Notes day 3 IntraTeam Event Copenhagen 2015 #iec15

As I did yesterday, I'm sharing my (rough) notes with you all. Please find them below. Others are live-blogging the conference. Please follow them as well. I pointed to their blogs yesterday.

Dave Snowden, The organization as a loosely coupled network

About systems, cognition and the patterns of those.

Three functional types of systems:

• Ordered: Order is cool, but after success we get seduced by it.
• Chaotic: no boundaries or structure
• Complex adaptive system (co-evolution): We’re moving away from content to linkages that are defined by people.

These systems work in very different ways. Illustrates this with the ‘7/8 year old children party’.

Refers to the Cynefin framework, a sense-making framework. Some remarks Dave made related to the framework:

• If you’ve done two interviews you already have a hypothesis that is hard to give up.
• Complexity requires more management than in the ordered domain, but the management is different. It’s about creating safe-to-fail experiments. It leads to a dramatic reduction in costs and managerial stress.
• Failure is better for learning than success. If you copy best-practices you will never innovate.

The future is distributed. Dave says there will be no intranets in the future. We will work with something like a bundle of apps. This fits better with how organizations work.

Snowden wraps up his talk with insights about human language (‘meaning is not found in text’), patterns (from ambigious, positive questions) and the importance of stories (collect them regularly, in real-time).

Arthur Turkstra, Bring out the best with Iris

Didn't take a lot of notes on this talk. I just listened. But, in short, Arthur shared his experience with design and his design principles for intranets.

One interesting statement I did write down is: Design for all humans. Human behavior is predictable.

David Gurteen, Conversational Leadership

The purpose of the Knowledge Café is to bring a group of people together to have a conversation on a topic of mutual interest.

The aims include:

• learning from each other
• sharing ideas and insights
• gaining a deeper understanding of the topic and the issues involved
• and exploring possibilities

It also helps:

• connect people
• improve inter-personal relationships
• breaks down organizational silo’s

The process of the Cafe:

• speaker makes a short presentation
• poses a question (what makes a good question?)
• small group conversations at tables
• 3 rounds of conversation
• whole group conversation in a circle
• approximately 2 hours in total

Conversations are the lifeblood of the organization. Some even say conversation is the organization.

There are many tools to facilitate conversation: dialogue, knowledge cafes, peer assist, De Bono’s six thinking hats, brainstorms, etc.

David thinks we should move towards conversational leadership. Conversational leaders can be described in the following way:

• modify their behavior to take a conversational approach to the way that we work and interact with each other
• help build a strong social fabric and a sense of community by connecting people and helping them build relationships with each other
• practice conversational methods daily such as peer assists, after action reviews and knowledge cafe's

Look for Conversational Architects in your organizations. David thinks managers should start with this.

Luke Mepham, Considering SharePoint in the Cloud?

Product or service, cloud vs. non-cloud, software vs service? Understanding these differences is essential when want to choose between SharePoint on premise and Office 365.

Customization was not possible for Office365 in the past. It's now possible. But MS doesn't allow anything that breaks the service. And Aviva learned to see this as a good thing. However customization is only allowed on a different server and that costs money. And don't except all requests for customization. Sometimes an extra service is better than a customization.
Upgrades, they were happy that they would always be the latest version. However... the upgrade is done whether or not it has any benefits for the organization. You cannot choose.
Security-wise Office365 is amazingly secure. It complies to ISO 27001, SAS70 Type II and EU Safe Harbor. Aviva also uses two-factor authentication to make sure the employee-side of security is covered.

Luke is also sure 'SharePoint' will move to the cloud. Some of the services (like Yammer) are cloud-based and will always be.

Final talk is by Anders Quitzau about 'Demystifying cognitive computing and putting Watson at work'. I didn't take any notes during this talk. Just listened and tweeted. You can find all the tweets by searching for 'IEC15'.

Notes from day 2 IntraTeam Event Copenhagen 2015 #iec15

I'm attending the 2015-edition of the IntraTeam Event in Copenhagen. It the 10th time it has been organized and it's my first time at the event. I'm writing along with the talks that I attended and will share my rough notes with you below. These are the notes from day 2 (- Day 1 was the workshop day. As I had to give a workshop I don't have any notes on Day 1. The slides for my/our workshop can be found here).

James Robertson, How design thinking is transforming

Intranets could do more with design. There are several tools to design intranets like:

• Cardsorting
• Tree testing (for instance by using Treejack)
• Wireframing
• Usability testing

James stresses that we should designing intranets that engage. Intranet should not only be useful (as he thought in the past), but also be beautiful. Employees look at it every day. It should delight employees. He shows several examples of intranets that do this:

• Accolade
• Calgary Board of Education (based on Sharepoint)
• vxconnect, Virgin America's intranet

Also design should change the way of working. Coles – mycoles and Lakewood High School are shown as examples.

