Globally local - locally global

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.

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.

Intranet Portal Awards 2009 (Brazil) announced

I participated for the first time in the Brazilian Intranet Portal Award 2009 event this week - virtually!

If you don't speak Portuguese (as I don't) you can use a translator tool to get an idea about what went on for the two days of the conference. Try this link.

There were 12 awards announced and approximately 200 people each day.

The Twitter tag is #pip09 .

2009 Intranet Innovation Awards announced and published

The 2009 Intranet Innovation Awards winners have been announced and you can now purchase the report with lots of details and screen captures. (US$ 189. More information on the Step Two Designs web site.) I've read it and find it to be one of the most useful collection of intranet case studies I've seen.
James Robertson is also publishing a 10-part series of articles on his blog Column Two, describing each winner this year: one platinum and nine gold. And the articles are gold themselves!
Gold winner: IDEO (USA)
Gold winner: IBM (USA)
Gold winner: Sabre (USA)

Fear not! There are other countries in the gold winners, and articles will be soon published on winners from Russia, Denmark, UK, New Zealand and Australia (platinum).
You can read more about the awards here, and consider entering one of your own intranet initiatives for next year.
Remember that what is unique about these awards, and what makes them credible is that they concern "intranet innovations" - specific features or applications you've developed in the intranet, and do not attempt to award "the best intranets" - which is mission impossible in my opinion.
This award program lets you see intranet innovations that have brought user and business benefits to the organizations.

(Disclaimer: I am one of the participating judges for the awards.)

Intranets & business impact

I have uploaded the presentation in the long version that I had planned to give at the J.Boye Philadelphia 09 conference. I was unable to travel and delivered a shorter version remotely.
Here is the original slidedeck. Ask me any questions you have and I'll be glad to answer them here or by email if you prefer.

Intranets & Business Impact by JMC

View more presentations from Jane Mcconnell.

How to measure the value of your intranet? IFVB by IBF

We are all looking for ways to measure the value of an intranet. Intranet managers often ask me how other organisations do it. The issue has been explored in the Global Intranet Strategies Survey since 2006, by asking some basic questions about indicators and techniques used.
We classified indicators into 4 categories:

• Soft - subjective and qualitative aspects such as increased employee satisfaction with the intranet
• Hard - objective measurements such as cost savings, decreased resources
• Quantified soft - combination of soft and hard, for example time saved converted into monetary value (dependent on agreement that the time saved does truly represent cost savings for the organisation)
• Derived - metrics using data from other enterprise or business systems such as sales reporting data studied before and after a sales portal is implemented on the intranet

One thing that is clear is that organisations with the more advanced intranets (in Stage 3 for example) measure more than the others:

• The Global Intranet Trends for 2009 Report shows that from 70 to 80 percent of all 3 stages use "soft" indicators.
• Stage 3 leads in the use of "hard indicators" (55 percent, compared to just over 30 and 20 percent for Stages 2 and 1 respectively).
• Stage 3 also leads in "quantified" at just over 30 percent, followed by Stage 2 at just over 20 percent and Stage 1 just under 10 percent.
• "Derived" are the hardest to conduct, and all 3 stages are at a similar low level under 15 percent.

The IBF team have made a significant step forward in designing a systematic approach to the question of intranet value. The IFVB (Intranet Financial Value Benchmarking) is designed to help organisations identify both the cost of the intranet and the value it brings to the organisation. It highlights both exploited and unexploited values. It is based on a full view of looking at all the functional and business areas of the organisation and includes different types of indicators.
The model was developed with financial analysts and some of the IBF’s member organisations including BT whose intranet manager Mark Morrell will be participating in IntranetsLive next Tuesday May 5th. He will be talking about how BT used the IFVB to highlight both areas of current value and new areas of potential value to explore. The IFVB model uses time-saving and increased productivity figures ("quantified soft") as one of the major types of indicators, but places them in a context that also includes "hard" indicators as well as some "derived indicators".
We intranet people know intuitively that a well-designed intranet helps people save time, thereby work more productively. However, this belief will not necessarily be shared by high level budget holders who may not have personally experienced the satisfaction of finding the right person to answer your question in seconds, or the frustration of spending a hour searching for a document and never being sure to have found the right version. The global approach used by the IFVB model, organised by function and business activity, gives more strength to the time-saving figures by placing them in a business-oriented framework side by side with other figures including process streamlining, savings in travel costs and real estate through remote and mobile working, and more.

