Some insights from the Digital Workplace Survey 2014 - 3

In my previous post about Jane’s report about the Digital Workplace I focused on what the report said about adoption, challenges and business scenario’s. In this post I’m zeroing in on the survey results about mobile intranet, search, and the scorecard.

Mobile intranet

I hear quite some organizations talk about mobile intranet. The report shows only 10% actually have a mobile intranet. And 30-40% have plans to develop one in 2014. To me this is somewhat disappointing, although it does relate to my consultancy work. Mobile intranet is still far away for most companies. Many are (still) working hard to get the 'basics' right.

Search

Quite some attention is paid to ‘search’ in the report. Clearly search is not done well in most intranets. I do find it surprising hardly any companies get search right. My experience is this usually has more to do with governance and content design than with technology…

Scorecard

Together with an Advisory Board a Digital Workplace Scorecard was defined with which organizations can assess themselves at their readiness for or current state of the digital workplace. The Scorecard is not easy to understand and fill in, I find. But I actually like that. Developing an intranet or a digital workplace is not easy either. The Scorecard clearly communicates that. There are many things to take into account when developing and maintaining a digital workplace.

In conclusion

First and foremost I’d like to congratulate Jane with another great report. Clearly a huge amount of work must go into the report. I find reading the report inspiring and insightful. And the way the survey results are presented get better every year. I really appreciate the way Jane continuously is thinking about how to present and communicate the results in a better way.

I’ve read quite a bit of posts about the report. It’s great to hear what others think of the results. I’m curious to hear what you think of my findings from the report. And how you use Jane's great report in practice. Please leave a comment if you have any.

Oh, and finally, it’s good to see some Dutch organizations – I counted 7 - participating in the survey. But we can do better, dear Dutchies! :-)

Some insights from the Digital Workplace Survey 2014 - 2

As mentioned in my previous post I wanted to write some more about Jane McConnell’s research report about ‘the digital workplace’. I can’t and won’t discuss the whole report. I thought I’d highlight some parts of the report and hopefully this will get you to buy and read the report yourself. If you haven’t already, I highly recommend you to.

Adoption and challenges

I searched the report for ways in which organizations promote internal social networking and support adoption. What I found was that most just let it grow (‘viral adoption’), promote it with official communication, and make sure senior management is involved and gives a good example. I think it would be great if more is shared about how organization support adoption of internal social networking (and digital workplaces). My experience is that many organizations have a hard time growing internal networking and workplaces.

This also relates to the interesting chapter about ‘The new workplace. Challenges and concerns…’, especially the part about the “toughest challenges”. It would have been great if some practitioners or the survey results would have shown how companies are addressing these challenges. It is good to see the list of ways organizations are tackling the challenges, like internal communication campaign, behavior change, etc. But what does this look like in practice, how are these companies doing this and does this really help overcome the challenges?

Business scenario’s

Jane defines four interesting and valid business scenario’s for the digital workplace. For instance, supporting customer facing employees, employee learning and development and organization flexibility. I like how Jane underlines the necessity of a business focus of the digital workplace. In my experience this is often the reason why intranets or digital workplaces hardly have value for employees and the organization. Governance is a big issue with many intranets and digital workplace. Not thinking about the reason/goal of why the organization needs a digital workplace is just as big of a problem.

For this reason I wonder if the business scenario’s in the report should be even more business focused. For instance: how does the digital workplace helps sales employees to do their work? Or: how does the digital workplace help employees develop new products and services? I’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences with this topic. I’m planning to share mine in the near future.

On Monday, I'll publish my final post about the Digital Workplace report.

Some insights from the Digital Workplace Survey 2014 - 1

Well, Jane McConnell’s yearly report about the Digital Workplace has been out for some time now. At that time I read the report (like I do every year), but didn’t have (or make?) time to share my thoughts on it. But I’m sharing them now.

Must-have

Jane’s report, ‘Digital Workplace in the connected organization’, is the most comprehensive report about the digital workplace. It’s her 8th report and it again contains loads of information and interesting insights. As I’ve said before: It’s a must-have for every person interested in or working the intranet, digital workplace and social business space. By the way, Jane regularly shares insightful nuggets from her research and extensive experience over on her blog.