Theresa Regli, Evaluating mobile platforms for the enterprise
The main question Theresa will be addressing in her talk is: Should you go big or small when it comes to mobile technology? Big is go with Google, Microsoft, etc. But there are quite some best-of-breed smaller vendors.

What does enterprise mobile technology do?

• it helps you with mobile app and mobile web experience development
• services required by these mobile applications

Key players in the market are:

• Infrastructure: e.g. IBM, Oracle, Salesforce, Adobe, SAP
• Mobility specialists: e.g. Verivo, Appmobi, Xamarin
• Niche offerings: e.g. Corana labs, July systems, Spring

The smaller vendors/specialist are much more focused on details and distributing to all types of mobile devices. The big guys focus on android and ios and that’s it.

What exactly are you trying to do?

• simpler b2c (consumer apps)
• b2e applications
• location based
• online and offline
• mobile websites (make websites responsive, one-on-one conversion)
• etc.

Theresa doesn’t think there’s a case for a complete native app for the intranet.
Hybrid apps: downloadable applications but the core uses standard web technologies.
Make sure you have a strategy and choose between a native app or responsive intranet and something in-between.

Closing thoughts
Select big infrastructure if:

• already invested in them
• need capabilities to mobilize other products with the suite
• enterprise concerns more important than breadth of functionality
• mostly suitable for b2e scenarios
• usability focused on hybrid approach

In other situations go for a niche vendor.

Dana Leeson, Complicated business management systems made easy

Works for BSI, British Standards Institution (global company)

How do we support our employees?

Shows an (ugly) screenshot of BSi’s assurance business management system just before 2014. They knew they had to do something.

Four separate systems had to be integrated into one (experience), that would manage 3000+ documents:

1. assurance
2. product certification
3. medical devices
4. standards & publishing

They structured the documents into 4 content types and x document types and x document categories. And assigned an owner. They developed a form with 20 fields to upload and share a document.

BSi wanted to make the system purely focused on work, not on things like news that don’t have to do with news for auditors.

The entry point to the new systems gave a simple overview of updates and comments and links to useful pages.

The users like the system because it’s easy, gives a good overview of work and the documents can be found.

This system is used by auditors and is audited by auditors.

They thought this project would be done in 6 months, it took them 2 years. Know your internal limitations. External examples of speed don’t always work in your organization.

Perttu Tolvanen, Intranet systems beyond SharePoint – overview of the best alternative

You need to understand the philosophy behind systems you can use as an intranet platform.

Make sure you draw out how the (intranet) system relates to other systems. It can help you select the right intranet platform.

Perttu sees 2 trends:

1. Social layer for the enterprise. Many of the older intranet system providers haven’t found the answer to the social layer.
2. Microsoft and the cloud. SharePoint 2013 is a dying platform. All investment is in Office365.

And he distinguished between different types of intranets for which different platforms are right:

1. Social publishing, e.g. Episerver, Confluence, Umbraco, Jive
2. Complex social publishing (SharePoint doesn’t support this), e.g. Episerver, Drupal, Umbraco. These platforms also support mobile strategies as well.
3. Management portal concept (hard to move to the cloud), e.g. Liferay, exo, ibm, SharePoint, Oracle
4. Social publishing and teamwork, e.g. SharePoing, Confluence, Jive, Dropbox
5. Social publishing and teamwork and document management, e.g. Dropbox, Alfresco, Liferay, IBM

Tomorrow we'll continue with notes from day 2 of the event.

Others are live-blogging the event, please refer to Sam Marshall and Wedge Black's blog.

Is intranet personalization of no value?

Personalization of intranet homepages has been a big topic for years now. Recently some results from a survey were shared and analyzed by Andy Jankowski, I was most surprised by the data about personalization (and left a comment there). According to the research from the Worldwide Intranet Challenge personalization has a negative impact on the way employees value their intranet.

My intranet

I know there is research that says only 20% of the employees personalize their intranet when they can. But the above-mentioned conclusion is contrary to all my experiences. When we do intranet strategy and design work for companies, almost all ask for some form of personalization. This doesn't have to mean they will use it, I think. I think employees says this when they ask for personalization: the intranet is fundamentally mine, so I want to be able to tweak it in such a way that it fits my daily needs, not Communication's or IT's needs.

Levels of personalization

What kind of personalization are we talking about here? It’s nog clear from the survey results. Is the personalization we're talking about here comparable with iGoogle-type personalization?

In my experience there are 3 levels of personalization:

1. the system does it for you based on your profile, location, etc.

