Globally local - locally global

Follow Enterprise 2.0 Forum in Paris on Twitter

You can follow the key ideas and presentations taking place Thursday 18 March in Paris at the Enterprise 2.0 Forum.

Hash tag is #e20f

(Tweets are in French.)

P.S. There will be 2 talks in English - maybe the tweets will be too: Claire  Flanagan (CSC) and Anu Elmer (Swiss Reinsurance Company).

P.P.S. It's nearly 6pm in Paris and the Enterprise 2.0 Forum is ending. In the end, there were lots of tweets in English, especially by Bertrand Duperrin (thanks Bertrand!) so it's worth taking a look at them using the hash tag #e20f. Here's the link.

Intranet track at J.Boye Philadelphia, May

I'm co-hosting the intranet track with the J.Boye group at the J.Boye Philadelphia 2010 conference this May. We have lined up some good case studies and hope to have lots of good questions and discussions.

Among the presenters we have participants in the Global Intranet Strategies survey as well as some that have recently won intranet awards. The day-long session will be both fun and challenging:

• I'll be talking about "Intranets: Getting ready for what lies ahead"
• Bill Donaldson, MITRE, will tell us about their "Anytime-Anyplace Access".
• We will hear from Beth Gleba, IKEA, North America on "Extending the Intranet".
• Andrew Jayne, Transfield Services North America, will talk about "Content Generation for your Intranet"
• Barbara Schelkle of UNDP will tell us about their "New Intranet for a Highly-Decentralized Organisation".
• Martin White, Intranet Focus, will discuss a strategic question of "Collaboration - should it be inside or outside the intranet?"
• Robert Polkowski, Perkins Eastman Architects will continue on the collaboration theme, specifically talking about "Embracing Online Team Spaces - Fun, Freedom and Functionality".

If any of you are in the region, please let me know so we can meet up.

Intranet conversations in NetJMC&Co - from ROI to branding

There are a lot of active intranet conversations currently taking place in the Linkedin group NetJMC&Co (for intranet managers).

There's a lot to be learned just reading through them!

If you are an intranet manager and would like to join the 430 intranet managers worldwide who are members of this group, click here to request membership.

Topics:

• Does anyone else agree they're no longer managing the same intranet as 5 years ago? It's moved from an IT role to HR and Internal Comms but still is being measured in hard dollars. 
• What metrics to choose as most significant to follow intranet use on Google Analytics?
• What features do you allow in an employee profile/employee directory?
• How to treat multilingual content on an intranet?
• Do you offer Classified Adverstising for employees on your intranet? Would you recommend it? What are the advantages & disadvantages? What are your policies? Does it increase traffic to your intranet?
• How do you brand your collaboration area?
• 'Self service' area of intranet portal - what do you call it?
• What was your greatest intranet-related accomplishment in 2009?

Call for Intranet Governance Models (reward offered!)

I am currently working on developing a set of governance scenarios and models.

In the last 2 months, I have had conversations about intranet governance with over 60 intranet managers. I ran a workshop at the IntraTeam Event 2010: "Making Governance Operational" this month. About 35 intranet people were involved. The JMC Intranet breakfast in Paris in January was dedicated to intranet governance with 25 people: Making Intranets Business as Usual. I will be running a workshop on governance at the J.Boye Philadelphia conference in May: Using Governance to Futureproof your Intranet.

Based on these conversations and firsthand experiences, I am developing a set of scenarios and models to correspond to different organizational profiles.

If you have developed a model you would like to share with me, I would be very appreciative. I am especially interested in organizations with large, complex cases since they are always the hardest to solve!

If you are interested in participating in this research, I need 3 things from you

1. A copy of the document describing your model along with your governance org charts or diagrams. 
2. Your answers to the key impact factors listed below. 
3. A phone call with you to discuss your model. (approximately 20/30 minutes)

Free copy of "Global Intranet Trends for 2010" report

In exchange for your willingness to share, I would be very happy to give each contributor a complimentary copy of the "Global Intranet Trends for 2010" report (Pdf version or printed book. Commercial price: US$ 750/ 500 euros).

All materials you share will be kept confidential. They will not be shared with anyone else. They will serve only to provide input into the models. I can send you a confidentiality non-disclosure document specifying this.

