I'm tweeting from the JBoye09 conference in Aarhus, Denmark this week. You can follow me at http://twitter.com/netjmc.
The twitter tag for the conference is #jboye09.
For those of you who are wondering, the 2010 report will be published the first week of November.
Many thanks to all of you for your emails of encouragement. This year's report will be worth waiting for!
Here's where I sit in early evening when I take a break from writing.
This article is a must-read for intranet managers: Is "Social Media" Really Changing the World? by Jared Cohen.
Here are some quotes to whet your appetite. Cohen says:
"'Social media' is merely a way to describe new tools in an old and narrow paradigm where we measure success by how many people are reached."
He talks about the organizations who participated in the recent Alliance of Youth Movements Summit in Mexico City and goes on to say:
"The groups who spoke at the summit were aware of their challenges: .... they used urls and websites instead of offices and leveraged open source platforms in the absence of budgets. In each of their cases, these technological tools are about more than the exchange and posting of information; they have also allowed them to organize and mobilize in real time to raise funds, circumvent restrictions on civil liberties, hold governments accountable, build tangible documents like petitions, orchestrate counter or parallel elections, and connect people with judicial and legal resources...."
"...The term 'social media' as we know it today appeared in July 2004 as a reference to participatory media like blogging, wikis, social networks, and related technologies. This is all well and good if technology was still primarily about connecting people to information, which is really the essence of media. However, this term has become obsolete in a world where technology has become a critical tool for connecting people not only to information and ideas, but also to other individuals, entities (NGOs, companies, governments, etc.), and more recently actual resources be they financial, medical, or judicial."
"The power of technology today will be determined not by web traffic and viewership, but by its ability to strengthen and more importantly facilitate connections in real time."
This speaks to my heart as I am currently working on one of the chapters in the "Global Intranet Trends for 2010" where I have identified the "real-time intranet"' as one of the emerging trends that is transforming the workplace web. The real-time intranet connects people to people in organizations where there is often no official means for making contact.
Micro-blogging is a good example. The use of Twitter or Yammer inside enterprises is extremely low today. However even the limited number of experiences described by the intranet managers who participated in the 2009 survey shows indications of what is coming.
One example is the intranet manager himself who said: "Micro-blogging has allowed me to build relationships with other members of the organization I would otherwise have no knowledge of or ability to influence."
I am convinced that micro-blogging has a critical role to play in organizations and in the workplace web.
Any experiences to share?
During the first Globally Local open thread of a couple of weeks ago, Chamika asked:
"A topic I've been trying to research is how to set up workflow for intranet content using Sharepoint. There are several resources that explain the technical aspects of workflow set up, but rarely have I come across any articles about mapping out workflow from a centralized publishing model to a distributed publishing model. Another way it's being perceived in my organization is the approvals process for intranet content. Any best practices and lessons learned would be great."
I have identified (thanks to some challenging work with my clients!) 7 fundamental principles that I feel are very important and that each of my clients has implemented - their own way - in their organizations.
1. Define responsibility for content at the lowest level possible in the organization, but at a level of accountability.
Define the level according to the "natural business role". Publishing on the intranet must be part of normal business procedures. Whoever is responsible for the accuracy of a specific content should also be responsible for that content on the intranet.
Keep this level as low as possible, but make sure it does not go lower than the business responsibility.
2. Do not mix "content owner" with "content publisher".
The content publisher may be a person whose responsibility is to use the CMS or publishing tool and put the content online. This is not the same thing as being responsible for the accuracy and up-to-dateness of the content. This is a technical responsibility, which is very important, but different. It requires knowing how to use the publishing tool, and, depending on the sophistication of the tool, making the content easy to read online.
3. Make the name of the "content owner" visible on the content itself.
Ensure that the person with business responsibility for the content is visibly identified on the content itself. Visibility goes a long way towards making people aware of their responsibilities.
