Globally local - locally global

Attitudes & activities for intranet managers in 2008

As an intranet manager, you are in a unique position: you may well be one of the few people in your company who realise the full potential value of the intranet, how close your organisation is to achieving this or how far away you are. Above all, you have a good idea of what can be done to transform the intranet into the strategic asset it should be.

Achieving changes comes down to attitude and activities.

The following list of suggestions for 2008 is based on the state of affairs in intranets worldwide today as observed in the 2007 Intranet Strategies Survey. Pick one or more activities that strike you as important for your organisation, but whatever you choose, do not skip the first one!

1. (Attitude) Find a good job title for yourself, get your manager to agree to it and re-do your business cards and email signature.
See my post of  August 2007 "Does your job title reflect the strategy and vision behind your role? " with suggestions based on intranet managers around the world.

2. (Activity) Create a global intranet team with representation from different parts of your organisation.
Communicate through conference calls at least once a month, and set up an online space on the intranet to share ideas, ask questions, and in general build relationships.

3. (Activity) If you have a major project in mind, put together a short presentation (maximum 10-12 slides) for budget decision-makers.
Use business language. Focus on senior management, business and user needs. Do not use any technical words. Suggested content: (one slide per item):

• Our intranet (portal) today
• Stakeholder needs
• Business and user needs
• Current issues / risks / challenges
• Proposed solutions / actions
• Benefits
• Requirements
• Snapshot roadmap with major milestones
• Roles and responsibilities
• Next steps
• Decision criteria
• Call to action

Include a short appendix of 6 - 7 slides: “what others are doing”. Refer to similar organisations and illustrate with screenshots (if possible), commentary, industry data, benchmarking information.

(Commercial break.... you’ll find plenty of ammunition in the Global Intranet Trends Report to show your management what others are doing.)

4. (Activity) Get a high level mandate to clean up the intranet landscape.
Then do it by defining roles and scopes for different sites or parts of the intranet. Work on this with the global team, get it signed off by senior management, and define a realistic but firm timeline for all sites to align. Without the high level mandate, you won’t be able to do this because you’ll hit too many political roadblocks.

5. (Activity) Work on the basics of search.
Study search logs, implement best bets, work with content producers to make content more searchable. This combined with point 4 will raise the findability index of your intranet dramatically.

6. (Attitude) Stop talking about 2.0 and begin talking about functionalities that bring value to organisations.
The very concept of version numbers does not have much meaning for intranets anyway. Intranet landscapes are so varied even within a single organisation (with the possible exception of very small ones), that you’ll find intranet 3.0 (whatever that is!) right alongside with intranet minus 1.0 (whatever that is!).
Talk about co-creation of documents, building a corporate dictionary, collecting and consolidation of marketing intelligence, project management, crisis management, internal brand-building and knowledge sharing.

7. (Attitude) Do not hesitate to make decisions on major issues, once you’ve been through the consultative part of the process.
Listening, exchanging viewpoints and discussing solutions is only the first step. It’s too easy to get bogged down and even blocked completely at that point by lack of a 100 % consensus. However, you’ll need to have a global team or visible, cross-organisational involvement as well as a clear mandate from senior management before you’ll be able to turn major decisions into reality.
One of the 2007 Survey participants cited in the Global Intranet Analysis Report says: “It is a fine line between community decision making and getting things done. There is a middle path that will help you gather a consensus in the organisation without stopping work. »

Final word: Hang in there and keep up the efforts.
You’re managing one of your organisation’s key strategic assets even if they don’t know it yet. Making them aware of this could be the most exciting and rewarding activity in your 2008 action list!

Happy New Year!

Intranet 2.0 Forum in Zurich - from guest blogger, Stephan Schillerwein (part 2)

Here is the second and final report from Intranet 2.0 Forum in Zurich in early December.