List of 7 key factors that impact governance models

1. Industry, sector or activity of the enterprise

2. Overall organization of the enterprise

• Organizational model as shown by a high level org chart without names but with overall divisions, entities

3. Size (number of employees)

4. Geographical footprint

• Number of countries, regional presences

5. Basic demographics: approximate proportion of:

• Staff in "HQ country" versus other countries
• Blue collar versus white collar

6. Objectives of the intranet: primary and secondary

• Communication, collaboration, process support, other...

7. Governance maturity/experience in the organization

• First time a governance model is being implemented?
• Revised model based on previous experience?
• New model because of re-organization of enterprise?
• Other

I hope you'll join this research. Let me know if you have any questions. Get in touch.

IntraTeam Event 2010 - social media 60 percent!

This year's Intrateam Event is undoubtedly one of the best intranet-specific conferences I've been involved in for the last 12 months if not longer. I was able to meet and spend time with many of my peers, hear high quality case studies from practitioners, and hang out talking intranets night and day for 72 hours (which was enough:))

I had created a presentation with a new approach and when James Robertson said to me "Your keynote was so compelling I forgot to tweet it" I know it had worked.  James is one of my best intranet friends and one of my strongest sources of honest feedback - both positive and negative but always constructive. 

Thank you Peter Richards, for taking the time to collect the tweets and publish them. Peter says:

"The tweets from #IE10 were gems of information. Thought provoking questions, insightful observations and valuable advise were coming thick and fast in less than 140 characters. I am now convinced that provided the person tweeting from the event has the ability to communicate key points and not just a stream of topics, following conference presentations on Twitter can be an entertaining and informative experience."

However, I need to correct one tweet from my keynote and it is a BIG correction!

The tweet "5% use social media across the organization. More are testing and planning" is wrong.

We need to add a lot of percentage points to this one!!

60 % are using social media today with another 25% planning to do so.

The 5% refers to internal use of social networking, and there another 35 % are in the planning stages.

FastForward Blog: Global Intranet Trends 2010

Bill Ives, prolific writer,  author of the blog Portals and KM, blogger for FASTforward has just reviewed Global Intranet Trends for 2010 report.

Thanks, Bill, for a good summary of the major trends identified.

If you would like to participate in the survey in 2010 and receive a complimentary copy of the Global Intranet Trends for 2011, read more here and get in touch.

Governance is negotiation

I'm at IntraTeam Event 2010 in Copenhagen and will be doing a pre-conference workshop today called "Making Governance Operational". Tomorrow morning I give the keynote for the conference. The title is "Future Intranet for New Ways of Working" and governance is an underlying theme.

After working on governance with many organizations over the years, I have concluded that governance is negotiation. It is a blend of control, politics, flexibility and common sense. It is built on "give and take".

It is difficult to implement governance for 3 main reasons: (1) the right people are not involved in the decisions from the start, (2) different groups in the enterprise are making conflicting decisions and (3) decisions are made on paper and are theoretical, either superficial or too detailed.

I have two pieces of advice:

1. Start by defining strategic principles before trying to make decisions on governance.

Once there is agreement on the principles, the governance decision-making process will be accelerated.  Examples of principles:

• "The intranet will be structured in a user-logical way."
• "All staff will use the same entry page to enter the intranet."
• "The entry page will be customized."
• "Content will be managed at the lowest, accountable level in the organization."

These sound simplistic, but getting agreement on them is not always easy. Once you have agreement on these or whatever principles are relevant for your organization, it is much easier to define exactly what will be done, by whom, how, etc. 

2. Spend the necessary time on working out decentralized publishing.

It is key to making the intranet business as usual. It is at the heart of embedding the intranet in the organization.

As you work on this, make sure you have the end-user involved in the process. Do not let the stakeholders or main content and service providers tell you they know what staff needs. They mean well, may have a lot of experience, but you should always make sure you have direct communication lines open with the end-users.

Senior Manager blogs and non-blogs

A short while ago Stephan Schillerwein wrote a blog post entitled "Recipe for failure, the senior management blog on the intranet". Following on from Stephan's post and the conversation that followed, I'd like to share some comments based on my experience with very large organizations and some numbers from this year's report "Global Intranet Trends for 2010".

Why do large enterprises lead?

Large organizations have major challenges in communication.

Top-down communication is hard for two reasons: (1) there are lots of intermediaries in the flow, e.g.divisional, regional and local communication managers, and (2) there is an intuitive reticence, even mistrust in some cases, of what comes "down" from the HQ office. Bottom-up communication is equally hard because what starts at the bottom often stays at the bottom.