4. Have the business units and functions specify their own types of content and levels of approval.
If you are a large, global organization, you will have many different types of content with varying degrees of ownership depending on the source: business unit, country, function, etc. Ask the different business units and functions to define their own guidelines for what type of content require approval by what level or role.
Propose a content-approval grid with (1) the types of content with which you are familiar and (2) the potential levels of approval based on your organizational structure. Ask business and functional managers to indicate what level of approval is required. Push them a bit to ensure they are not placing the approval level too high.
Find examples outside of the intranet to help them analyze the true level of responsibility. For example, if certain people are allowed to communicate externally, they can certainly approve content for internal publication. If a level of management produces internal reports on a topic, they can certainly approve publication for this information on the intranet.
Avoid, as much as possible, elevating the approval level.
5. Avoid complex workflow. In fact, avoid CMS workflow completely!
With a few rare exceptions, assume the person publishing a piece of content is authorized to publish the content. Building workflow steps into a content management system simply adds to everyone's email overload.
I have rarely seen cases where the actual approval process takes place in the CMS workflow. It always happens either before (preferably) or after the actual publication.
6. Do not let content owners alone decide what end-users should or should not see. Involve user rep's!
Identify owners for user profiles (or "persona ambassadors"). Make sure that if you have defined profiles such as "marketing managers" or "employees based in France" or "customer service staff for product A" that you have also identified a person who is part of that profile and who can work with you to determine what members of that profile need to see and access to do their jobs. This person becomes the "user rep" for that profile. ("Rep" = representative)
One of the biggest pitfalls of customized intranets/portals is letting the content owners alone decide who should see what. They only have a partial view. The complementary view is from the users: "what do we need to see", and only a member of that user segment can answer that question.
7. Make sure you have no "black holes".
This is hard, but if you have top management support you can do it! :)
If you don't, you probably can't. :(
Require every part of your organization to have an intranet representative, a person who represents what the area publishes on the intranet and what the members of that area needs from the intranet.
If your top senior person makes this a requirement, you can be sure that users will be able to find what they need on the intranet. Otherwise, the intranet may be lop-sided (unbalanced) with some areas heavily present and others absent.
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Thanks for asking this question, Chamika, and I hope others will add to my list...
In the open thread last weekend, Zeb asked the following question:
I gave a brief answer in my post 30-30-30-10 Watch the Trends saying that that it is important for intranet managers to have part of their time focused on external issues.
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In the meantime I sent the question to one of my virtual colleagues with whom I have worked on numerous projects, Anthony Hamelle,VP of linkinfluence. Anthony blogs here (in French) but he is more than fluent in English as you see below in his response to my query.
Anthony's response to Zeb:
"There are two main kinds of online monitoring services out there.
(1) Those that seek to capture and track as much data in as many languages as possible about your brands or topics of interest. They are like smart clippings services and are useful in an e-CRM fashion (hearing everything everywhere and, inasmuch as possible, providing timely answers to everyone).
Some better-known ones are Radian6 (leading paid-for monitoring service), Sysomos, Attentio, Twitter Search or Google Blogsearch (that latter two being leading free monitoring services ;-)
(2) Those that seek to make sense of the data they track and capture. These tools are akin to market research solutions and services, filtering and organising data so as to reveal interesting trends that help decide upon strategies.
Some better-known ones are linkfluence (disclosure, I am VP of linkfluence), TNS Cymfony or Nielsen Buzzmetrics.
Although almost all providers work with some form of text mining, a line might be drawn between those that provide NLP (natural language processing, i.e. automated sentiment detection) and those that choose to rely on human analysts to interpret the data.
I for one think that NLP is not yet suited for the complexity and the heterogeneous aspect of language on the social web, meaning that human analysts still have to interpret and extract insights from the data..."
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Many thanks to Anthony. Do not hesitate to raise questions to him directly, or via Globally Local here in comments.