Many thanks to Stephan Schillerwein, from Schillerwein Net Consulting, organiser of the Zurich event. (Schillerwein Net Consulting is a network partner in the NetStrategy/JMC Global Intranet Survey since 2006.)

Stephan offers us something rare today - real case studies on companies moving towards life in the 2.0 fastlane!

(You can read Intranet 2.0 part 1 here.)

"Using RSS for optimizing Communication in the Enterprise and driving traffic to the Intranet"
Stephane Cheikh, SITA (Societe Internationale des Télécommunications en Aéronautique) described their first step in the 2.0-direction which led them away from „corporate spamming“ (with lots of internal email newsletters) and a broad variety of news locations to an RSS-based solution with full choice for each employee. The RSS-reader is desktop based (Skinkers) and so far about half of all employees configured the news and alerts to their needs. The volume of newsletters has already been cut by 75%. An important driver for adoption and user satisfaction was found to be the usage of external feeds and thus the combination of private and corporate interests.

"Social media in the corporate context: lessons learnt at BT"
Richard Dennison, Internal Programme Manager at British Telecom presented the impressive transition BT has made towards becoming an Enterprise 2.0. While the full case is available on Richard's blog, here are some major points:
how to get people out of their routine and into acting and thinking in new (social) ways? As changing the corporate culture in such a big company is nothing short of impossible, the benefits of the new ways (and tools) have to be so evident and convincing that people start using them out of self interest and thus adapt step by little step (think evolution, not revolution). But also the demonstrated will of the company to re-invent itself was an important factor at BT.
One of their key principles is that anonymous posting is not possible. Hence everybody can say what they like … but will also be held fully accountable for what they say.
Examples of 2.0 tools at BT include „BTpedia“ which serves as a knowledge base and to build communities, RSS powered news (with far more than 150 internal feeds), podcasting, blogging, more than 300'000 wiki pages and fully configurable "My Pages".
How to harvest the wisdom of crowds if you have no (or rather small) crowds? Even BT's "population"“ is tiny in comparison to the user base of the web. Thus the percentage of active contributors has to be higher internally.
If your company focusses on risk instead of potential value, then there'll always be a reason not to do social media. I feel that this is really crucial in all intranet 2.0 activities (to illustrate this I used the little "nobody wears shoes here" story in my own presentation at the event). 


"Trust-based collaboration with enterprise wikis – consolidated experiences gained in 20+ projects"
Juerg Stuker from namics, presented some key things to consider in respect to internal wikis:

Wikis are about people, transparency and also about creating a new kind of competition among information and the people contributing it.
Personal fears about the medium shouldn't be adressed in the wiki itself, but in face-to-face conversations
The wiki has to stand above hierarchy (lots of implications there, huh... ;-) ) as many voices freely articulating their opinion is what creates value in the wiki. Walls, silos and anything top-down (politics, hidden agendas, too much regulation...) will silence or drive away these voices.
Creating trust by trusting employees first and walking the talk are important contributions by management. Adding to the wiki is something you can't delegate to your assistant.
Just like shared office kitchens, wikis require someone that is responsible for cleaning up. That's the job of the WikiGnome.
Actively create opportunities for people to use the wiki, e.g. quickly set up a wiki page instead of discussion something at length in emails.

"Intranet 2.0 – the Vodafone experience"
Juan Figuerola-Ferretti showed how a complex landscape of internal information, communication and collaboration systems and the increasing trend of internal conversations taking place outside of the corporation (e.g. in facebook groups) created the urgent demand for an internal social networking platform to bring people and information back together again.
OxMox, as the platform is called, connects people with their actions, bookmarks, peers and expertise and thus enables a new perspective when looking at the vast amounts of information available, by contextually searching for people rather than for information objects. 

Followup links and events
Most of the speakers are active bloggers, so you can take part in their intranet 2.0 journeys on a continual basis. The links can be found on the Intranet 2.0 Forum's speaker page.