This is also called personification. In most organizations this has failed horribly. Employees hate when the systems decides for them. But there seems to be a subtle balance here: some automatic personalization is good, but too much is irritating. In any case: users want to understand why they automatically get to see certain content and functionality (to be able to correct the system if necessary). Currently work is being done on learning intranets. I think this is interesting, but employees will still want to understand how the learning algorithm (artificial intelligence) learns, concludes, infers, etc.

2. the homepage design is fixed but you can personalize the content of some of the widgets/boxes

So the elements on a homepage are predefined, but employees can select 4 out of 10 news categories, they can decide who to follow, they decide which updates from projects they want to see, etc.

3. the homepage is not fixed, every user can 'design' his/her own homepage, no two homepages look alike

This is usually a combination of 1 and 2 plus an iGoogle kind of interface. We have several customers with this type of intranet. About 80% personalize in the iGoogle way.

Personalization and design

Another thought: there are also design considerations here. The fact that some users don't value personalization can also have to do with the way they've experienced it. I've seen many horribly complex implementations of personalization with ditto design... In those cases I would want to personalize my intranet either.

Personalization and the web

And finally: why do we personalized so heavily on the Internet? The Internet and intranet are different things. But how we use the web teaches us that we love ‘pull’ and ‘personalization’. Just look at the way many build personalized feeds based on RSS, following, hashtags, etc. And also think about all the different apps we use. A quick peek at someone’s smartphone homescreen teaches us we personalize heavily. I’m sure this goes for internal as well if we give it to employees in the right way.

Share your experiences

I’m really curious what your experiences are with personalization. Whether you work with your company’s intranet or you develop intranet platforms for customers. Please leave a comment and will continue the discussion.

The importance of Why for intranets #intranatverk

I’m on my way back from my visit to Stockholm. I was honored to speak at one of Kristian Norling’s Intranatverk conferences. I’ll share my insights from the conference in another post and start with sharing my slides and the story around the slides with you. Please find my slides here:

The importance of Why for intranets and digital workplaces #intranatverk from Samuel Driessen

Surprise
My talk was about the importance of Why for intranets and digital workplaces. The reason to talk about this topic is my surprise about how often organizations don’t answer the why question and just focus on the what, when and where of intranets. (Research on Swedish and Finnish intranets underlined this. I’ll share more about this in a following post.) I think this is problematic and leads to intranets and digital workplaces that don’t have (enough) value.

Endless debates
When we talk about ‘why’ we could easily get into endless philosophical, demographical or cultural discussions. About why we don’t ask why? Or why kids asks why more often than adults? And why some cultures ask why more often? I didn’t want to go there in my talk. Although I do find this an interesting topic...

Why is there fire?
But, to be true, my kids (I have three boys) do inspire me to talk about ‘why’. As you know kids ask ‘why’ all the time. Over time, when we grow up, we seem to lose that. I love how kids question everything. Sometimes the why question is easy to answer: why are you dressed that way? Or, as they asked me recently while building a fire: dad, why is there fire? In any case the why questions makes us step back and think. It helps us find what is essential and necessary.

Better intranets
This goes for intranets and digital workplaces as well. In my experience asking why more often leads to intranets that are more:

• ambitious
• realistic
• valuable
• useful

Two issues with Why
What I see around the why question for intranets is 2 things:

1. it’s not asked at all, it’s all about how, where and when
2. it’s answered by a too small group

In my presentation I wanted to look at these two observations and unpack them. First of all: What is a good why or intranet goal and what does a good why look like? Secondly, I’d like to discuss the question how do you get to a good why?

Bad examples

Let’s look at the first one first. I’ve seen organizations formulate the goal of the intranet in the following way: The intranet should have news, profiles, project spaces and blogs. Is this a good why? I’m hoping when you read and think about this, you ask: but why? Why news, why profiles? What is the underlying reason to work on this? To me this goal or this answer to the why question is not good. It’s focused on how not why. It’s focused on functionality or strategy instead of goals. (By the way: to me goal and strategy are different things. A strategy is a way to achieve a goal. Don’t mix them up!)

Sometimes why is answered in a better way. Organizations say: the intranet should improve or centralize communication. Or: it should improve knowledge sharing.

This is indeed better than the previous one. But again, the question should be ‘why?’. Why should communication or knowledge sharing be improved? What’s the problem? And how does this relate to employees’ daily work and the goal of the organization? How are we going to show the intranet helped improve communication or knowledge sharing?

A good intranet goal

To me a good answer to the why question or a good intranet goal consists of the following:

• it’s specific, measurable
• it’s inspirational
• it’s about short- and long-term
• it’s related to business goals and the employee’s daily work

So the goal helps you define the value of the intranet and you can communicate that to employees and decision makers. It’s helps you improve the intranet. It’s helps you distinguish between what the intranet should do now and later. And it’s help you do business in a better way. More products developed, more new product ideas, better service, more sales, etc.