Open thread topics over the weekend got a couple of very relevant comments, the first from Zeb.
Zeb wants to know about tracking trends:
Zeb is right in focusing on how companies can track trends.
Intranet managers need to be externally focused - with at least 30 percent of their energy (why 30? less than half, but still significant!) in order to stay fresh, motivated and up to date on what's going on in the world. Trends on the web are impacting the intranet more than ever in the past.
I'd say the smart intranet manager should be focused on:
Of course, the "user needs" and the "business needs' converge (hopefully); otherwise there's a serious problem in the organization.
The "organizational needs" are probably Corp Comm-driven, and, in most - but hopefully not all cases - very top-down.
In spite of all this so called "synergy", the way the intranet responds to these different needs is quite notable.
Lots of consultants push the "persona" approach: what does this type of user need?
"Let's define typical user profiles and identify their needs."
That's very good stuff, but hard to achieve in a meaningful way in a global organization with multiple business units, a variety of professional profiles and presence in a hundred countries (and cultures) or more.
Other more technology-oriented partners (agencies, solution providers) will push the "personalization" approach: let people decide what they need.
So, back to the smart intranet manager:
1. Watch the web trends
2. Listen to your end-users
3. Talk to your business managers and identify their pain points.
4. Talk to your senior management: you'll be surprised, I hope!
And back to Zeb, who originated the question, I've sent it on to someone who knows web technology and who will hopefully give us some leads....stay tuned.
Open thread means "over to you".
What do you want to talk about?
What's on your mind?
Start a conversation by posting a comment....
An intranet manager asked me the following a couple of days ago:
"I am looking for some comparative benchmarks for readership of news posted on corporate intranets. I get fairly regular feedback from senior management here that readership should be higher (uptake on articles ranges from very small to as high as 80% of target audience in some cases) and I would like to find something to demonstrate to them that an average readership of X% is fairly typical. Are you aware of any such benchmarks?"
I referred him to a blog post "Spam from corporate communications?" that I wrote just over a year ago, based on 2 real life anecdotes from intranet managers about corporate emails. Since then, a couple of intranet managers have asked me what percentage of viewership is average for corporate videos.
Do any of you have any figures to share?
I often say that the intranet is a process, not a project. I did a slide 4 years ago that I used then quite often in workshops and still use today: "One slide worth a thousand words". I came across a printout of this slide a couple of months ago in the office of one of my clients where he had posted it on his wall. He told me he referred to it often when "educating" his manager about intranets being more than technology and well-executed project plans.
Government as a process was one of the tracks at Gov 2.0 Expo last week, and here is a link (YouTube) to a 5-minute presentation made by Emma Antunes, webmaster for NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, last week at Gov 2.0 Expo.
I met Emma several years ago at a conference in California where I was presenting the results from the very first Global Intranet Strategies survey, which takes us back to the fall of 2006. It's exciting to remember back 3 years and see how fast intranets have evolved since then.
I still remember giving a workshop at that conference and showing participants some numbers from the 2006 survey about 2.0 experimentation and some of the people saying "not in my intranet!". There was quite a strong resistance from some of the intranet managers. I remember one of them being very worried about "losing control of his intranet". Note the "his". Those were the days where some intranet managers still thought the intranets "belonged" to them! I have not come across that thinking in some time now, thank goodness.
If you sometimes get discouraged about your intranet evolving at a snail's pace, think back a few years and reflect on the progress you've made. Remember that it's a process you're dealing with - a gradual change - and not a self-contained project.
I'll be joining one of the J.Boye communities of practice in Munich on September 24th. This international group is one of the many CoPs run by J.Boye. (More information here.)
I have entitled my talk ""Evolving towards the intranet-enabled online workplace".
It is clear that intranets are changing. I see evidence of this everywhere I go. I have had two large global organizations on the telephone in the last 2 weeks, and both are facing challenges of how to transform their intranets into effective, online workplaces.