Extra valuable

This year’s report clearly has extra value compared to previous editions. The report contains an enormous amount of valuable information. More than ever before Jane gives guidelines how to go through the report, with a short and longer version of the report. Also a scorecard is provided to score the organization you work for and compare yourself with others. Furthermore I like how the report is set up in such a way that you don’t have to read the whole report to understand the segment you’re interesting in. In this way the report is truly a intranet or digital workplace handbook. And it’s updated every year! The report can help you target fields in which your digital workplace can improve. In my work as a consultant I also find that some organizations are anxious about their intranet being hopelessly outdated. This report can help those organizations to find out if they are right to be anxious or not.

Next posts

I plan to write two more posts about the report. The first is focused on adoption, challenges and business scenario’s. The second is focused on mobile, search and the scorecard.

Reflecting on the Digital Workplace Trends Report

Recently I published two posts about Jane McConnell's Global Intranet Trends Report 2012. I shared some of the interesting information that can be found in it. In this post I'd like to reflect a bit about the findings.

The usual suspects
Last year I wondered if any progress was made in the intranet space. Some improvements could be seen. But the topics like intranet governance, search and measuring gave lots of organizations a hard time. This hasn't changed much this year.
Even though most intranet managers know these are the topics that can get your intranet from good to great, not very many spend a lot of time on them. Or, and I think this is mostly the case, the intranet managers simply don't have the time and money to spend on them. The intranet is a nice-to-have tool, but not essential to the business.

Share more stories
A big topic for next year's survey could be: How have some moved from a good to a great intranet or digital workplace? What advice do we have to share? I think there is progress to be seen, as I just said. The report shows more are connecting the intranet to the business (processes). And the fact that intranet is being called 'digital workplace' more and more also underlines this trend. It's not the intranet as an extra tool anymore, but the intranet is becoming the place where work is done. It's becoming the employee's workplace.
I enjoyed reading the short quotes in the report sharing little nuggets of advice. Isn't it an idea to share larger nuggets of advice? To made the survey deeper instead of wider? Hopefully this will help the intranet space to really tackle the issues of governance, search and measuring?

Mobile intranet
I'm really curious what next year's results will tell us about mobile. The numbers mentioned in Jane's report relate to what I see and hear in the market. There are organizations working on mobile intranet and investment is up in this area, but not very many are working on it. Relating to the growth of mobile web, this could change rapidly. Also because lots of senior managers have an iPad and want access to the intranet from the iPad...
I also wonder what the respondent's definition of a mobile intranet is. For instance, companies using Yammer or Socialcast have an impliciet mobile intranet. The Yammer and Socialcast app is used a lot. Most of the companies I know have this kind of mobile intranet up and running.

More Dutch participants
And, finally, we have to get more Dutch companies to participate in the survey... I counted just 2 Dutch companies in the list of participants. It's on my To-Do list! ;-)

What do think Jane's survey should focus on next time? Leave a comment and we'll talk about your ideas!

My Highlights from The Digital Workplace Trends Report 2012 by @netjmc - part 2

In my last post  I shared some of my highlights from Jane McConnell's Global Digital Workplace Trends 2012 report. We left off describing how some organizations used their intranet to support employees in the field. This brings us to the mobile intranet.

Mobiel intranet

Delivering the intranet and digital workplace to mobile was seen as important by 7% of the respondents in 2011. In 2012 30% thinks mobile is important and is investing. I'm disappointed to see that IT is defining the strategy in this area, according to the report. The goal of mobile is to improve communication and productivity. Corporate news and the people finder are the most important mobile intranet features. I would hope mobile is a business initiative with business in the lead and that the mobile features would be more closely related to the core business processes. I'm curious what we'll see in next year's report with respect to mobile.
A special finding from the report was that organizations with many employees without direct access to the intranet, are able to define clear goals for mobile intranet. And most mobile intranets are based on the existing platform of the intranet.
Location-based services are still in an early phase (45% has plans in this direction). In most organizations mobile services via intranet don't have a high priority. On the other hand 35% already have mobile services for their external customers (internet). Security and costs are the biggest barriers to work on mobiel intranet.

Intranet leadership
When can you say your organization is in the leading league of intranets? The report shows one of the following categories have to apply:

1. The digital workplace is the primary workspace
2. Internal social tools are well-integrated in the organization
3. A fully-functioning digital steering committee makes strategic decisions over the internal and external development of digital channels.

Only six of the respondents have reached this level!