The figures in this year's report clearly show that senior managers in many large organizations are using blogs to improve communication flow, to break through some of the barriers and silos.  However, there is still a lot some of them need to learn about  blogging!

Blogging at 45%, senior bloggers lower

45 percent of the survey population at the end of 2009 reported having internal blogs. The figures in the chart represent the 131 enterprises with internal blogs out of the full survey population of 283 enterprises worldwide.

Details: Senior managers in very large organizations (over 30,000 employees) are more likely to blog than those in smaller organizations. In the first segment, 10 percent of the organizations using social media report having “quite a few” senior manager blogs and nearly 50 percent “a few”. In the medium-small group: none responded “quite a few” and 15 percent responded “a few”.

The blog usages that differ the most are “distribution of news” 80 percent (medium-small: 60 percent), and “collecting feedback”  nearly 70 percent (medium-small: nearly 40 percent).

Senior manager bloggers aim to show transparency and engage people

The purposes of the senior management blogs:
•    Talking about strategic issues (83 percent)
•    Showing openness & transparency (77 percent)
•    Sharing opinions, engaging people (74 percent)
•    Sharing news and updates (54 percent)
•    Sharing expertise and experience (38 percent).

Some senior manager blogs are not blogs

Not all the senior managers write their own posts. They do not always respond to comments and questions on the blog. Comments from  survey participants show different approaches to senior manager blogs

« We absolutely require that senior manager bloggers write their own posts. No ghostwriting allowed!
 
« CEO blog is written for him - and comments that purport to come from CEO are also written for him.
 
« Have started experimenting in the last nine months - becoming quite competitive! Although most of the senior manager blogs are open to comments or questions, the senior manager actually responds less than half the time. 

«  Employees are encouraged to ask questions, but via forms or e-mail, not open comments.
 
« Posts from senior managers and the board tend to attract a lot of comments which they are happy to respond to.

« The CEO’s blog doesn’t allow comments so communication is in one direction only - I don’t know if you would categorize this as a true blog, although that’s what it’s been dubbed.

Most senior manager bloggers blog 1 to 3 times a month

And you?

What is happening in your organization? Do you have a lot of senior manager blogs and are they really blogs?

Slide deck on Global Intranet Trends 2010

I've just put a presentation about the Global Intranet Trends 2010 report on Slideshare and made it available for viewing on the "Slide Decks" section of my web site.

Let me know if you'd like to download it and I'll send you a link.

Is the social intranet really here?

Toby Ward has opened the second edition of  his Intranet 2.0 survey.  You can read about it here where he talks about 2010 being the "year of the social intranet".

His study last year brought some interesting results. I was interested in comparing his figures and observations with my own, since a large section of my 2009 Global Intranet Strategies survey dealt with the same topic. The comparison was very interesting.

I strongly recommend your participation in Toby's study. Participants get a free copy of the final report.The survey only takes 10 minutes and you can win a $400 cash prize.

One of the comments in the social media section of my survey last year when I asked about why organizations are hesitating to experiment with social media:  " Lack of positive examples from peer organisations of successes in internal social media tools is a major factor in hesitancy." 

The more information we can get, the easier it will be for organizations to decide to make the leap. Or if they have already made the leap, to keep on swimming. And if they're already swimming, how to keep a sense of the shore and the destination.

In answer to the question "Is 2010 the year of the social intranet?" I'd say no. Enterprises are testing the waters, a few have clearly moved in that direction, but for the vast majority it is still a couple years away.

Incidentally, the enterprises that have done the most experimentation are the very large ones (over 30,000 employees) and those where the intranet is already quite mature and is or is on the verge of becoming the way of working.

JMC Breakfast "Social Media Inside the Enterprise"

The second JMC breakfast of 2010 will take place on March 10th in Paris. The topic is "Social Media Inside the Enterprise". Exceptionally, it will take place in English. (Normally it is in French.)  Details will follow, but in the meantime,  here is the program:

• Jane McConnell : "Social media inside the enterprise: hype and reality"
• Florence Devouard : "Co-what? : Collaboration, cooperation, and coordination: how understanding the difference between the three terms help building social networks"
• James Robertson: "Award-winning social tools: Real cases from enterprises around the world."
• Mini case studies on specific social media examples from participants including Alstom and Alcatel-Lucent.
• Martin White will also be joining us and sharing his approach to integrating social media into an information management strategy.

The event will last from 9 to 12, and will include lots of time for Q&A and discussion.