They both realize that a large part of this is getting the balance right between global requirements and local requirements. I'll rephrase that to say "getting the balance right between common requirements and specific requirements." I wrote about this earlier in the year: "Intranet purpose: 3 angles".
Practically speaking, many intranet managers today have to reconcile two strong strategy drivers that collide with each other. The first is the "common culture, shared vision" corporate communication departments strive to build, especially during times of radical change such as what is happening currently in many organizations. The second is the "now and fast" needs expressed by local business units, always under operational pressures.
Transforming intranets into online workplaces, or even simply making them the "front door" into online workplaces requires making certain strategic decisions and bringing these decisions to life in organizations where day-to-day activities take precedence over stepping back and taking time to think.
It also involves either making collaboration part of the intranet, or at the very least, positioning it within the online workplace with a user-centric logic.
Points I will cover in my talk:
I'm looking forward very much to discussions with the members of the J. Boye CoP next week, and hope to challenge them and that they will challenge me.
Note: It is possible for non-members to be invited to attend one CoP meeting as a guest before deciding to join. There is information on pricing and membership options on this page.
(Disclaimer: I am not a member of J.Boye but work with them frequently in their CoPs and conferences as a speaker and workshop leader.)
We officially closed the 4th annual Intranet Strategies Survey today. Many thanks to the 283 organizations around the world who participated!
Here are some statistics to show you the dimension the survey is taking on:
More later on the survey highlights, but again, many thanks to all of you in the global intranet community.
The official report will be published in the second part of October, but I'll leak some trends here soon!
At the request of participants who have just returned from holidays, we have extended the deadline for the Global Intranet Strategies Survey. Instead of closing today, August 31st, it will close at the end of the week, Friday, September 4th at end of day, Pacific Standard time.
So if you haven't started it yet, or not had time to finish, you still have this week to do it!
Contact us if you have and questions, or even if you'd like to sign up and do it in the next few days. (More information here.)
I was very interested in the New York Times article "Who’s Driving Twitter’s Popularity? Not Teens"
I quote:
"Twitter’s unparalleled explosion in popularity has been driven by a decidedly older group. That success has shattered a widely held belief that young people lead the way to popularizing innovations."
And...
"The notion that children are essential to a new technology’s success has proved to be largely a myth."
What about Facebook?
Evan Williams, Twitter’s co-founder and chief executive says that Twitter is a “... one-to-many network and most of the content is public, it works for this better than a social network that’s optimized for friend communication.” (read Facebook)
Take look at this article and see how it could apply to your intranet. Are you looking for colleague-to-colleague communication, a real-time communication channel or both?
Sunday night and I finally launched netjmc.net - my combined blog and web site. Let me know your feedback. Gobally local is still here.
Working on the weekend? Fraid so. I read this morning, yes a Sunday morning with a cafe creme at hand, made by my own expresso machine, about how the 8-hour day, 5-day workweek (created by Henry Ford no less) is no longer relevant.
Tonight it took me a few minutes but I went through my history file from all of today on the net - literally hundreds of links - and found what I was looking for: Working this weekend? So I'm definitely not home alone!
I even saw that as the deadline nears (end of August) a few intranet mangers used the weekend to complete the survey: Global Intranet Strategies.
Get in touch if you're interested. Hope you did not work TOO much on the weekend - just enough to be part of the new generation of web workers!
I'm looking for as many Intranet Awards as I can find.
If you have one in your country or an international one, or even an intra-enterprise one, please get in touch.
I want to publicise these awards, and understand what the criteria are for winning! I want to get the best ones on to the decision-makers' radar.
What makes an intranet business critical?
How can we make the intranet part of the strategic assets of an organization that should be considered when evaluating the value of an enterprise?
Here we go, chronologically...with the awards I know:
The oldest, to my knowledge, started in 2001 and is run by the usability guru team at Nielsen Norman:
Best Intranet Design. It awards the intranets which have outstanding design and usability. (I'm pleased to say that one of my global clients won this a few years ago!)