Interested in more on 2.0? Join us on facebook in the Enterprise 2.0 Summit & Open group and visit the international Enterprise 2.0 Summit, which will take place on 4th march 2008 in Hannover, Germany at the world's largest IT-fair CeBIT 2008.

Thanks again, Stephan for such a great writeup!

The 2.0 enterprise does not exist and will not for many years to come

I like to quote Dag Hammarskjöld (Secretary General of the UN from 1953 to 1961) who said  when speaking about the mission of the UN:

“I have no doubt that 40 years from now we shall be engaged in the same pursuit. How could we expect otherwise? World organization is still a new adventure in human history.”

I often adapt the quote and have said in some of my articles:

"Global intranets are still a new adventure in organizational history and organizations have a ways to go before they are fully understood and effectively used."

And now I would say 2.0 activities are in the same situation. They are a new adventure for most people and organisations, and have a (long) ways to go before being fully understood and effectively used.

Looking for the 2.0 enterprise is like looking for the perfect intranet. They do not exist, and will not for many years if ever.

James Robertson (Step Two Designs) put his finger on it when he initiated the Intranet Innovation Awards. They attribute prized to innovative actions and projects within intranets. The key word is "within". Contrary to intranet competitions and prizes elsewhere, including very well-known consultant-driven reports, intranets all have their strong points right alongside their weak points. What is interesting and relevant to share are the strong points, the innovative pieces.

Instead of looking for 2.0 enterprises, perhaps we should we looking for "2.0 enterprise initiatives" - why not even create a "2.0 enterprise innovation award"...?

Intranet 2.0 Forum in Zurich - from guest blogger, Stephan Schillerwein Intranet 2.0 Forum in Zurich (part 1)

There were three "2.O" conferences in Europe in the last 3 weeks: Online Information in London whose theme was "applying 2.0", Enterprise 2.0 in Paris and the Intranet 2.0 Forum in Zurich.

Here is the first report back, thanks to Stephan Schillerwein, from Schillerwein Net Consulting, organiser of the Zurich event. (Schillerwein Net Consulting is a network partner in the NetStrategy/JMC Global Intranet Survey since 2006.

Intranet 2.0 Forum in Zurich (part 1)

Is Intranet 2.0 still way too far in the future for "your usual company“? It definitely is for many, as we learned in quite a few conversations we had with companies before the conference, but it surely wasn't for those ca. 50 participants who were present at the event last week in Zurich.

Some key take-aways:

• Strategy: do we need an "Intranet 2.0 Strategy“ in our company? No! What you need is a strategy for the future of your intranet. This will most probably include 2.0-elements, but shouldn't be driven by the latest hype. Instead the focus should be on what you really want (and need) your Intranet to be.
• Employees: changing systems is easy – but what about changing people into "employees 2.0“? Leila Summa from Cablecom (whose intranet is completly based on wikis and blogs) argued that the will for a change of the whole company is an important driver for that. So is time. Companies should not be afraid of negative comments that employees write down in social intranets: those comments often pose the chance to learn and improve a situation that is currently in a bad condition.
• Role of the intranet manager: Markus Haeni from Rolotec showed how the role of the intranet manager can be "upgraded“ from a rather operational one to one with much higher value contribution by focussing more on moderation, motivation, modelling and being a missionary for the cause of the intranet 2.0
He also showed a part of that great video-clip "here comes another bubble“ ;-)
• AJAX: Silvio Galfetti from Parx Werk demonstrated examples of usages of rich internat applications integrated into existing intranets. Usablility issues should be taking very seriously when implementing such features. In the Q&A session after the speech, an example illustrating this very well was brought up: many people just aren't aware that it takes a second or two for the "type ahead“ function (aka auto suggest, auto complete) to show possible search terms (or similar) and so they never experience this function, because they just enter words and hit "search“ immediately afterwards.

The second part of the conference's programme will be covered in a following post. This will focus on intranet 2.0 and wiki case studies from companies such as BT, Geneva based SITA and Vodafone.