Florence Devouard, previously President of the Wikimedia Foundation was our guest a couple of years ago for the January breakfast at UNESCO. You can read more about Florence here and here.

Most of the readers of this blog will already know James Robertson (Step Two Designs, Australia) our second "guest of honor". James has been behind many intranet initiatives including the international Intranet Innovation Awards. You can read more about and from James and Step Two Designs on the web site and blog.

Martin White of Intranet Focus is an intranet consultant and author of "Successful Enterprise Search Management" and "Content Management Handbook".

If you are an intranet manager and would like to join us, get in touch. We have a few participants joining us from the UK so this JMC Breakfast will be quite international.

Intranet metrics: which indicators?

Following up on our previous discussions about benchmarking intranets (here and here), this post is about indicators.

The Global Intranet Strategies survey which took place between June and September 2009 explored the topic of metrics. The resulting  "Global Intranet Trends for 2010" report shows which metrics the survey participants (nearly 300 organizations) are using. The survey looked at the following types of metrics:

• Adoption 
• Usage/activity 
• Awareness/satisfaction 
• Time saving / efficiency 
• Cost avoidance 
• Core business value 
• Employee training and career 
• Reach and workforce coverage 

What follows is an extract of 2 pages from the report, pages 96 for adoption indicators and page 102 for core business indicators. Note that the number (n =) at the bottom left of each chart shows how many participants out of the 283 organizations are using this type of indicator.

Adoption indicators

Measuring the amount of information and processes being moved online shows how the intranet is being integrated into the way of working.

Stage 3 is significantly ahead of the other stages in measuring “moving information online” (63 percent) and “moving processes online” (at 20 points higher than average at 46 percent).

The percentages below represent those in the full survey population who responded “we measure this regularly”. The chart indicates the percentages per stage, referring to the 3 stages of maturity. (If you are not familiar with the 3 stages, see post from 2008 describing them.)

• Moving information online: Number or proportion of functions or activity areas which provide information on the intranet: guidelines, news, policies etc.from Finance, HR, different business areas, etc. (52 percent)
  Note: 75 percent of the enterprises over 50,000 measure “moving information online” (23 points higher than the survey average).
• Moving processes online: Number or proportion of functions or activities which offer services directly through the intranet (self-service centers, travel booking, active discussion forums) (26 percent)
• Number of authors / content producers (45 percent)

Comments from intranet managers:
 
« We measure the number of paper-based processes that can be automated, or at least illustrated using SharePoint / Windows Workflow Foundation.
« We look at the number of processes that have transitioned to our intranet.

« We run weekly reports on a set of metrics for our internal communities, including top contributors, subscriptions, number of posts, as well as documentation management stats (related to our CMS).

Core business indicators

Core business indicators are rarely used when measuring the impact of the intranet.

Twenty-two percent of the organizations with Stage 3 intranets measure the core business indicators. This makes sense because they are also the segment with the highest proportion of business processes and applications linked to or integrated into the intranet.

The percentages below represent those who responded “regularly” within the survey population. (The chart indicates the percentages per stage.)

• Indicators from core business processes and applications (11 percent)
• Sales and marketing indicators e.g. time required to respond to new customer’s request for proposal (5 percent)
• Indicators from customer service / maintenance / call center support (11 percent)
• Indicators from business support processes e.g. budget planning, finance, purchasing (6 percent)

One organization reports:
 « Every month we make probes into the intranet use of all of our stores in all countries. The results of the statistic probes go into our Balanced Score Card where they are used to identify the Country Managers whose stores are not opening new items on the intranet within a certain time frame.

What types of indicators are you using?

Can some of you share the types of indicators you are using with your intranet? Do you have any comments on which ones are the most useful for senior management?

Note: Consider joining the Global Intranet Strategies Survey this year (as of June), and get a complimentary copy of the Global Intranet Trends fro 2011 report which will be published in November.

Intranet benchmarking: a mashup of why & how

I’ve mashed up a new post about benchmarking based on my original blog post "Vanity" or "Specific value" benchmarking? and the extraordinary outpouring of lengthy reactions and comments (including Mark Morrell's post Benchmark to get the best value). Thank you all for your contributions.

The text below is written by the Globally Local readers!

Why benchmark?

Comparing your intranet to others is useful because intranets exist within organisations and are somewhat 'oblivious' to what happens outside the company. It is hard to look over the fence. That's where the value of benchmarking comes in.