I highly recommend tuning into IntranetsLive next Tuesday, May 5th, to hear what BT has to say about IFVB. More information here. You can get a first time visitor's pass if you are not a member.

(IntranetsLive is the monthly online intranet event created by IBF and followed by intranet managers around the world. IFVB is a service that can be purchased by members and non-members of IBF)

Unfortunately, I won't be online next Tuesday, as I'll be in Philadelphia at the JBoye event, but would love to hear from any of you on how you have gone about evaluating the value of your intranet.
Have you ever done a study on ROI?
If so, what types of indicators did you use?
Any specific point you'd like to see developed in this year's Global Intranet Strategies survey around the ROI issue?

Making your intranet essential - workshop 23 Feb 09, Geneva

I'll be running a workshop in Geneva Monday 23 February called "Making your intranet essential". Figures and data from the last 3 years of the Global Intranet Strategies survey highlight differences between intranets that are "nice to have" but not yet fully integrated into how the organization works, and intranets that have become indispensable.
We'll be looking at these differences and addressing some fundamental questions:

• What is a "mature intranet"? What role should it play in an organization?
• How can you raise senior management awareness of how intranet can help the enterprise "work smarter"?
• Can social media be introduced in cases where the current "classic" intranet is not yet up to speed? In other words, can a weak "intranet 1.0" be strengthened by injecting "2.0 elements" or is this distracting?
• How can content publishers be best supported?
• How does the role of the intranet manager evolve as the intranet becomes more critical to business?

If you're in the Geneva region, and interested, get in touch with the J.Boye group who is organizing this workshop.
If you have comments on the topic, I hope you'll share them here.
(And don't forget the new Linkedin group for intranet managers "NetJMC & Co" where topics like this can be discussed online with over 180 other intranet managers from around the world in a "closed group" with no vendors nor agencies. The group is new, and the discussions are just starting.)

Intranet 2.0 Forum - sound bites

Some highlights from the Intranet 2.0 Forum in London 25 and 26 June.

As I twittered yesterday, there is no wifi access to the internet, so it was impossible to report in live mode via twitter or even old-school blogs! Amazing for a 2.0 event.

The following bullet points are from the keynote - given by myself: "What web 2.0 means for your intranet: hype, reality and future trends" and the different case studies presented over the 2 days.

2.0 can serve as an accelerator for intranets. (keynote)
Class 1 organisations (intranet is the way of working today) are approaching enterprise 2.0 issues differently from the others:

• They have a higher degree of senior management involvement
• They have defined rules and guidelines
• They leave their people freer to choose to blog or open a wiki
• They have integrated the 2.0 places into the mainstream intranet navigation and search

50% is the magic number. (keynote)
Based on data from the 2007 Global Intranet Strategies Survey:

• 50% of all organisations will have either tested or integrated 2.0 tools by the end of 2007.
• 50% of some survey segments will have established their 2.0 strategies by the end of 2007. (Class 1, enterprises with over 50,000 employees, organisations where senior management consider the intranet to be essential, ...)