How to get to Why?

So, first I wanted to address what a good why or goal is. Now let’s think about how to define a good intranet goal. How do you do that? I often see the why question answered in a small, isolated group. E.g. in the Communications department. They are working hard amongst themselves to define the reason why a new or updated intranet is needed. In the best case IT and HR join the discussion. This usually leads to too ambitious goals or goals that are not grounded in the daily business of the organization.

Broad participation

My experience is that the why question should be answered by a broad group of people in the organization. Most importantly by the people in the primary business departments. Get them together, talk with them one-on-one and in workshops, understand how they do their work, which tools they use, work with them and create the answer to the why question with them. It’s not easy, but in doing so you get an intranet goal that:

• really answers the why question
• has a broad acceptance in the organization
• creates enthusiastic amongst employees about the (future) intranet

In short

So to wrap up this blogpost. I hope it inspires you to:

• Ask Why more often in intranet projects
• Distinguish between why and how, between goals and strategy
• Define goals together
• Make sure the goal is measurable, inspirational, focused on now and then and relevant to the business

So, give me an example of a good intranet goal, you ask? Good question! You tell me. I hope you're able to formulate one. Share it as a comment to this post. :-)

Intranet manager: the most complex job in the world

It struck me again recently while I was reading the latest edition of Jane McConnell’s ‘digital workplace’ report. There are an amazing number of aspects to intranets or digital workplaces! Intranets and intranet projects are complex. Intranets touch the hart of organizations.

Intranet managers

This is also what you hear when you talk with people who are responsible for the intranet. Their role implies they have to master a broad range of skills, if they want to do their job successfully. So is intranet management one of the or the most complex jobs in the world?

Intranet disciplines

Let's see which skills a successful intranet manager has to have. I have conducted the following list. Intranet managers need to know:

• The organization and processes: how does the organization work and what are the key business processes? This is also important because the intranet needs organization (governance) that fits with the overall organization of the company. An intranet manager must be able to define, set up and manage the intranet organization.
• Organizational strategy: related to knowledge of organization and processes, knowledge of the organizational strategy is important. Where is the organization headed? An intranet manager must know this and position the intranet as an enabler for the strategic themes. Decision makers will see the intranet has value and creates value.
• IT and technology: an intranet is built using (web) technology and often integrates with other IT systems. Knowledge of these technologies is essential to be able to talk with IT and select the right intranet platform. The intranet manager must also be able to translate the needs of the employees to a functional description that IT understands and can implement.
• Trends: What trends can be seen in the way people, organizations and technology works? Keeping an eye on these trends and using them for the intranet is essential for an intranet manager. Else the ‘intranet’ will be built elsewhere by employees…
• Sales: a good intranet sells itself, but not everybody is just as convinced about the value of the intranet as you are. Therefore an intranet manager should be able to sell the (envisioned) intranet and sell it to management and employees.
• Service: an intranet can (partially) break down. Employees will complain about this. Their complaints should be listened to and solved. Related to this knowledge of secondary processes is essential. Employee self-service is a highly valued feature of intranets.
• Writing for ‘online’: creating relevant content for employees is an art. An intranet manager must be able to create such content and help others do so as well.
• Finance: an intranet costs money and generates value. An intranet manager must be able to write up a business case for the (envisioned) intranet to prove its value to decision makers and employees.
• HR and legal policies: what may or may not be shared on the intranet differs per country and market. In some countries, for instance, an employee picture isn’t allowed to be share (without consent). An intranet manager must know these (local) rules and act on them.
• Measurement: intranet managers must measure the intranet usage, and analyze and report the results.
• Convincing: intranet managers need to be influencers. In many organizations they don’t have a position to impose what they want (even if that would be possible…). Other people skills like communicating and presenting fit in this category as well.
• Community management and networks: managing intranet means understanding the communities and networks in the organization. How are decisions really made in the organization and how do you get communities and networks to work for you?

Translators

I probably missed a few skills. I loved to hear from you which other skills you think an intranet manager must have. More and more I’m convinced that intranet managers should be good translators. I think that’s the implicit skill in the list. Intranet managers must work in between organization and employees, IT and Communications, design and technology, etc.

One person?

Reading this list could lead to the question whether all this can be done by one person. Ideally speaking I think the intranet manager should have all these skills. In most cases it’s even necessary, because there is no extra budget for more intranet managers (with other skills). But even if these skills are spread out over more than one intranet manager I think it’s important that these managers have overlapping skills. In this way they will understand each other more deeply.