As an intranet manager, you need to show the actual value of your investment to prove that you are actually helping the organisation save money / work more efficiently / 'live' a strategic agenda / etc.

Benchmarking should...

• Be part of a more detailed analysis, requirements and benefits realisation exercise - not an end in itself.
• Emerge into actions, decisions and behaviours.
• Provide us not only with the 'snapshot' but the roadmap for the continuing journey.

In short, acquiring a 'benchmarking artefact' is only the first stage of what’s interesting about the process.

Benchmarking lets you ...

• Quantify an impartial view of strength and weakness and catalyze an action plan.
• Obtain valuable feedback and expert advice from both the benchmarking organisation and other other participants in the benchmark.
• Measure the evolution of the intranet as a result of changes that have been implemented.
• Share tips and techniques that can be helpful to other organisations.
• Provide evidence for senior management.

Speaking of senior management ...

Senior management want to know what the competitors are doing, how do they compare, how can they do better. It's also a sad fact that many companies turn a deaf ear to employees yet listen with great attention to the same message from external representatives.

Organisations are not logical. Whether it's driven by egos or politics (or both) a benchmarking report certainly becomes an asset in dealing with internal personalities.

4 tips for benchmarking and using the results

• Look at the intranet strategy and compare "actual" with "required", assuming the intranet strategy is appropriate in the first place.
• Identify (1) specific business indicators aligned with business processes and (2) "people indicators" based on interactivity and collaboration.
• Make sure you are not simply copying or cloning, just because it brings security and validation.
• Know what is transferable to your intranet, and how to use the data to justify further investment in your intranet.

JMC Paris breakfast 19 Jan on governance - update

25 intranet managers met in Paris today, (thank you to Vincent, Sophie and Renault) to discuss the topic of governance and how to make the intranet "business as usual".

We met in a building that is a "monument historique" in France (once a manufacturing workshop for Renault).

It was very enjoyable to merge history and modern technology. The ambiance was much like "Les Rencontres Internationales pour  Responsables Intranet" which takes place every November in Paris (which I have chaired for the last 4 years)  at the Automobile Club de France, Place de la Concorde - in their library with thousands of books on shelves from the floor to the ceiling and models of both classic and modern racing cars in the lobby.

I was happy to get feedback tonight from a participant who said (via Twitter) " too often professional breakfasts = waste of time, while you helped me solve a problem I've been facing for 2 months".  The person added "the intranet is dead, at least the old one ;-)".

That's great feedback: helping intranet managers solve problems and move towards  intranets that are meaningful in today's business and social world.

I'm always impressed by the quality and knowledge of the intranet managers in the companies who are part of the informal JMC intranet network. I learn more from them than they do from me! They handle complex situations, deal with organizational politics and still have time to spend half a day, several times a year, networking with me and their peers.

If you'd like a copy of the presentation used this morning on "Using governance to transform your intranet into business as usual" drop me an email, tell me who you are, and I'll send you a download link.

Next JMC breakfast in Paris: March 10, with James Robertson and Florence Devouard (past president of the Wikimedia Foundation). Topic: "Social media inside the enterprise". Get in in touch if you're an intranet manager and would like to join us.

"Vanity" or "Specific value" benchmarking?

I think it is a vanity exercise to participate in group benchmarking exercises for intranets. I do not see how comparing your intranet to other intranets truly addresses the question: What specific value does your intranet bring to your organization?

It may help you provide "evidence" to senior management that:

• Your intranet is very good, better than most
• Your intranet is sub par and deserves more attention and investment
• You've done a good job this year and deserve a raise (just joking, but I do believe most intranet managers DO deserve more recognition and higher salaries)

All of the above are valid reasons for doing benchmarks. And I fully understand why it is important to gather proof for all 3 reasons!

But they ignore the fundamental questions of:

• How can your intranet help your enterprise achieve its specific goals?
• How can it make it easier for people to work smarter?
• How can it become a place where people are free to express themselves, and do better business at the same time?

The only way you can achieve this is to identify (1) specific business indicators aligned with business processes and (2) "people indicators" based on interactivity and collaboration.

Then, and only then, will you be able to truly understand how your intranet is performing.

Intranets: are you spending your money on what will last?

What are you spending your intranet-related and IT budgets on these days? And will whatever it is still be serving the organization 5 years from now?

I was asked this question by an intranet manager on a plane a couple of months ago. It was the first time anyone had ever asked me that question.