P.S.: there's good coverage with lively commenting in the blogosphere on this event – unfortunately in German only so far, so for those of you who speak the language a little:
− Webonomy has fully covered the conference
− Saim Alkan provides a short version
− further links and some of the presentations can be accessed on this site.

Many, many thanks, Stephan, for this report in English, letting us know what went on at your Zurich event!

More coming soon from London and Paris...
Note there is already a writeup on the Paris event, in French, on the Blog des managers 2.0, thanks Xavier.

The Blog Council - damn I wish I had thought of that!

Lots of feedback in the blogosphere about the new Blog Council...

Top Executives from 12 Global Brands Form Private Community to Develop Best Practices, Measurement, and Idea-Sharing
December 6, 2007 -- The Blog Council, a professional community of top global brands dedicated to promoting best practices in corporate blogging, officially launched today. Founding members include the leading companies from a diverse range of business sectors: AccuQuote, Cisco Systems, The Coca-Cola Company, Dell, Gemstar-TV Guide, General Motors, Kaiser Permanente, Microsoft, Nokia, SAP, and Wells Fargo.

Another quote for the Blog Council web site: ""The Blog Council exists as a forum for executives to meet one another in a private, vendor-free environment and share tactics, offer advice based on past experience, and develop standards-based best practices as a model for other corporate blogs."

The vendor-free environment seems to have one vendor involved - GasPedal, who "manages the Blog Council". All I can say is to take a quote from the GasPedal web site - "Damn I wish I had thought of that"... and suggest that I create the Intranet Council.

Want to join...?

In the meantime, check out what bloggers are saying about the Blog Council:

• PR 2.0 (list of other blog posts on the subject at the bottom)
• TechCrunch

Intranet resources: numbers, "way of working", what next with 2.0?

Intranet teams always feel under-resourced. Are they?

First, let's take a look at some numbers. I am aware of 3 relatively recent sources which are in fact quite similar.

1. James Robertson's intranet resource survey conducted by StepTwo  in 2005, where he and Iain Barker published their findings: Intranet teams: survey results and key findings:

• Organisation with over 10,000 employees - from 10 to 13 intranet headcounts
• From 1,000 to 10,000 - around 7

2. A second source is the survey conducted at the Intrateam Event in 2007, organised by IntraTeam A/S.

• The 103 respondents were from organisations averaging 7,000 employees, had 5.4 intranet headcounts, which makes an average of 0.8 per 1,000 employees.

3. The third source is my own Global Intranet Survey of 2007  where I reached the average of 1 headcount for 2,300 employees. This is based on data per size category going up to very large organisations of over 100,000 people.  When I look at the smaller sizes within the survey population, the figures are similar to StepTwo and IntraTeam.

• Less than 1,000 employees - 3 intranet headcount
• 1 to 5,000 employees - 8 intranet headcount
• 5 to 15,000 employees - 12 intranet headcount
• 15 to 30,000 employees - 19 intranet headcount

When the intranet becomes the "way of working" do resources go down?
If we consider content providers part of the intranet team, the number of resources will vary according to how decentralised the publishing model is. Logically, the more the intranet is integrated into the way of working, the lower the official "intranet headcount" will be. Why? Because people who provide content will consider it part of their "normal" job. It will be considered the natural way of working, and, hopefully the CMS and/or content publishing systems (including 2.0 tools) will enable highly decentralised publishing. If they don't, then the intranet as the "way of working" will be crippled.

Low resources for what should be a strategic asset for an organisation
As we go higher up in size of organisations (the Global Intranet survey offers categories up to over 200,000 employees) the ratio of intranet headcount to employee base drops, but not always consistently. There are different explanations for this: 

• In large decentralised organisations, intranet managers and major content providers do not always know each other, nor are they aware of each other's existence.

• Another factor to consider is that organisations with a significant percentage of people who are not pc-connected may have an intranet headcount that is not proportional to the total employee base.