Intranet governance

The ownership and management of the intranet is mostly the responsibility of Communications and IT. Sometimes HR also joins the group. Business functions hardly ever have a role in governance and management. An interest fact is that organizations reported when they moved ownership of the intranet to Knowledge Management and HR this was very beneficial to them.
Only 17% of the organizations have a digital steering committee, strategically directing the internal and external digital information and communication streams. The primary business functions are part of this committee.
Ownership and governance still don't receive the attention they need in most organizations. The leading intranet organizations do spend a lot of time and money in this area. Most other respondents say they are working on improving the intranet organization.
I like the way the report distinguishes between companies with lots of operational employees without a computer and companies in which almost all have a computer. The report mentioned an intriguing fact in this context: Companies that have a deep integration of their intranet with the primary processes, are mostly companies with many operational employees. The report shows that many companies are working on this deeper integration.
Related to governance is also measurement. 75% of the respondents don't measure at all. The most mentioned metrics on the collaborative side of the intranet are 'satisfaction' and 'activity' of users. In other parts of the intranet 'activity' is swapped by 'reach within the company’. 

That's my summary of this year's report! I want to congratulate Jane with her newest report. Lots of work has been put into it. And now we get to reap from the results! Thanks, Jane.

Of course the 160 page report contains more than I can describe here. You can order the full Digital Workplace report here. By the way, if you fill out the survey, you get the report for free!

And again, I'm wondering: Do you recognize the above-mentioned trends? What do you think are the most important Digital Workplace trends? And, what are the biggest challenges for organizations with respect to their (future) intranet?

My Highlights from the Digital Workplace Trends Report 2012 by @netjmc - part 1

There's one great place to go if you want an overall update on the intranet and digital workplace state-of-the-art and that's Jane McConnell's yearly Digital Workplace Trends Report.

Just like in previous years I read the report and would like to highlight parts of the report for you in two posts. In another post I'll reflect a bit on this year's findings. I hope this will trigger you to buy and read the report for yourself. There's much more in the report than I can write about here.

From intranet to digital workplace

This year more than 400 organizations participated in Jane's 6th survey. The title of the report shows how much development there is in the intranet landscape. We are moving from intranet to digital workplace.

And Jane has been documenting this trend for several years. I think this year is the first year I hear more people talk about the digital workplace than intranet. Of course this broadening of the scope of Jane's survey and report also brings along some difficulties (for Jane...). The digital workplace is a much bigger topic than intranet.

Fragmented digital workplace

The intranet was mostly about the traditional internal digital publishing platform with static content. The digital workplace collects all the online, internal content and applications a knowledge worker needs to get things done. The report shows only a small number of organizations has a central, uniform digital workplace. Most have a fragmented landscape, consisting of separate tools.

Still can't find anything

Search is still horrible. Hardly any organizations are happy with their intranet search. Leading organizations pay much more attention to improving search. Users are frequently polled to test search results, search patterns and data are analyzed, and functionality, like tagging, is added to improve search.

Concerns

Information security is a concern for many companies with respect to the digital workplace. As is the quality of information. Other concerns are the influence of the social platforms on the company's structure and culture, and multi-linguality.

Enterprise 2.0

More and more companies are rolling out internal social media. Usually this is set up next to the existing intranet and is integrated into it over time. On the other hand only 8 % is working on organization-wide deployment of internal social media. The data seems to show that bottom-up roll outs are stagnating. But still 50% of the respondents is investing in this area. As you would expect podcasting and social bookmarking are used the least internally. And ‘prediction markets’ (although they were popular some time ago) and ‘gamification’ (now very trending, for sure on the Web) are not mentioned at all.

Internal social media ROI

What most organizations get from internal social media is well known. Improved knowledge sharing, recognition and location of experts, etc. Cost reduction and faster market penetration is not mentioned a lot. As is improvement of and integration with business processes. The report does show that successful internal and external adoption of social media are related.

Intranet in the field

I really enjoyed the section in the report about 'intranet in the field'. Some organizations shared how they use their intranet to support employees in the field, working directly with customers. Those employees could connect to the internal company and ask questions, consult the internal procedures, etc. This topic relates to mobile intranet. I'll share the mobile trends in the next post.

So, do you recognize the above-mentioned trends? What do you think are the most important Digital Workplace trends? And, what are the biggest challenges for organizations with respect to their (future) intranet?

I'll post part 2 of my highlights in a couple of days.

Have a nice weekend! :-)