After some thought, I started a list of "things" I believe will bring benefit to enterprises for multiple years. So far I have 5:

• Tags and tagging capabilities
• Information life cycles
• Governance principles and policies
• Change management
• Security technologies and policies that reflect new ways of working (mobile, homeworking)

Comments?

Please help me build this list.

IntraTeam Event - International Intranet Touch Point in Europe

I'm excited about participating in the IntraTeam Event in Copenhagen in March. It will be the 3rd year for me, and each time I find it a valuable investment of my time.

IntraTeam Event 2010 brings together a lot of people I respect and follow (in the general sense, not the Twitter sense although that's true too!). And the best part is that I meet so many dedicated intranet managers.

I remember last year when I presented the results of that year's Global Intranet Trends. I got lots of interesting and tough questions from the audience. When audiences "come alive" and push the speakers, it is a fantastic experience for everyone in the room.

This year there will be a two tracks of workshops on March 2nd, and I'm having trouble choosing which ones to attend outside of my own. I'm doing one on "Making Governance Operational"

I'll be covering these points:

• What exactly are you governing? What is the intranet?
• Strategic principles as a governance framework
• Who should own the intranet?
• Three ownership models and their impact
• Involving the users in the governance model
• Different types of content and governance principles
• Managing decentralized publishing
• Examples from two real cases

I hope some people come because James Robertson is doing one at the same time: How to Design and Structure the Intranet. Tough competition!

My keynote speech which opens the conference is titled:

Future Intranet for New Ways of Working

It is based on the 2010 Global Intranet Trends study and will cover:

• The future intranet: front-door, team-oriented, people-focused, real-time, place-independent. 
• How social media are being integrated: benefits, concerns, approaches. 
• The future intranet manager: different paths, different values.

I'm already preparing for  the audience questions!

If you're in Europe in early March and involved in intranets, consider signing up. I am sure it will be worth your time. You can see the full IntraTeam Event program here.

SharePoint, the human way

I rarely read books that have product names in the title. However, SharePoint Roadmap for Collaboration by Michael Sampson is an exception.

Michael approaches SharePoint the right way. From the top down. I mean that his main interest is collaboration. This means people and how they work together. He then talks about SharePoint in that context.

This is a book that can and should be read by business, communication and IT managers in any organization considering or currently implementing SharePoint.

It will help them all speak the same language, which is often a major obstacle when turning concepts into practice whatever the technology.  

User adoption

I was especially interested in some original ideas about user adoption (page 164). His ideas are action-oriented: learn by doing, learn now and fast. Very little abstract "consultant speak" about the importance of collaboration.

For example, he talks about "bulk loading parties" where you bring content owners together for a few days to migrate content into the new SharePoint environment. People learn the system fast and users are not faced with two parallel systems over a long time period.

An idea I like a lot is "facilitated group re-imagining". It's easier than it sounds! It means getting groups or teams together to discover how they work today, then define - with them - how they can work in the new SharePoint context. This lets teams define their way of working together. As Michael says, "Getting an intact group to agree on working in a different way is critical to success."

Michael will be at IntraTeam Event in March in Copenhagen running a workshop on "Crafting your user adoption strategy. He will give a talk on Frameworks for Evaluating Collaboration Tools.

He will be in Europe during the full month of March. You can get in touch with him directly if you'd like to meet him or organize a SharePoint session with him.

P.S. 22:30 Just got a phone call from Michael who told me he'll only be in Europe for 2 weeks and has just a few more slots in his schedule. So get in touch with him soon if you'd like to arrange a meeting.

Governance: publishing, approving, prioritizing

A member of NetJMC&Co (Linkedin group for intranet managers created by JMC)  recently asked for some guidance on governance.
He expressed 3 needs:

• 1. Explain how a piece of content goes from idea to published
• 2. Define who is responsible for approving content
• 3. Explain how application development gets prioritized

My contributions to the Linkedin discussion....

Three governance angles

Although every organization needs to "find" their own intranet governance policies with the right balance of control and liberty, there are some fundamental principles that apply in all situations, or at least every situation I have seen.

Point 1: Publishing content.

A general principle: You'll need to have several paths.

Intranets have different spaces with different dynamics and therefore different "rules of the game". The place where reference documents are published will be managed very differently from where teams put their working documents and still differently from a "blog central" or space where users create content directly.

Point 2: Approving content

Two main principles:
- Keep the responsibility for publishing content at the lowest level possible, but at a level where the person is still accountable for the content.
- Have as little workflow and pre-publication approvals as possible.

