn't get much of a look in. So don't put important stuff there. This was in reference to Jacob Neilsen's study of eye tracking.

For quick links William suggests that they should be ordered by most used not alphabetically. In my experience you don't want to change them too often, when they do change often my staff find it easier for them to be in alphabetical order.

The doctor's final layout.

A day in the life of an intranet manager
This section was an interview between Paul Levy and Kurt Jones of Charles Schwab.
My notes on this section are pretty short compared to the time taken for the interview

Kurt - "a lot of meetings"
photo of Kurt's desk was a nice touch
interwoven is the Schweb platform
collaboration is via SharePoint
moving to MOSS
Kurt - "I'm a change manager and negotiator"
HR is the intranet owner

I like this section of the overall event because it gives me a feel that I'm not alone doing what I do, but .... as with any interview really fly and some are OK.

NEWS
The next section was the news - none of which was news (new information or information on current events). I'd find this section much more useful if it gave a snippet (url or delicious bookmark tag) and told why it was important to intranet managers or intranets. As it was the section was lots of stuff I could find myself, too waffly and WAY too much scrolling around web pages. Take a screen shot of the page, or company logo and talk to that, don't show me what you're reading to me please.

Deloitte's US intranet
The last session was with Jeffrey Ward, director portal strategy and ops from Deloitte. Jeffrey talked about the US part of Deloitte's intranet that he is responsible for.

Jeffrey is part of the comms team and the intranet is the primary vehicle for communication within the company. Three news editors collate, write and publish the articles on the home page and come up with special section ideas like 'Eye on the economy'
Deloitte have an internal social networking application that they built in house called Dstreet. It was this that Jeffrey gave us a tour of first.
One third of Deloitte's 45,000 staff have added information to their Dstreet profiles so far.

Currently Deloitte are using MS CMS 2002 but they're moving to SharePoint 2007. They're already using it for blogging by some teams on specific topics. Deloitte also use SharePoint's wiki option, their most successful application of this so far was a wiki setup in memorium of a well known staff memember who died unexpectedly. The in memorium wik provided a means for Deloitte's very distributed staff to grieve together on the intranet, sharing their stories, photos, experiences and grief.
In response to a question Jeffrey briefly outlined the governance structure DeloitteNet uses.

Day to day operations - ops team and IT
General - advisory committee of 25 staff making key decisions
Governance board - made up of leaders of the primary business areas

Jeffrey also showed the intranet profile page which I thought was interesting in that presence (online, offline, busy, etc) of those showing in the 'have you met' section was displayed.

Summary
Very quick as I have to get some sleep prior to the next intranets live event (4 hours away).
IntranetsLive Jan 2009 was very worth while, in writing this up 1 month after the event I've really had a chance to think about some of the presentations. Even to the point where, unfortunately, we may make use of the Deloitte wiki use case.

Global Intranets Survey out now

noreply@blogger.com (Dorje McKinnon) — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 02:11:00 +0000

Jane McConnell's Global Intranets Survey is out. Jane has also just released the free 'Trends' summary of her larger Survey.

As part of the Trends summary she provides the table of contents for the Global Intranet Survey - so I took the liberty of analysing the Table of contents to see which topics she gave most pages to [see the image above]. I realise this isn't very a scientific way of looking at the survey - there is a huge wealth of useful information in it but it was kind of fun so I thought I'd share it with you. Notably, though there are a number of graphs in each section, the quotes throughout make for some very insightful reading particularly in the SharePoint 2007 appendix.

As one of the peer reviewer's for the Survey this year I've been looking at a copy for a while now and I like it.

The survey is well worth purchasing because it can provide a lot of support for intranet business cases and justification. It is also good for helping you asses changes currently impacting intranets, with respect to your own intranet. Another nice touch is that this year the design and layout of the report is very pleasant, which makes the whole thing much easier to go through and aids comprehension.

If you want a taste of the survey results Jane has just released her 'trends' summary of the survey, which she provides to the intranet community for free.

DorjeM

Social Bookmarking - poll results

noreply@blogger.com (Dorje McKinnon) — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 02:15:00 +0000

Hi there,

During the recent Intranets Live web conference (October 2008) I heard Shiv Singh talking about how Avenue A Razorfish had used a specific tag on Delicious to drag an RSS feed of useful links onto their intranet. He also mentioned a similar thing using a special tag on Flickr images, and using that to drag an appropriate photo roll onto the intranet.

I was intrigued so thought I'd do some rough research to see if such a thing was relatively easy to do.

Initially I thought I'd look at the technical requirements - from what I found it wasn't going to be too difficult to do with delicious and very easy to do with Flickr.

From there I progressed to some water cooler interviews to see what response might be, I picked staff I know are web savvy to ask my questions of. Their response was positive so as a final check of - was this a good use of my time and resources I did a quick poll of a sub set
of my users.

7% of intranet users were given the option of replying to the poll which was on the FrontPage of the intranet for two weeks. Of my total user population 3% responded

[NOTE - 3% is 40% of the 7% who actually saw the poll, which I was quite pleased with, especially because many people bothered to tell me they didn't use anything]

Del.icio.us 8%
Digg 8%
Furl 0%
Ma.gnolia 0%
Reddit 0%
Stumbleupon 2%
MSDN 8%
TechNet 4%
Other 6%
None 65%

Conclusion - at this stage this sort of development probably should be put aside in favour of projects with more immediate impact.

The reason I'm posting this now is that I've just read a Post by Step Two owner James Robertson about the three tiers of collaboration. In it he talks about the 'capacity' as being the key building block for making sure collaboration works.

http://www.steptwo.com.au/columntwo/three-tiers-of-collaboration/

My brain brought James article and my recent work together providing me with the following conclusion

my social bookmarking data may represent a real symptom of the long way we have to go as an organisation in fostering greater sharing and therefore collaboration

Other fitfully taken up collaboration projects support this hypothesis but obviously further work needs to be done to confirm or reject the idea.

I'd be interested in other people's experiences and comments on what James article gets you to think about.

DorjeM

Social Networking marketing examples

noreply@blogger.com (Dorje McKinnon) — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 20:46:00 +0000

Huge list of examples where social networking tools / sites are being used to improve the image of companies globally

http://www.beingpeterkim.com/2008/09/ive-been-thinki.html

Thanks to James Dello for the link