A missing business objective of enterprise 2.0 technologies: bring "equality" to the workplace. (general observation)
This is something that tends to be missing in the vast majority of case studies I've seen here and in other conferences)

• Make it easier for ideas and people to become visible. For example, enable anyone to show what they can do, discover "hidden" experts who are "brought up to the surface" - and enabled to do more, to share their specific knowledge. One speaker described how the Q&A in a CEO chat session uncovered a person with deep expertise on a subject that was strategic and at a critical point in one of their markets.
• Another example: Let people far away from the "centre" (or in countries where travel is difficult or expensive) to participate in meetings and therefore decision-making. In fact, the very concept of "centre" is evolving. It's hard to define "centre" when you're working as a connected network of people.

Employees are being given more choices. (observed from several case studies)
"Digital natives want their information delivered to them; they don’t want to go to the intranet to get it."

Cases shown:

• TNT top management does podcasts - short and targeted, employees can therefore listen when and where they want
• Ericsson: employees choose when and how they will access information: text, email, RSS feed, intranet

Governance is still a key issue for many organisations. (observed from several case studies)

• SAP intranet: two types of governance: managed and unmanaged content. Have moved back to a more centralised publishing model to get information on line faster and to improve quality - trained publishers, their fulltime job.

My observation: this is an interesting move, which goes against the trend over past years of de-centralised publishing, making people responsible themselves for getting their content on the intranet. (The 2008 Global Intranet Strategies Survey will look into this point. Stay tuned.)

The role of communication teams in the intranet leadership role is being questioned. (observation)
This conference was designed for internal communication managers, which explains the fact that 90% of the participants were communicators.

One participant, who himself is in charge of internal communication, challenged his fellow conference delegates by saying: "Collaboration is not an internal communications thing - it's much bigger - it's about productivity." He did not get much of a reaction!

I agree completely with his view, and would say that any enterprise who leaves the management of the intranet landscape to the communication teams will hopefully have communicators who know how and when to engage the rest of the enterprise functions and leaders.
That said, I personally work with a lot of communicators who do just that, and who in fact, are the drivers behind making the intranet an enterprise-owned venture.

IBF24 - a resounding success - the bar has been raised

IBF 24 closed at 1 pm (French time) today, exactly 24 hours after it started. The statistics shared minutes before closing were:

• 407 total delegates, but over 700 people participating overall from 16 different countries
• 25 intranets were shown, and over 100 questions asked and answered

I followed this amazing online event as it moved around the globe, and joined in 3 times over the 24 hours: (1) when it started, (2) when the center of gravity moved from Europe to North America (I participated directly around 9 pm) and (3) when it moved from the Australian-New Zealand region back to the UK.
I must confess I was not one of those who stayed online for 24 hours as I later heard some people had done!

I'll let you read more straight from the source on the IBF 24 web site.

I want to extend my congratulations to the whole IBF team for their work. It was a risky operation, could have failed (for either technical or content reasons) - and in fact it exceeded my expectations by far. I had thought it might be the intranet event of the year and although we still have half the year to go, it may well be.

It was very much like listening to a radio talk show, the mood was relaxed, humorous at times. The intranet managers who presented were very well-prepared, contributed a huge amount of information, experiences and good practices.

All around, it was an exceptional moment in the intranet space.

Why IBF 24 and what are the challenges? Interview with Paul Miller

I'll be attending IBF 24 decided to check with with Paul Miller, IBF founder, to see his views on this event, which is both highly visible in the intranet world and carries a certain number of risks. Any worldwide event conducted online has risks, as companies who did "worldwide jams" for the first time several years ago will tell you.

Virtual working is coming into its own now, and companies who have been doing it for a number of years will tell you that the sooner you start, the better. It takes time, motivation and a major culture shift for it to work effectively. It's much more than just learning to use the tools - it's how well you use them and how optimised the overall environment is for using them. By environment I mean the human, social aspects of the new way of working.

I had the opportunity to do a fair amount of work in Finland 6 or 7 years ago and found that my clients there were very sophisticated in their usage of virtual meeting tools. I participated in a number of meetings and workshops that were completely virtual and very effective, sometimes more than had they met in person.