Point 3: Prioritizing application development

Understand the impact of the development(s) on users and on the business. Work with the business and functional managers, and also end-users of the application. Of course, you'll involve the "owners" of the app, but their views are often too subjective when asked what the impact will be.

Evaluate the the different development options by asking these questions:

• - Will this enable people to do something they could not do before?
• - Will this enable people to do something better (faster, easier) than previously.
• - Will this reduce costs?
• - Will this increase our revenue?
• - Will this bring a new or improved service to our customers (external, I mean).

You can then prioritize based on a simple rating scale where you weight the answers to the questions according to your organizations current and near future goals and needs.

Two critical pitfalls to avoid

A. Do NOT define the governance by a team located in head-quarters or the center of the organization. Involve a small, representative group of people throughout the organization.

B. Do NOT define governance by a group of "support" or "functional" people. (IT, HR and Communication managers.) Involve business people in the organization.

How, not what

My final comment - based on having worked with many organizations on their governance policies - is this: "The WAY you define governance is more important than WHAT you define."

2010 - the year of intranet governance

One-minute poll results

I just completed a poll with the informal NetJMC network of intranet managers based in or near Paris. They are nearly exclusively from some of the largest global companies in the world.

I always set the agenda for the JMC Breakfasts based on feedback from the "core circle" within the larger network, some of whom have participated in these events for many years.

Here are the topics I suggested this year, with the percentages of those who indicated "very interesting and relevant for me". The other choices were "interesting, but less relevant for me" and "not interesting or not relevant".

• Governance: principles, examples, integration into "business as usual" - 80 %
• The single-entry point strategy: realistic? desirable? risks? advantages? - 70 %
• Enterprise 2.0 and the intranet: impact, challenges, examples -70 %
• How to structure a global intranet: target users, sections, personalization - 60 %
• The intranet of the future: trends, implications, issues - 50 %
• The future role of the intranet manager - 35 %

These results do not surprise me. 2010 is lining up to be the year of action in intranet governance. People are realizing that governance is the fundamental thing to get right as intranets evolve and become more and more essential for organizations.

Topics for 2010, first semester

January: The first JMC Breakfast of the year in the second part of January will be on the topic of governance. If you are an intranet manager and interested in joining us, contact me. I'll give you more details. The breakfast will take place in French.

March: The second JMC Breakfast is tentatively planned for early March. Exceptionally, it will take place in English because I will be having 2 special guests. More on this later. Provisional topic: "Enterprise 2.0, social media and the intranet".

These are half-day events, starting at 9:00 and finishing around 12:00.

Workplace Web - 3 models

Alex Manchester triggered a long, interesting conversation on his blog when he quoted Janus Boye in a session at Online called "Death of the intranet".

Part of the discussion was about the usage of the term "intranet" versus a different term such as "workplace web". I was the one who originally suggested that the word "intranet" is out-of-date and even inappropriate in a blog post here last April 1st: A new word for the intranet

The date of April 1st was a coincidence, but some of the discussion triggered by the post on my blog and on Column Two  where James Robertson referred to it,  made me think some people thought the date was appropriate! (Just joking.)

In my comment on Alex's blog, I refer to one of the 5 future trends identified in this year's report: "Global Intranet Trends for 2010: Towards the Workplace Web".

We proposed 3 models of the workplace web to the 300 participating organizations. The rest of this post is an extract of the diagrams and text from the chapter "Future Intranet: the front door intranet"

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 The front-door intranet

The intranet is becoming the entry point into the “workplace web” - the ensemble of resources and information needed by staff . This includes applications, intranet sites, specialized portals, team spaces, collaboration spaces and so on. Today, 15 percent of the survey participants have achieved a “unified workplace web”. 

The fragmented workplace web

The “fragmented” workplace web means the employee has many different entry points to the range of intranets, portals, applications and spaces available. 30 percent of the survey participants currently have this model.

The hybrid workplace web

The “hybrid” workplace web is an intermediary stage where the intranet or enterprise portal is the accepted entry point into the “intranet landscape”. A few country or specific portals still exist outside this system. In particular, collaboration spaces and business applications tend to be outside the system, and accessible via separate entry points. 55 percent of the survey participants currently have this model.

The unified workplace web

The “unified” workplace web means the intranet or enterprise portal is the front door to the organization’s information, business and collaborative resources and places.  15 percent of the survey participants currently have this model.

