Setting up the digital workplace program #intra14

Next masterclass at the Congres Intranet is by Paul Miller and Elizabeth Marsh about setting up the digital workplace program. Here are my notes.

What is the 'digital workplace'? It's consists of 3 connecting circles: the employee's digital home life, employee's digital working life and the organization's digital workplace.

Only 36% of organizations have a formal digital workplace program or function.

The overview of the session relates closely to the digital workplace checklist they developed. The steps that are distinguished are:

1. strategy and approach - 70% of the organizations say they have set up a collaborative platform, only 10% succeed... Do a review of systems and roadmaps and define the as-is landscape of the current digital workplace. Interestingly someone remark: don't focus only on the digital landscape but also how people do their work offline. 
2. stakeholders and buy-in - Interesting remark: Digital workplace seems to be resonating more with stakeholders and senior management than "intranet" and "portal". 
3. governance framework - their research shows governance continues to be poorly addressed. Governance should be ongoing, not only for the duration of the project
4. implementation and measurement - cross-functional teams lead to more success here, take an iterative approach, define key success criteria, make sure you help people understand and use the new way of working

Tapping the mind of many by @rossdawson #intra14

This year's Congres Intranet starts with two masterclasses. The first masterclass is about the potential of internal crowdsourcing by Ross Dawson. Here are my notes.

Ross starts out by point to the Wikipedia definition of crowdsourcing, but disagree with the "open call" part. It's not limited to 'open calls'.
His definition of crowdsourcing: tapping the mind of many.
And there's a huge number of crowdsourcing initiatives and platforms.

There are two big constraints to external crowdsourcing. It's intellectual property and context.
There are different types of closed crowds, e.g.:

• employees
• customers

The big difference between open and closed crowds is it's important to have a good reason to have a closed crowd. People that you want you to join the closed community need good reasons to join as well.

What are the steps to succes w.r.t. internal crowdsourcing?

• objectives - why? Access better ideas? Tap existing talent? Engage staff? ...
• context - where is your organization now? What are the existing innovation structures? What is the culture of the organization? What are the stakeholders in the crowdsourcing project?
• process - how to set up the project? Select and define the initial project, design incentives, invite participants, encourage contributions, etc.
• platforms - what's the right platform? Social platforms, idea platforms, prediction markets, competition platforms, collaborative documents
• adoption - what pilots can we create?
• success factors - what are the factors that distinguish good from bad crowdsourcing projects? 1. strategic clarity, 2. define metrics, 3. rewards, 4. roles, 5. communication, 6. governance

Hope to meet you at our Intranet conference #intra14

As you may know I work for Entopic. We organize several conferences about topics such as intranet, content marketing, Facebook marketing and SharePoint. I’m happy to say these conference are attended by a large number of people and are well received.

Recently we published the first version of the program for our next Intranet conference on March 17 and 18. The structure of the conference will be the same as previous editions: 4 keynote by experts in the fields and 3 breakout rounds with talks from practitioners.

The main topic of this year’s conference is the digital workplace and the future of work and the organization. I feel privileged to say the following speakers have agreed to speak at the conference: Paul Miller, Sam Marshall, Ross Dawson and Lee Bryant!

With respect to the breakouts we have several large and smaller organizations from different areas of business that will share the intranet experience. Some will talk about intranet strategy, others about design and project management, etc. It’s going to be a mix of more traditional intranet topics and more cutting edge ones.

The conference is held in The Netherlands. So the main audience will be Dutch of course. But I’m writing this post in English to invite non-Dutch readers of my blog to this conference as well. All keynotes and several breakouts will be in English. And over the years we see a more international audience attending our conference(s).

So, my colleagues and I hope to meet you all in Holland at our conference. If you have any questions about the conference, please let me know!