Horrible Blogging Year

Oh how I love blogging, but what a horrible blogging year I’ve had… Just 24 posts in 2013… What happened?

Well, I’m happy to say I’ve been very busy. I think 2013 was my busiest year ever. My personal life has been busy. Little David was born in August and my two others boys are growing bigger of course. Furthermore we have plans to move to the middle of Holland, sold are house and are looking for a new one.

A lot of time and energy went into my new role at the company I work for, Entopic. It was my first (complete) year as ‘manager Projects’, responsible for the people in Projects, ‘acquisition’ of new assignments and actually working on them. I really enjoyed the previous year, but found it left little time for reflection and slack.

On the other hand I learned a lot for the work I did for clients. You should see the draft section of my blog: many one or two line draft posts about topics I’d like to share my perspective on. Topics like: intranet strategy, intranet design, adoption and change, books I’ve read, etc.

I must say I enjoyed reading other blogs. I’m happy to see people like Euan Semple, Luis Suarez, Ana Silva, Martin Risgard, John Stepper, Intranetizen peeps, (my colleague) Joep van Loon, Jane McConnell and Oscar Berg (to name a few) keeping up their blogging (although I know some of them are struggling as well…). They inspire me to not quit on blogging. And I must say the posts by Euan (Why blogging still matter), Thomas Vander Wal, John Stepper (about Working Out Loud) and Dave Winer (Blogging Matters) triggered me to pick up frequent blogging in 2014 and keep on ‘working out loud’.

What I want to do this year is commit to 4 posts per month. This is post number 1!

Hope to meet you all here or in real-life. Have a nice weekend!

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.

Dutch Web Editor’s conference #webred11

The company that I work for, Entopic, recently organized the Web editor’s conference (Dutch: Congres Webredactie). It was the first conference in Holland (and the world?) for web editors. Dutch posts about the conference can be found here. The tweet stream can be found here (#webred11) and all the presentations here. I’ll share some highlights from the conference with you here.

The Future of Content
The conference started out with a talk by futurist Gerd Leonhard about the future of content. He gave an interesting talk about the past, present and future of content. He started in the broadcasting era and move to what he calls the broadband era; the time we are experiencing now. He stressed this is happening now and if we or institutions don’t get on board we/they will be disrupted.

I liked they way he pointed to the increasing influence of technology on our lives, but also stressed the extreme importance of human ingenuity.

Of course, Leonard also addressed the post pc statements and its implications for content (publishing and curation). The value of content will be in adding meaning and context (location, real-time, platform) to content, not in the publishing of it. This will also ask for a complete different business model.

Customer Journey
There were also several breakouts. I went to two of them. One was about Customer Journeys. How can you lead people through their tour along websites, email newsletters and social media in an optimal way? Interestingly the speaker said the audience should not use persona’s to define these journeys, while persona’s were promoted in another breakout.

Writing a book using social media

The other breakout was done by Erwin Blom. Hij wrote the Community Handbook (in Dutch). He told a fascinating story about how he used social media to write, promote and improve his book. He sees the process of writing the book as the product. And advises all to publish raw material. Make sure the product or service you want to deliver is alive before it’s there.

Another interesting thing he said is by sharing early you also claim the idea. I agree. This is a weird paradox of social media. Some wonder if we should be so open about our lives and ideas. An important question. But if you have an idea sharing it on social media gives you the exact time and date (permalink) on which you shared it. Comparing dates could help solve the problem who had the idea first.

Web editor’s and social media
Erwin Blom also closed the day with a keynote. He stressed the blessing that social media is for web editor’s.

Erwin studied journalism and became journalist. The internet fascinated him. He wondered how he could tell more stories over the web. How do you share more with your audience? Your audience often knows more than you can know by yourself.

Social media is great for telling (more) stories. Social media brings people together around their passion, a problem or goal they have. Blom showed the audience all kinds of ways to use social media to find interesting people and information, to interact with the world, etc. He challenged the audience to start with one of the example or just start blogging.

Some endnotes

- Social media is about passion. So if you use social media, you have to do it with passion.
- Facilitate the communication of the community. Even when it’s negative feedback. Respond to the feedback and learn from it.
- Blom was asked what new web app he liked? He pointed to Instagram. Not many in the audience had heard of it or were using it.

- And two video's from the conference. The first is the intro to the conference and the second is a summary of the day.

Question
I'm curious if you know of a comparable conference in other parts of the world?