Companies who have not yet experienced this way of working will soon find themselves pulled into experimenting with it. The simple benefits of less personal travelling, better-prepared meetings, and participating in a more environment-friendly way of working will make it worthwhile for many. A word of caution, however: virtual meetings don't work for all purposes and they don't work by themselves.

In the meantime, here's what Paul has to say. Feel free to comment and ask questions here on this blog. Even better, share some of your own experiences about virtual meetings.
If you want more informatiIBF 24 web site, click herek here for details on timing and cost for participants.

JMC: What made you decide to organise IBF 24?

PM: I believe that face to face public meetings and conferences are exhausted as a format for sharing intranet insights and best practice. I also believe that we are at an early development stage in terms of using and exploiting online collaboration and meeting tools. IBF 24 also felt innovative and different.

JMC: In your opinion, what are the top 2 or 3 benefits someone will get from participating in this event?

PM: A unique insight into multiple intranets live, in a way that you could not experience at a typical conference. A carbon neutral way of learning and connecting and a chance to connect globally with an advanced intranet group without leaving your desk.

JMC: What are your success criteria - or rather - how will you know if IBF 24 has been a success?

PM: At least several hundred people attending at any one time during the 24 hour period. A sense of excitement and innovation during the event. A good deal of feedback from attendees that this was not simply an alternative to a face to face conference, but a new distinctive conference format.

JMC: Will people who understand English but are not native speakers be able to "follow the action"?

PM: I hope so. We will have people attending throughout the world including many countries in Asia and so we plan to pace the communication for a non English speaking audience.

JMC: What do you think are the biggest challenges facing intranet managers in global organisations today?

PM: Biggest challenges would be:
integrating a myriad of different applications and systems into a unified user experience behind the firewall.
dealing with the increasing demands that organisations place on what are still relatively small intranet teams.
integrating and harnessing Web 2.0 applications in a way that is both useful and manageable for the organisation.

JMC: Any last comments you'd like to make?

PM: I would say that IBF 24 is an experiment. We are at the early stages of learning how to meet and connect online, whereas the face to face meeting format has been in existence for several hundred years. We need to experiment, be patient and see what is possible. Fortunately, these tools are developing just at a time when the carbon impact of wasted time and wasted travel is rising up all our agendas.

The day of "2.0 - the user-centric intranet" - not here yet!

I'll be in Denmark in just over a week keynoting the IntraTeam Intranet event. Conference organiser Kurt Kragh Sorensen chose the theme of "Create value with your intranet". I dropped him an email today to tell him what a pleasure it is to participate in an event where Intranet 2.0 is NOT the main topic.

Too many conferences are copping out these days (I mean taking the easy, popular approach, audience-guaranteed) by defining their theme around 2.0. Don't get me wrong. 2.0 is important. But there are so many other important intranet issues also.

2.0 brings in the crowds today. 2.0 is here to stay. But what a refreshing breath of air to get back to the basics. Of course, 2.0 helps create value....and I'm pleased to be leading the Open space discussion the second day on "Intranet future" where I'm sure we'll talk about it a lot. There is also a session on prediction markets which is about as 2.0 as you can get!

Hope to see some of you there. And I'm looking forward to seeing my good virtual colleagues, James and Martin, also keynoting.

The day someone can organise a conference around intranet 2.0 and value, and have a program built from case studies (rather than vendors or consultants) will be the day that 2.0 disappears as a concept and becomes one of the keys to the user-centric intranet.

Intranet activity booming in Europe

Europe is jumping right now in intranet activities. I will be participating in the following events, and really looking forward to all of them (including the virtual one in the US!):

13 February, IBF 100, Intranet Benchmark Forum at the British Library, (always a fantastic place to visit), where I'll be giving on talk on "The State of Affairs in Intranets Today and Trends for Tomorrow".

28 February, IBF Global, Philadelphia, where I'll be connecting virtually and giving a talk similar to the one in London, but with an emphasis on the complexities of global intranets.

