Contextual intranets by @roojwright #congressp

I recently posted my notes on the 1st masterclass of the SharePoint conference we organize. The 2nd masterclass of the SharePoint conference is by Andrew Wright. His talk is about ‘contextual intranet’. I'm sharing my summary of the masterclass below. I think I'll also post one or two more posts on the conference itself.
But first Andrew Wright's masterclass about 'contextual intranets'.

What is a contextual intranet?

Wright’s definition is:

An intranet that facilitates the development of content – both qualified (signal) and unqualified (noise) – that supports continuous improvement, efficient operations and employee engagement and delivers this content in a meaningful context to the employee.

Characteristics of the contextual intranet
The contextual intranet exists of the following elements:

1. Content development
2. Business imperatives (continuous improvement, operations (tasks), employee engagement)
3. Content delivery (context provided by meta data, like LinkedIn Today does and Amazon)

Andrews shows with actual examples how business imperatives can be achieved using SharePoint. For instance: by using a SharePoint wiki and ‘related content’ (using look-up fields).

How do you implement a contextual intranet?
Andrew explained how we can achieve a 'contextual intranet. He detailed the following steps:

1. Set a baseline. What do you want to achieve and what is the situation now?
2. Technology (which elements of SharePoint do you need?)
3. Set-up
4. Prototype
5. Roles and tasks
6. Content plan
7. Governance
8. Collaboration

Discussion
We discussed to which extent this list goes for all intranets, not just contextual intranets. We thought there would be more time spent on roles and tasks, and content (tagging) to make contextualization work.

Would you say you have a contextual intranet? If so, let us know how it works and what value it brings to employees and your organization?

What every SharePoint intranet should do? by @s2d_jamesr #congressp

Intranets have been around a long time, but not necessarily well loved. SharePoint brings huge opportunities for intranets. But new technology does not make problems go away.
So, how do we deliver SharePoint intranets that are really great? This is the question that James Robertson will answer in the 1st masterclass at the SharePoint conference 2013.

Great intranets in words
We start out with the question: what words describe great intranets? The audience says: connected, collaborative, accessible, social, information value, support daily work routines, usable, fast, mobile, task-based, updated, interactive, single-point of trust, attractive, innovative, easy to maintain and affordable.

Purposes

James goes into five purposes of intranet: content, communication, collaboration, culture and activity. James shows many examples of intranets that fulfill these purposes.

Content

We need to deliver usable and valuable information. We quite ‘good’ at this and we have way too much of this. There are intranets with 3,5 million pages.

Examples: a facilities page of the Department for Culture, Media & Sport intranet (DCMS), a page about My Employment from British American Tobacco (BAT). The BAT example also shows that good navigation is important for usable content.

Communication

The intranet is used a lot as the communication channel for global and local news. The SharePoint news features have always been horrible and are still quite horrible. James shows News Limited as an example. They use the news page to manage change. He also shows an example with targeted news, based on locations mentioned in ADS.

Collaboration

What collaboration is, is pretty clear? Document collaboration, discussion forums, etc. Shows several examples like Stockland has a SharePoint 2010 intranet with Newsgator. James mentions there are still many companies not open to putting collaboration on the homepage.

Culture

Create a beautiful intranet that engages staff. The intranet should also reflect the culture of the organization. Focus on how the intranet can communicate and cultivate the core values and business. Don’t use SharePoint out-of-the-box and pay attention to design, even if you do just a little bit of design. But useful first, beautiful second. Most people want both.

Activity

This is about integrating key tasks into the core of the intranet. E.g. SharePoint is great for building and sharing forms. And moving excel files online for sharing and collaboration.

Ontwerpen van organisaties door Pierre van Amelsvoort #4ruimtes

Vandaag ben ik bij het lustrum congres van de DutchOpen KM. Het DutchOpen KM en een netwerk van kennismanagement ervaringsdeskundigen die regelmatig bij elkaar komen. Het netwerk bestaat 10 jaar en het leek ons goed om dit te vieren met een congres over de ‘4 ruimtes van kennis management’. Ik zal mijn notes van de dag delen in een aantal blogposts. Ik schrijf live, dus let graag niet teveel op de zinsbouw en typo’s.