Another one started in 2007: Step Two Design's Intranet Innovation Awards. I especially like this one because it does not attempt to evaluate the "whole intranet" (which I personally find impossible to do in the case of global organizations), but rather looks at specific innovations within the intranet.
The goal is to "celebrate new ideas and innovative approaches to the design and delivery of intranets and find these ideas (whether large or small), and to share them with the wider community."
(Disclaimer: I am one of the judges for Intranet Innovation Awards.)
I have recently become aware of the Intranet Portal Award in Brazil, starting in 2008, organized by the Intranet Portal Institute. Its goal is to recognise portals that "facilitate access to information and knowledge which has become a necessity for those who want to be competitive in a networked economy". I love this ambition for an intranet/portal award. Very business-focused!
I know there are other awards in Denmark, Germany, Italy and Switzerland, but I don't have the specific information or links. Please send them to me. I'd like to interview you about the details.
If you organize or are aware of other intranet awards, please get in touch.
We all need to work together to bring intranets up to the decision-maker radar, which is where they belong by definition!
The Global Intranet Strategies Survey always closes with a final, open question: "Do you have any comments?"
So far this year, there have been a few suggestions for improvements for next year. One involved making it easier to use from a laptop (very good point!). It's really great to have participants contributing ideas for the 2010 survey.
Many participants have found the survey a stimulating trigger to thinking about their own intranets:
One participant used the final field to share his thoughts on the future of intranets:
"My overall feeling regarding the future of intranets:
You still have time to sign up. The survey closes at the end of August. (Requirements for participating.)
An intranet manager asked me recently how to prioritise ideas about social media for the intranet. They are a global organization and are currently attempting to bring all the local intranets under the same umbrella.
They ran a workshop, and lots of ideas were proposed. People gave lots of examples and even ROI figures in many cases. (I need to say "alleged ROI figures" because some of them were familiar examples currently flung about on the internet with little or no detailed information.)
Their question to me: So now what do we do?
My response to them: Don't look at the others; look at yourself!
I suggested the following:
I know there will be some of you out there who will say: Make the tools available and see what happens.
I disagree with this approach, to a large extent, mainly because there are so many tools, so many ideas, and such an obvious need to have a reason for what you do on the intranet.
Time is limited, resources are scarce, people are preoccupied with lots of other things these days.
I strongly recommend thinking about what you do and why, and finding the most "fertile" terrains for experimentation.
Let me know what you think, and what you've done!
I did not realize how lively the intranet scene is in Brazil until Fernando Viberti got in touch with me and became a Network Partner for the 4th annual Global Intranet Strategies survey. His blog is definitely worth reading: "Gestao e governança web". "Web management and governance in English."
Lots of in-depth posts.
(I use Google's Word Translator which I've recently installed in my Firefox navigation bar in order to follow intranet blogs in languages I don't speak!)
I've also heard from Ricardo Saldanha, President of the Intranet Portal Institute which is a non-profit, non-governmental organization, set up to stimulate and help professionalize the Brazilian intranet space by bringing case studies and best practices to light, in a knowledge-sharing way. Fernando Viberti is also one of the Portal Institute's directors.
Brazil also has its own Intranet Portal Award, founded by Ricardo, and now in its second year. It was started in order to recognize outstanding intranets. The first single-day event for this award is apparently considered to be a turning point in the Brazilian intranet space by intranet professionals, end users and vendors.
In addition, there is an Intranet Portal site with a discussion forum on corporate portals and intranet projetcs in Brazil. It now has around 3 thousand subscribers.
Do you need a good reason to go to Brazil on a business trip?
If so, think about participating in the two-day event in November that will be the culmination of the Intranet Portal Award for 2009. The first day will be dedicated to winners' presentations and second day to discussion tracks on IT Integration (Portal), Content & Collaboration - and Governance.