I personally conclude that big or small, the numbers we've seen in these 3 surveys are too low!

Will 2.0 publishing tools bring a new dimension to the intranet resource issues?
The easy of publishing content on a blog or wiki will make it easier for people throughout the organisation to contribute content. This raises issues for many organisations who fear they will lose control of both content (what is published and when) and quality (how it is published).
Among the big questions every organisation will have to answer are:

• What degree of regulation should be defined?
• Will groups of users be able to self-regulate?
• Should anonymous contributions be allowed?
• Should the intranet structure be defined so that official content and user-generated content should be published in separate places?
• Which in turn raises the question of what is meant by "official" versus "user-generated"? How are they different? How are they complementary? Does one threaten the other?

No right or wrong answers
I've heard intranet managers discussing these questions in several forums recently, and it's clear there are no right and wrong answers. I've concluded that there are 5 factors that play very great influence on this:

1. The organisational culture: an open, trustful environment or a suspicious one where people must be "careful" of what they say.
2. The industry sector: highly regulated with high legal risks or not.
3. The professional culture: for example, legal and financial people are more conservative than marketing and R&D people when it comes to sharing content
4. The tools in place: basically a question of how easy or hard to use, and centralised, partially or fully decentralised models.
5. The will to change at the top of the organisation:  senior management awareness and attitude to communication and knowledge sharing.

Please feel free to add comments about your own resource context and how you think 2.0 tools may or may not impact how intranets are managed and how content publishing will evolve.

P.S. You can now purchase the Global Intranet Trends Report and the Global Intranet Analysis Report. Let me know if you have any questions or require more information.

2.0 Intranet Maturity slides from Global Intranet Survey available to download

I presented data and observations from the 2.0 section of the NetStrategy/JMC 2007 Global Intranet Strategies Survey at Online Information on Wednesday 5 Dec. "2.0 Intranet Maturity".
One of the participants in the session said to me at the end: "At last some hard facts and figures!".
Take a look at the slides, and you'll see that adoption is on-going, although slow. My take is that 2.0 will gain critical mass in the intranet landscape in 2 or 3 years when you consider the whole intranet horizon around the world. This does not include of course the pioneers who are actively working on it now. Thank goodness for them - many others are in "wait and see mode".
You can download a copy of my slides from the netjmc.com web site (document section).
The survey reports - Global Intranet Trends and Global Intranet Analysis - are available for purchase. More information here.

Online Information 07 : Wikipedia in a squatter slum in India - a way out?

Wikipedia in squatter slum - a way out?

The opening keynote was by Jimmy Wales, founder of the Wikipedia, who talked about the Wikipedia of course, but also the Wikia - the online space for community wikis,  and the Wikia search - the open source search solution about to be launched. The 4 principles: transparency, quality, community, privacy. Read more about the Wikia search mission statement.
The title of his talk: “Web2.0 in action: free culture & community on the move”. Current efforts on the Wikia as well as spreading the use of Wikipedia globally show that Wales walks the talk:

One of his anecdotes really hit home for me: Jimmy talked about visiting a squatters slum in India, where he and Wikipedia colleagues had gone to see how they Wikipedia would help them share information, their culture, et. in their native language. The slum area has no public services at all, risks being "shut down" at any time. Wales arrived and offered to help set up pages in the people's native language. To his surprise, the parents all refused. They had set up schools for the kids on their own (no public system) and what they really wanted was simply for their kids to use the Wikipedia in English - English was the way out for their kids. We heard one interviewed on a video clip who told about using the Wikipedia and only the Wikipedia to pass all his exams. I found the parents' reaction about English versus their native language interesting. For them, the native language was a "silo" that blocked their kids from getting out of the slum - English was seen as the way out. (How might this apply to our global intranets...?)

Search is big and getting bigger - thank goodness!