5 - 6 March, IntraTeam Event, Copenhagen, where I'm giving the opening keynote. My colleagues James Robertson and Martin White are also keynoting, so should be an exceptional conference! Looking forward to meeting another keynoter, Kara Pernice, Director of Research, Nielsen Norman Group, for the first time. If you're near Copenhagen, consider joining us. Much of the conference will be in English. Check out the detailed programme for March 5 and March 6. Based on 2007 success, you can expect to meet a lot of intranet managers here and further build up your network of peers.

13 - 14 March, Stimmt Intranet Innovation Days 2008 near Zurich. Lukas Karrer (one of the founders of Stimmt) and I had dinner in San Jose during KMWorld and Intranets last November, and talked about how intranet conferences are too linear, too powerpointish. Stimmt had other plans and have put their ideas into action. Rigi, the event lieu is exceptional. I'll be there with my colleague James Robertson again. I understand there are still a few places available so if you want an exceptional experience, consider signing up. You'll need to be comfortable in German to fully benefit from these two days, but I'm hoping to have a friendly translator by my side!

3-4 April, the international community of practice on online media, organised by J.Boye, in Vienna. Details still coming. If you want more information on this one, contact Peter Erik Bang Nissen.

And there's a lot more going on of course - this is only a small sampling of the ones I know about  because I'm involved.

I'll be glad to blog about any intranet events going on, so get in touch and let me know.

Florence Devouard - Wikimedia Foundation Chair - celebrates Wikipedia birthday with NetStrategy/JMC in Paris

The breakfast guests at the JMC traditional January "tendances net" event, had the exceptional opportunity to celebrate the 7th birthday of the Wikipedia personally with Florence Devouard, my breakfast guest this morning.
Florence is the Chair of the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees. she is French, she lives in Clermont Ferrand, and she was the guest-speaker this morning at the JMC breakfast which took place at UNESCO headquarters in Paris.

I quote from the Wikipedia site:

Wikipedia Celebrates its Seventh Birthday

San Francisco, January 15 - Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia anyone can edit, celebrates its seventh birthday today. Founded on January 15, 2001, Wikipedia has become one of the world's ten most visited websites, and the fastest growing, most current, and largest encyclopedia ever created. Currently, the website has nine million articles in over two hundred and fifty languages. It is collaboratively written by volunteers from around the world.

"In a relatively short time, Wikipedia has become one of the world's most successful collaboratively written websites. We have struck a chord with tens of thousands of volunteers worldwide, all of whom share our dream of empowering citizens worldwide to share in the sum of all human knowledge. Now with a strong international volunteer base, we would like to focus more energy on improving the quality of Wikipedia and its sister projects. The next five years are going to bring many never-seen-before web based initiatives geared towards this goal," stated Florence Devouard, Chair of the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees.

Florence lived up fully to one of the 2.0 business models she presented - keeping people's attention - by keeping the attention of the audience of approximately 55 people for the morning.

There will be notes from the morning published on my French blog, Carnet intranet, (in French) in a few days thanks to two volunteers who took notes for me during the talk and conversations. I have already published Florence's slides (in French), along with those of Stephen Roberts, UNESCO and myself (also in French) who followed Florence as speakers.

As Stephen said "she's a hard act to follow!".

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!

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.

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...

Making intranets work (for communicators)

James Robertson, StepTwo, has made his presentation on Making Intranets Work (for communicators) online via slideshare. He gave it at IABC very recently, and it is focused on the internal communications angle.

KMWorld & Intranets 07: Building a strategic roadmap - Biogen Idec

I moderated the first day of the intranet track of KMWorld & Intranets, and the presentations were all of very high quality.
Some highlights:

Christine Carron from Biogen Idec - Her subject: "Building a strategic roadmap"

Notable quotes & key ideas:

"Getting approval for doing the roadmap was a project in itself."