Eerste keynote spreker is Pierre van Amelsvoort. Zijn keynote gaat over ‘Ontwerpen van organisaties’.

Pierre neemt ons mee in de veranderende wereld van organisaties. We bewegen van de focus op efficiency naar kwaliteit, flexibiliteit, innovativiteit en nu service/duurzaamheid. Dit is niet en-en-en. Dit wil niet zeggen dat jouw organisatie alle deze stappen moet zetten.
Belangrijk om naar organisaties te kijken vanuit het begrip 'regimes'.
Een grote ziekte in organisaties is het opknippen van organisaties in functies/fragmenten. En dat groot perse beter zou zijn.
Volgorde van organiseren is P > B > S: proces, besturen en systemen. 

Betrokkenheid van medewerker bepaalt kwaliteit van het werk, weten we al lang. Maar wat doen we daarmee?
Pierre’s antwoord is: organiseren met mate en zorg voor ruimte voor diversiteit en coleur local. Zoekt naar de menselijke maat van samenwerking. Dat heeft volgens Pierre ook met de grote van organisaties en groepen binnen organisaties te maken: 

• 8-12 mensen is een goed team, kleiner dan dat heb je onvoldoende diversiteit 
• 40-50 mensen in je hoofd hebben voor een community. 

Hierarchie is goed, om richting te geven aan mensen. Maar hierarchie moet altijd wat toevoegen, vooral het tijdsperspectief. De functie van hierarchie is het nemen van beslissen, niet administreren.

Het is belangrijk om meer te organiseren op basis van vertrouwen.

Bij veranderingen in organisaties moet je sturen op mensen, cultuur, structuur en systemen. Vooral bij vaste, bureaucratische regimes naar een flexible regime, moet het ‘disruptive’ gebeuren.

My Sharepoint Conference Notes #congressp

SharePoint is used by many companies. Lots of them are struggling to use it strategically. How can SharePoint become essential for our organization? How can organizations drive SharePoint adoption? These are questions I hear a lot from customers.

There are many SharePoint conferences out there. Do we really need another one? My colleagues and I at Entopic found many conferences address SharePoint from a technology and developer perspective. Which is great. There is clearly a market for this. However, we wondered if there are also conferences that address the business- and user-side of SharePoint. We found only a couple world-wide. For this reason we thought it would be good to organize a SharePoint conference with a business focus. And apparently more people were looking for something like this. There were 300+ attendees.

Symon Garfield kicked off the conference with a keynote about how to implement SharePoint successfully. Symon discussed several reasons why implementations fail. Like policitcs, not understanding SharePoint, no feeling for information and knowledge management, no senior management support, etc.

Symon proposed a four step approach to a successful implementation: governance (beware of the tech-focus!), strategy and business case (connect Sharepoint to business processes!), business architecture (know the internal workings of the platform) and transition (make sure you have an adoption plan!).

This last steps leads us directly to the second keynote of the conference by Sam Marshall. Sam's keynote went deeply into SharePoint adoption. He started out by asking the audience who's Sharepoint implementation has a larger 'human' than IT budget. Hardly anybody raised their hand... Sam shared the MARS model with us and discussed it in detail. The model has 4 steps:

1. Mandated
2. Accepted
3. Rewarding
4. Stimulating

Sam showed how these steps could work when organizations would like to have employees fill in their profile.

I enjoyed Sam's talk. I liked the way he drilled deeply into adoption, clearly showing us all that adoption is not easy and should not be an afterthought.

There were two rounds of breakouts. The breakouts were about Sharepoint for websites, intranet, internal social networking, Sharepoint 2013, etc.

I went to two interesting breakouts. One was lead by Jan van Veen and was about how he positioned their local intranet in a world-wide SharePoint intranet. The other was by Ellen van Aken and she showed how SharePoint can drive business value by supporting business processes.

All conference slides can be found here.