The other topic which attracted at times even more people than the 2.0 topics is Search. At one point I left a web 2.0 talk to check out the search session next door, and could not get in. Even the standing room was gone!
One other person at the door was very distressed - he'd slipped out to go to the restroom and the doorkeeper would not let him back in!  The lesson learned - if you're in a good session, don't give up your seat.
Search topics covered security, privacy, social search, ethics and legality issues and more. Stephen Arnold, world-renown search expert (especially on Google) and author of The Google Legacy and Google Version 2.0 the Calculating Predator, moderated the session. At one moment he remarked that he had conducted a study on search and found that 60% of the surveyed organisations were not satisfied with search. 
(Interestingly, this is the same percentage I published in the Global Intranet Trends Report, which I then dissected in the Global Intranet Analysis Report discovering that not all companies treat search equally!)

2 much 2.0....?

One of the stated goals of the 3-day Online Information conference (London) this year is to discuss whether or not 2.0 is a fad or here to stay. New chairman Adrian Dale posed the question in his opening speech. It is an understatement to say that 2.0 is a key theme this year. Practically every track has 2.0 somewhere in the titles of the talks. Granted 2.0 is a major concept in the net world, but there are still - in my humble opinion - many other basic issues to deal with. In discussing the possible "overdose" of 2.0 with other conference attendees, I discovered that many feel the 2.0 is the lens through which we see the net world today.

Some links to sites about Online Information:
The official Facebook page for the Online Information group - some photos, a couple posters, 453 members in just a few days.
The blog run by Information Today (organisers of KMWorld & Intranets in San Jose every November). A few too many photos of ITI people and not enough of others, but at least they've made the effort of getting realtime information about the conference on to the internet!
I could not find as many blogs as I had expected, given the number of pc's in the conference hall during the talks! Maybe they were doing email...
I met someone tonight who recorded much of the conference and plans to post podcasts - I'll let you know if he does it.

Final note: the conference is very international. In a round table discussion on search, the moderator opened it to Q&A. The first 5 people asking questions were from: Norway, Russia, Ukraine, France (me!), and Israel.

To be continued tomorrow...

"Shining light on the often-hidden world of intranets"...Global Intranet Reports - available to buy now

The two reports resulting from the 2007 Global Intranet & Portals Survey conducted from June to August 2007 are now available for purchase. You can read more about them on the NetStrategy/JMC web site in the survey section as well as download the tables of content, sample pages, and click through to the purchase platform.
The Trends Report gives you the overall, consolidated facts and figures from 178 organisations around the world who participated in the 2007 survey.
The Analysis Report provides segmented interpretation of the data based on different criteria including whether or not the intranet is the way of working today, will be in 1 to 2 years, or will be much later (3 to 4 or more years). It includes a high-level intranet status snapshot and an intranet assessment guide to use with senior management.
James Robertson, StepTwo Designs, leading intranet consultancy, says in his well-know blog Column Two: "Shining light on the often-hidden world of intranets, the Global Intranets Survey is sure to become the standard reference for all intranet teams."

Users spoke, Facebook listened

I wrote about concerns people and corporations may have using Facebook a couple of days ago: Facebook for Companies: Open or Closed?
Well, users have grouped together and petitioned Facebook to change the way Beacon works. Beacon, the tool that let Facebook know what its members purchase on other sites (if the site implements Beacon) and then displays it on the user's FB page, will no longer be the same".
Opt in rather than opt out. A huge difference!
Read more on the BBC Sunday morning article on the subject."Protests force Facebook to change":
I quote the BBC:

Facebook apologised for its actions via a letter on its website.

"We're sorry if we spoiled some of your holiday gift-giving plans," read the letter. "We are really trying to provide you with new meaningful ways, like Beacon, to help you connect and share information with your friends."
Industry commentator Om Malik said Facebook users had to be certain to opt out completely from Beacon otherwise Facebook would still collect data from partner sites - even if that data was not shared more widely.

Perhaps my post should be titled "lawyers may speak, Facebook listened"...?