Learning

Which steps can you take to learn more of these skills? I don't think there’s a 1-2-3 recipe. But I can recommend the following 3 steps:

1. Read and listen: read books and blogposts from intranet experts and talk with other intranet managers
2. Study: there isn’t an intranet management study (should there be one?), but spread out over different studies there are classes and courses that you could take.
3. Contact the primary process of your company: take you time to participate in the primary process of your organization. Ideally work in the primary process for some time.

I’m curious if you recognize all this. Do intranet managers see themselves in this way? Did I miss out important skills for intranet management? And which skills are the hardest to master?

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.

Digital Workplace Concepts and Trends #e20s #intra14

Jane McConnell shares the results of her yearly - and great! - Digital Workplace survey. This is part of the expertise panel about digital workplace concepts and trends.

Jane defines the digital workplace as the intersection of people, tools and organization.

The two main drivers for the digital workplace are:

• increasing organizational intelligence;
• gaining efficiency & cost savings

Key to transformation Jane found in her latest research is that the top management and operational management are twice as involved in strategic decision-making with respect to the digital workplace.

Much more was shared in her slides. Too much, too fast to keep up. I focused on studying her slides instead of blogging... Sorry.

Next up Michel Ezran about the research Lecko does on the adoption of enterprise social networks. They try to measure the level of engagement in 15 organizations.

Some findings:

• a few transversal communities generate most of the ESN value
• deploying and using a tool does not guarantee cultural and behavioral shift
• but it's an enabler: culture change occurs through action
• most communities don't take off
• but engagement is increasing, 18% per year

The research shows the investment in saas e2.0 platforms almost doubled. 

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!

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.

Intranet as digital workplace by @markmorrell #intra13

First of all we should be clear what a digital workplace is. Mark’s definition of a digital workplace is: work is something you do not a place you go to. In a digital workplace you can:

• work from any location or while mobile 
• have the same or similar online experience
• collaborate, search, and complete tasks online 
• choose what tools you can use to do this 
• feel comfortable whenever you are using 
• feel comfortable whenever you are using it 
• be confident you can use it when you need to
• have a better work/life balance

The real difference between the intranet and the digital workplace is that you can get work done with a digital workplace. It's not just a content and publication platform, but a place where you can get work done. It's collaborative, it's task-focused.

So, how do you develop a digital workplace strategy? Mark shares several points with us:

• it should align with your other strategies
• is wider than an intranet strategy
• is for the short, medium, and long term
• has a governance framework (Mark: 'everything should be managed')
• people who will create, support, and make it happen ('this is the hardest part', says Mark)

What steps can be made to work towards the digital workplace:

• develop a proposal for a digital workplace
• show the benefits to be gained
• get it approved...... and funded!
• have a steering group (focus on strategy, not implementation with them)
• agree on roles and responsibilities
• have standards, training, guidance (e.g. with vid- or podcasts)
• coordinate IT, HR and property management

During the workshop the participants worked on these steps and shared their approaches.

Mark blogs quite a lot about the benefits of digital workplace strategy. He shared some benefits during the workshop, such as:

• shared performance objectives reduce risk of conflicting priorities
• help decide top priorities to implement

Benefits of digital workplace are:

• BT employees took fewer sick days and were 20% more productive
• a study by the Emerald group at BT showed their work-life balance improved, even though they worked longer hours
• the BT Agile Worker program save 6000 pounds per worker

Mark also pointed to reports from other companies about the benefits they are getting from the digital workplace.

Reasons to come to the Intranet Conference 2013 #intra13

On March 18 and 19, 2013 the next edition of the Dutch Intranet Conference will be held. We hope to meet you there! But let me give you some idea of the program and main topic of the conference.

In the intranet space lots of discussion is about choosing the right technology and selecting and providing the right features for your organization. Also, we talk about intranet governance. What is the right governance model for my organization? How can we keep our intranet interesting and vibrant?

Soft skills
What I hardly hear is the skills intranet-related people need to do intranet right? What skills does an intranet manager or owner need? For this reason we thought we’d focus the keynotes on this topic: the skills of the intranet manager and more specifically, the knowledge worker. Because that’s what most modern intranets are for: to support knowledge workers in their daily work.

Keynotes
We invited 3 keynote speakers to give their view on this topic. These are:

• Euan Semple: The internet has tremendous influence on organizations. Subsequently this also changes the way we look at intranets. Euan will share what he thinks is changing in organzations and what it means for intranets.
• Luis Suarez: What skills does the modern intranet manager need to do his/her work? And what skills does the knowledge worker (the intranet manager’s customer) need to work in a productive way? Luis will share his vision and experiences on this topic and give practical tips to improve the way we work and subsequently improve the intranet. 
• Steven van Bellegem: The intranet can be seen as a conversation between the business and technology. How do we make these two connect? The intranet itself can be seen as a conversation platform. How do intranet managers create interesting and relevant conversations? And why are conversations so important inside the company? Those are some of the questions Steven will address in his keynote. 