My social media resolutions for 2010

If you are like me and have multiple accounts on different social media platforms, you are probably feeling some "social media overload" in terms of what you communicate, where and how often.

A time and a place for everything

Although some overall trends are beginning to take hold, we - as professionals in the "intranet / information / collaboration / social media" space need to be clear about our own personal social media strategies.

There is one principle today that everyone seems to all agree to: Linkedin is for professional network building.

Although I am over-simplifying, the clarity of the Linkedin positioning may be primarily because you can't share photos and play games. So, it's less "fun" than FB and less fluid than Twitter.

When it comes to Facebook or Twitter, there are a wide range of usages and behaviors. I have professional contacts whose opinions I respect and whose market and business intelligence I would like to follow. However, when they are updating their statuses or sending tweets many times a day about everything they are doing, I find myself getting very distracted.

The problem is I have different mind sets when I am working and when I am socializing online. When I'm focusing on business, I don't want to know if my business friends are stuck in a train or making a gourmet meal or sick at home with the kids. What I do want to know is what they are reading, what conferences they will be going to and what interesting links they have to share.

But, when I'm taking a break from "work-work" and socializing with the same people, I have a lot of fun reading their updates on all kinds of subjects and non-subjects!

For me, both dimensions are part of building relationships, but personally, I don't do both at the same time. So, I decided to bring some clarity to my own usages. Here are my personal social media resolutions for 2010.

1. I will use Linkedin for 3 reasons: 

• Building my business network - "contacts"' as Linkedin calls them
• Following the updates from my contacts in Linkedin, which tend to be directly or remotely related to subjects that interest me professionally
• Participating in the discussions that take place in specialised Linkedin groups (including NetJMC&Co which I created for intranet managers)

  

  

2. I  will continue to make a clear distinction between "pro" and "perso" on Facebook by having 2 different accounts.

• One for family and friends - very personal - one that I share with only a few people
• One for business friends - business-triggered but with a personal touch - people around the world I've been fortunate to meet and with whom I want to stay in touch and share informally: information, thoughts, simple stuff like what we're reading and doing, ideas, photos, etc.

  

3. I will use Twitter for multiple purposes, all professional for the moment.

• Follow trends in areas that interest me (professionally primarily but not exclusively), by creating lists based on people and following hash tags
• Publish updates myself to communicate ideas, inform people about posts I've written on my blog, and promote the content I create
• Do research: ask and answer questions within the larger Twitter world
• Provide real-time feedback to people around the world from events I attend
• Re-tweet items of interest I find. (I want to be careful here, because re-tweeting is so easy and can become a replacement for writing one's own tweets. I need to make sure it's something very special/important before I do it.)

  

4. So, how about you?

How do you see your own uses of social media?

Are there distinctions you think are important to make? If so, what are they?

Do you have any social media resolutions for 2010?

Enjoy the break, from ProvenceBeyond and NetJMC

Wishing you all a great break from work. Looking forward to seeing or hearing from you in 2010!

Photo: ProvenceBeyond.com. Luceram in the Alpes Maritimes, about an hour's drive from chez moi.

I've worked with ProvenceBeyond for many years. It's one of the best doors into Provence and has over 1 million pages read per month.

Happy holidays.

Work and Content in the Intranet: Interview with Natalia Shvetsova

My last interview of the year was with Natalia Shvetsova, author of the Russian blog "Intranet Blog". Natalia is a network partner in the Global Intranet Strategies Survey.

She oriented the interview around managing content on intranets, and added some very good points at the end of the article summarizing the interview.

You can read the interview here, translated by Google. Do not hesitate to get in touch with myself or Natalia if you have any questions or comments.

Top 12 posts from Globally Local by JMC in 2009

The top 12 #intranet posts of "Globally Local..Locally Global"  in 2009 based on reader comments or email feedback  (in reverse chronological order) are:

2009: Efficiency, Energy and Voice on the Intranet

Real Intranet Manager bloggers: a rare species

User-generated content for employee directories

Where should collaboration sit?

Web Workplace - a new word for intranet?

Who's playing in the Intranet online space?

Intranet Checklist for the Flu Pandemic

Social media on a global intranet - how do you choose?

News, emails, videos from Corp Comm: spam or not?

7 principles for decentralized publishing

5 Future Intranet Trends - Brazilian Portal Award keynote on YouTube

Highlights from the Global Intranet Trends for 2010

Thank you all for your comments and contributions. Without you, there would be no Globally Local!