The worked on "Perception transformation". Involved 4 inputs:

1. Tracked usage on a monthly basis - 60 % increase, now at 40 % increase (intranet in its 3rd year)

2. Usability analysis done by external consultancy, validated strong and weak points from an external expert viewpoint.

3. Did an intranet satisfaction survey, to be used as a baseline. One of the questions: Is the Intranet necessary to get my job done? 56% agree - therefore had integrated business processes. This was good information for management.

4. Used the Avenue A Razorfish Intranet maturity framework to do a gap analysis.

Our mantra became "business productivity".

New change requests or user requests analysed with a weighted scale, with business value representing 60 % and other criteria that were previously used making up the remaining 40 %.

The slides will be available on the KMWorld & Intranets web site later - not sure when. I'll try to remember to let you know if I notice them. Otherwise, you can check out this link from time to time, and let me know if you see the conference slides! KMWorld & Intranets.

This presentation is one of the best case studies I've seen about how to build a strategic roadmap.

KMWorld & Intranets - Making groups smarter: James Surowiecki

Notable quotes from the opening keynote by James Surowiecki, author of the "Wisdom of Crowds".

(This post is not intended to be very structured - it is cleaned up notes taken while listening.)

Started by giving examples of how wise the crowd can be...

• Google’s page rank algorithm based on their realisation of the "remarkable hidden order and intelligence under the surface of the apparent chaos of the web".
• Uses example of a crowd of bettors at a race track and shows that the odds are usually right.
• Refers to another example of prediction markets - the Iowa voting one for presidential elections since 1988, more accurate than the Gallup polls 75 % of the time.
• Companies that use markets internally: HP, Google, Siemens,  (see the Wikipedia article on the subject for other names of corporations)

Prediction markets get around the problems created by hierarchies and bureaucracies: hard to move information,  incentives to hoard information, tell bosses what they want to hear.
The only premium placed by the wisdom of crowds is for being right, no matter who you are, where you are in the organisation.

What's the catch? Only works under certain circumstances:
How do we make the crowd smarter?

1. Aggregation: A way of aggregating a lot of individual judgements to produce a collective judgement (this is not a suggestion box where ideas go in and are then filtered out)

2. Diversity: real case for diversity is that it improves the bottom line and decision making. Referring to cognitive diversity - different ways of thinking about and framing problems.
Diversity expands the range of information available to you
Example: Has a group of engineers solve a problem. Then has them solve one together. One group is the best of the best, the other a mixture. The B of th b does well, but is almost always out-performed by the other random group.
The ones at the lower end of the spectrum, less successful than the B of th B, - is bad for them as individuals, but put ito a group it makes the group smaller
Less likely to get hung up for a wrong answer
Diversity of perspective: geographical, training, age, 
People make mistakes, so want to ensure they aren't all in the same direction. Errors cancel each other out. 

In a homogeneous group, the more people talk to each other, the dumber they become. They become more convinced they are of the rightness of their positions.
You need to find ways to break that apart - disrupt that.
You need a devil's advocate. Must not be the same person everytime. That person serves an automatic role of being the devil's advocate. The others listen to him out of routine. We listen, then do what we want to do anyway.

3. Independence: have people relying as much as possible on their own knowledge and opinions. Give their thoughts, not others.

People want to appear reasonable in the eyes of others. Therefore, tend to do what others do. If you're wrong, you're still close to the others. If you go out on a limb, have a different judgement, more risky. Those people tend to get punished in some way in most organisations.
Humans herd together in conditions of uncertainty.

Paradox: groups are smartest when the people in them are acting as much as individuals as possible.
Make people free to offer genuine opinions. Must be able to accept disagreement.

Consensus: Finding consensus too quicklty can often be a mistake. People must be able to disagree strongly before making a decision. Imitation makes sense for individuals, but not for the group. Leaders have to learn to step back.