In all these talks we hope the conference participants will get practical insights for their daily work, which they can act on. We think we have chosen excellent keynote speakers from which we all can learn.

Breakouts: BYOD, mobile, gamification, and more
On the conference day there will also be 3 rounds of breakouts with 10+ topics to choose from. These breakouts won’t be focused on the soft side of intranet only. We set up a nice mix of more traditional and more modern intranet topics. Just to mention two modern topics: the Rabobank will be talking about how Bring-Your-Own-Device works in practice and what it means for intranet. And a large telecom company will be sharing how they use gamification on their intranet to increase engagement.

Pre-conference workshops
The day before the conference we have 4 pre-conference workshops about topics that are pretty hot. Mark Morrell will give a workshop about the digital workplace and Sharepoint intranets. Luis Suarez will talk about his (and your) battle against email. And Euan Semple’s workshop is about getting hands-on with social intranet.

You’re invited!
The company I work for, Entopic, has organized this conference for several years now. We’re proud to say it has become the largest intranet conference in the world. Of course most of the participants come from Holland and Belgium. But, over the years more and more participants from other countries have joined us as well. So, we’d love to welcome you all to this conference. Not only the keynotes, but also the pre-conference workshop and several breakouts will be in English.

I hope this give you some idea of what this year’s conference is about. If you have any questions, please leave a comment and I’ll get back to you soon.

A Google Glas intranet?

Most people know the history of the intranet. And if you’re older you will have experienced its history. Many organization that have had an intranet for years are looking for ways towards a modern and future-ready intranet. But what is the future of the intranet? Many intranet experts and organizations are thinking about this question. Are we eventually going to be apply to wear the intranet?

From intranet to social intranet 

There’s lots of talk about using social media within organizations. In short this is also called the ‘social intranet’. The intention is to have an intranet that is more than most are used to: news, procedures, who-is-who and the restaurant menu. A ‘social intranet’ should make us forget the old intranet. The old intranet that often hardly supports the way employees do their daily work. 

From intranet to digital workplace 

For this reason the new intranet is also called the ‘digital workplace’ more and more. A new name to help us forget the old intranet and sell the intranet as an essential tool to support work. It stresses that fact that the intranet can be relevant to help knowledge workers get things done. Looking at the definitions of the digital workplace, it is intended to be a bit more than the ‘social intranet’. The digital workplace wants to be the place where a knowledge worker can do his/her work. Therefore it must also connect to and support the business processes (and related tools). (Of course this can also be done when it’s called a ‘social intranet’...)

From intranet to mobile intranet 

If the new intranet should truly support workers, it should also support him/her everywhere work is done. Therefore the logical step for the new intranet is to also become mobile. The knowledge worker needs access to the intranet everywhere he/she is getting things done. Slowly organizations are thinking about how to do this. 

But what comes after this? I want to share two of the steps I see. 

Location-based intranet 

When the intranet gets mobile access there will be a new demand for push-information. We have come to find push-informatie without context irritating. But when information is filtered based on your location, it could be useful. Services like Foursquare, Google Fieldtrip and Google Now give us glimpses into this future. In the same way this could be useful within organizations by providing information about nearby experts when you’re looking for help or which protocols apply to the part of the organization you’re walking around in. Furthermore location information added to messages employees are publishing also provided meaning and context. Posting a message in a factory can give it a totally different meaning, than posting it from a car on your way to work. 

Google Glass intranet 

One step further can relate to projects like Google Glass. Google Glass is trying to make finding and consuming relevant information and publishing it easier. You don’t have to carry your smart phone in your hand; information is projected right into your eyes so you can consume that information and publish and save content with easy gestures. Imagine the access to your intranet being like Google Glass. Everywhere you are you’ll have direct access to (the right internal) information. During meetings, on your way to meeting, when you bump into someone you planned to ask something, working on a document or product/service. The intranet is less and less something you go to, but something you wear. You don’t have to look for information, it will search for you depending on what you’re looking at and wear you are. 

What do you see as next-steps for the intranet? Do the above mentioned steps make sense? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

By the way, inspired by Dave Gray's work, I made the little drawings for this post by myself!

[This post was also published in Dutch on the Frankwatching blog.]

Learn from other intranets, join the Digital Workplace Survey

What is the best way to benchmark your intranet? How can you learn from other intranets?