Andrew Wright's site on end-user intranet benchmarking (Worldwide Intranet Challenge) was accidentally left off my list of Intranet blogs.
Sorry Andrew and thanks for pointing it out! It's now been corrected!
Apologies to Giacomo Mason, whom I've known virtually for several years, and forgot to put him on the list of Intranet Blogs...
http://www.intranetmanagement.it
His blog is in Italian, but you can get the gist of it from this automatic translator that Giacomo provided:
http://www.intranetmanagement.it/en/
I tried to put the English translated version in my NetVibes, but could not make it work.
Does anyone know how to do this? Giacomo's posts are worth it!
It's a tie! At last, there are as many blogs by intranet managers as by intranet consultants. Bravo!
I just redid my lists of intranet bloggers and online groups and divided them into 3 categories:
Intranet managers, Intranet blogs (consultancies) and Intranet Groups Online.
Intranet Managers
In alphabetical order...
Intranet or intranet-related consultancy blogs
Intranet Groups Online
I’d like to give special recognition to Dorje McKinnon, a “real intranet manager” who finds the time and energy to facilitate an online group. I don't know of other cases like Dorje!
You can find permanent links in the lists in the left column of this blog.
Please repost, link to or tweet about this list to help give all these people the coverage they deserve!
Get in touch if you have a blog or group that falls into one of these categories, and I'll add you to the list. If you are listed above, and want to change how I described you, let me know!
Is your intranet team being down-sized? If so, you are in a minority. You should absolutely share the following stats with your senior management.
The 4th annual Global Intranet Strategies Survey indicates that over 2009....
- 27% of intranet teams have increased in size
- 60 % of intranet teams have remained stable
- Only 12% have been downsized
This is encouraging news during the current economic crisis. These figures represent roughly the first 100 participants in the study, and may change.
However, previous survey results (3 years of experience) have shown that the first 100 or so of participants are a reliable indication of the overall trend.
Have senior management realised that intranets are essential for doing business - internally and eternally? I really hope so!!
Have you signed up to participate in the study?
You'll receive a free copy of the "Global Intranet Trends for 2010" report in exchange for your time and contribution.
More info here: http://netjmc.com/survey/sign-up-JMC-global-intranet-survey-2009-2010.html
Please get in touch if you have any questions or comments.
With enterprises preparing their plans in case of a flu pandemic this fall, now is the time to get your intranet ready.
If you haven't started yet, you'll barely have time to make it before the flu hits according to predictions in many countries, including where I live. I strongly recommend you give the checklist below to your intranet sponsor or CEO. Make sure they know how much the intranet can help your organization get through this crisis about to happen.
(Influenza ward at Walter Reed Hospital, in Washington, D.C. during the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918-1919. Wikipedia. Public domain.)
Business critical checklist:
1. Can staff access the intranet from home?
2. Do you have on line collaboration spaces and tools in place so that teams can continue to work?
3. Is your senior management team ready (psychologically and technically) to communicate to staff via blogs and on line chats?
4. Have you set up extranets or other online solutions with your key clients and your key partners so that you can continue doing business?
5. Have you equipped all your managers with smart phones?
6. Do you have the means to send urgent messages to all managers? (text messages, twitter channel, ...)
7. Are your critical HR processes on line so that staff can carry out their basic administrative needs without coming in to the office?
Real important checklist:
8. Do staff have access to real-time chat tools for their daily communication needs?
9 Are you preparing training materials in the form of podcasts and videocasts so that new employees can get up to speed fast?
10. Have you started communicating with staff about the possibility of having to work from home or work in circumstances where our normal communication around the coffee machine may not longer be the norm for a while?
The 2009 Global Intranet Strategies Survey deals with all the points above (and many others) so if you have not yet signed up to participate, please do so. More information here: http://netjmc.com/survey/sign-up-JMC-global-intranet-survey-2009-2010.html