Intranet conferences in Europe autumn 2007

CMF2007 in Denmark has put together a very impressive list of speakers for their November event. I know the keynoters well - Bob Boiko and Lisa Welchman - and they are both top notch. You can see details on the programme here. Dates: 6 through 8 November.

Janus Boye and his team believe that the a conference is a "total experience" where the time you spend with people outside the seminar rooms is as important as the official programme, and the social events are organised to maximise networking.

The conference scope is broader than intranets - but all directly or indirectly relevant to intranet issues - which are becoming wider in most enterprises anyway!

Please let me know if you are aware of other intranet conferences in Europe in the autumn. Feel free to send me the info and I'll post it, or add it in a comment yourself.

Intranets Tomorrow - much more than today

A copy of the presentation I have at Intranets.Today, Wed. 23 May in Frankfort on "Intranets Tomorrow - a glimpse into the future" can be downloaded from my web site.
I'll summarise my keypoints in a few days - but the point of the slide you see here is that intranets tomorrow will be much more comprehensive than those we know today.

If you read German you can enjoy the fantastic work of the German blogger Frank Hamm during the 2-day conference. Real-time at it's best!

Peter Schütt (IBM Deutschland) who gave the first keynote.

Jane McConnell (NetStrategy/JMC) - myself, who gave the second keynote.

You'll find the blog entries on Injelea thanks to Frank Hamm

Intranet.Days 2007 in Frankfurt

I'll be in Frankfurt Wednesday 23 May to give a keynote speech on "Intranet Trends 2007: a glimpse into the future".
My talk will be based on how management perception of the intranet influences the role the intranet plays,  which in turn impacts the value it brings to the organisation.
Like a constantly turning circle, we can say that the value brought by the intranet impacts how management perceive it, which in turn determines the role it plays in the organisation.
We can go around and around.
The point is that perception, role and value are intrinsically linked.  The budget and resources made available for the intranet are largely influenced by these 3 factors.
If the intranet (1) is perceived as business critical, (2) facilitates productivity, collaboration and doing business and (3) brings both soft and hard value to the organisation, obviously it will be well-funded, managed and  - in general - treated as a valuable business asset.

A preview of one of my slides (from data collected in the 2006 Global Intranet Strategies Survey) shows that in organisations where senior management perceive the intranet to be "business critical" or "very useful" (left column), the global intranet team itself is perceived as doing strategic work.

In organisations where senior management perceive the intranet to be "useful" or "nice to have" (right column) the perception is not so high.

The challenge intranet managers face today is how to change the perception of the intranet - to bring it up the value chain from being an internal communication tool to also being  a productivity and collaboration tool. The intranet is one of the most strategic assets a company has.

As tomorrow's workforce - the young people "born on the Net" - enter the job market, all intranets will be  somewhere between  two extreme positions - "late" or "on time".

Late: a defensive intranet, trying to play catchup with the new web-enhanced ways of communicating and working in teams in more and more virtual organisations. One where newly hired employees will "Oh no! Have I made a mistake coming here?" (real quotation heard in an intranet audit recently)

On time: a modern intranet, offering users content, services and functionalities that let them work inside the organisation as easily as they do on the web.  One where the newcomers will say "This is a cool place to work!"

I'll make the full presentation available on line after Wednesday.

January Breakfast in Paris - "Tendances Net en 2007"

If you're in Paris around Jan 16th and you understand French, you'd be very welcome to join us for my 4th annual January breakfast on trends in the Net world - both intranet and internet.
Read all about it on Globally Local, and let me know if you'd like to join us.

Next JMC Breakfast in Paris set for 16 Jan. 2007

If you are in or around Paris, you may be interested in attending my first 2007 breakfast. Following the tradition of the last 4 years, the theme is "Net Trends in 2007".
It takes place in French. You can read the provisional program on my French web. "Petit-déjeuner "Tendances Net 2007""