Comparing intranets
There are many ways to find intranet inspiration. Among others you can:

• Have your intranet assessed by an intranet expert
• Read a good book about intranet
• Visit organizations that have a (beautiful) intranet
• Visit a conference or workshop about intranet
• Join online or offline intranet networking groups

This list doesn’t mention listening to your users, because I assume you're already doing that…

Digital Workplace Survey 2013

Another way to learn from others is to join intranet surveys. The most well-known survey is Jane McConnell’s. Jane is a well-known intranet expert. Jane’s internal research on intranet has been going on for years now. The scope of her research used to be intranet and has broadened to the digital workplace. Many organizations participate in her research. The survey is broad and deep. Filling out the survey takes about an hour of your time. For this hour of your time you get a free copy of the report. The report is a perfect way to benchmark your intranet. Compare your intranet with the results of the survey and you’ll know where your intranet needs development. Or you might find your intranet belongs to the select class of intranet leaders. 

Please participate!

I highly recommend partcipating in this survey. Just by filling in the survey you learn a lot about the facets of intranet. And you also get the final report which is loaded with inspiration and learning points. I too am curious what the results will be and will blog about them when the report is out.

Personally I hope more Dutch organizations will participate. Last year just one did… I know of many interesting intranets in Holland that others can learn from.

Are you planning on participating in Jane’s survey? Let me know. And I’d also like to know if you will not participate this year.

LinkedIn as your intranet?

“Why can't we use LinkedIn for our intranet? At least it works, our intranet doesn't.” Maybe you considered this or heard it in your organization. The question intrigues me and I think we will hear it more and more in the coming years. What do you say in response to this question as internal or external consultant, Communications or IT manager? I'd like to share my thoughts in this post.

Dissatisfied about IT
The intranet is changing rapidly. The internet provides all kinds of free tools, like Dropbox, Yammer and Google Drive. More and more people are getting used to sharing (versions of) documents, online collaboration, sharing short messages, setting up and maintaining a personal profile, etc. Employees are often dissatisfied about the internal IT-tools and content-focused intranets. These tools cannot compete with the functionality we have on the internet.

Free tools as intranet
More and more employees are openly, and sometimes secretly, using free internet tools to get things done ('stealth IT'). Organizations, especially IT departments are struggling with this trend. Making things worse, the developpers of the free tools aren't laying back. They market their tools, implicitly or explicity, as intranet solutions. Recently LinkedIn shared they possibly also want to position their platform as an intranet. Some are even using Facebook as their intranet.

LinkedIn as intranet?
Could LinkedIn fit as an intranet platform? LinkedIn has functionality many intranets have or should have, such as:

• Detailled profiles and connections between profiles (social network)
• Groups and subgroups to ask questions, share knowledge and publish news
• Share documents with 3rd party apps
• Available everywhere
• Mobile access

Advantages LinkedIn intranet
The advantages of a LinkedIn intranet aren't hard to imagine:

• (Most) employees are already there; they have a profile
• They know how the tool works (intuitive UI)
• Fast development of new functionality
• The platform is free
• Customers are there as well (so collaboration and co-creation via the intranet is easy to set up)
• The LinkedIn intranet can be set up and configured quickly

Disadvantages LinkedIn intranet
But there are also disadvantages of LinkedIn as an intranet platform. I'll list a few:

• Security of company informatie is fragile
• Ownership of content is not clear: is it owned by the company or LinkedIn?
• Navigation of information is defined by LinkedIn
• No functionality for content management 
• Integration with organizaitonal processes and tools is impossible or complex
• Integration with user management tools (ADS) is impossible
• Search is limited: it works in LinkedIn, but you can't seach  from one searchbox over all your free tools and in your business tools, like ERPS

Balancing and directions
When chosing a platform it's always important to weigh the pro's and con's. If costs and collaboration with customers are important, then a LinkedIn intranet could be a good direction. However, if information security and integration with business tools is a priority, this direction is probably not right.
A mix of different directions is also possible. E.g. a LinkedIn intranet for specific goals like knowledge sharing and facilitating internal networks, and an internal platform to open up business tools and share internal work methods.

What are your ideas about a LinkedIn intranet? Is it a viable direction? Do you know organizations that successfully use such an intranet?

(This post was also published in Dutch on Frankwatchting.)

Building Your Social Intranet - Step 6 Cultivating your Community

And finally my last post about building your social intranet. The final step might even be the most important one. It’s a step that is often skipped. For some reason people still think you just have to give technology to the organization and the employees will jump on it. Over and over again this has proven to be false (although the technology adoption barier is very low in most internal social platforms).

The last step is about cultivating your community. A social intranet is not alive in itself. It needs to be keep alive and fibrant. Potentially a social intranet supports most of your organization: the network-side of the company. If so, it is extremely important to make sure it can actually do so and continues to do so. This is even more important because sharing and collaborating with your employees is different than with your friends. Some say: Well, it works automatically on Facebook, so it should on our internal networking platform. I wish it were that easy. (And I don’t this it’s that automatic on Facebook either.) 

Look at your social intranet as a big community, consisting of many smaller communities. These communities must be facilitated and cultivated. In my experience the best community cultivation is done by a multidisciplinary team. Consisting of someone from HR, Communications, IT and the business. They pick up the responsibility to own and lead the community. This can be a formal or informal role. Their job is to encourage communication via the platform and outside of it. They train employees and explain why the social intranet was set up. They help them use the social intranet in a way that is effective and efficient to them. Measuring is also done by this team and the report findings to decision makers. The team learns from their own organization and other organizations how the platform can be improved, which elements should be added and removed. They connect people to eachother. And expect the unexpected. 

So, this wraps up step 6! If you’ve read closely step 6 actually leads us back to Step 1: Listening. Good community cultivation is listening closely to employees and the organization. So in a sense the steps that have listed can be seen as a circle. A social intranet begins and ends with listening. 

Do you agree? I hope you enjoyed my posts. Hopefully they were useful as well. Did I miss steps that you would add? I’d love to hear you thoughts and experiences in this area. All comments are welcome!

Building Your Social Intranet – Step 5 Measure

In the last couple of weeks I wrote some posts describing steps that help you build your social intranet. I’ll round up this series of post in two final posts. The last two steps towards a social intranet are: measure and cultivate your community. This post will address measuring.

As we know from many intranet studies measuring is almost always forgotten. Not many organizations have metrics to know how well their intranet is received and used. In my experience the same goes for social intranets or elements of social intranets like microblogging. This is often directly related to the fact that these intranets don’t have a goal to start with…

I advise you to make sure you measure as much as possible. This is the way to check whether the goals you set are being reached. It also helps you sell the social platform within your organization. Managers will like to know what the return on investment is. Sceptics might be convinced to join if you show them hard numbers. Etc. 

If people measure they mostly focus on hard numbers. Like the number of (active) participants, the number of conversations, the number of page views, how long people stay on the platform, etc. These are good things to measure and pay attention to. However, these numbers don’t really address the value of the platform. And what do these numbers really mean?

I think social intranets are challenging us to look broader. Don’t only focus on hard numbers, but also on the soft ones. They can be just as or even more convincing to fellow employees and decision makers. How can this be done?

When you measure hard numbers, this is done automatically. With an analytics tool for instance. When measuring soft numbers you have to go out and talk to users. Ask them what kind of value they are getting from the social intranet or parts of it. What are they getting from microblogging in a factory or blogging pre-liminary research results? The answers to these kind of questions will never show up in analytics. But… they show the value of the social intranet in a more compelling way. I find they are much more convincing than the hard numbers.

Let me give you an example of a true story. When I asked one person what she was getting from microblogging she shared this story. At a point in time she had to set up a wiki for a project. She was asked to make sure the hard- and software was there and the wiki would work. Before she started ordering, she posted a short update on the microblogging platform. She said: “Going to set up a wiki for a new project I’m working on!” Shorty thereafter someone replied: “Nice and good luck! I assume you know we already have a corporate wiki platform. You can start by creating a wiki page.” Half an hour later she answered: “Really?! Didn’t know that. You just saved us a month in the project planning. Thanks!”

You see? This could never be concluded from statistics. But when I tell this to employees and managers they can’t say this platform is useless.

Do you measure your (old) intranet? And how about your social intranet? In which way do you measure? And are the results convincing to your organization?

Building Your Social Intranet - Step 4 Choose your platform(s)

The last couple of weeks I've been blogging about my experiences with social intranet. I started out by defining 'social intranet', then moved on to the first three steps towards a social intranet: listen, define goal(s), and choose a roll-out strategy. It's great to see the posts are being shared and appreciated!

Step 4 is about choosing a platform for your social intranet. I'm not going to give lengthy advise about how to do this. I hope to do that in a separate post. My short advice is to choose a platform that is truly social. People and their networks should be at the core of the tool. This is more than having profile functionality. And it's also more than being able to share and publish content.

You can also choose platforms, plural. Based on my experience most organizations don't have one platform, but several platforms. And isn't this often the easiest way forward? Why try to push everything into one platform, if it just doesn't fit the tool or work for users? In the past IT taught us one platform is better. It's better from a financial and maintenance perspective. This is understandable. Practice shows this principle is less true nowadays. Social tools are (often) dead-cheap and are (often) not hosted by IT, leading to lower maintenance costs. Furthermore people are used to switching between many applications to get things down outside work (e.g. Gmail, Skype, Facebook, Twitter). Doesn't this also fit with they way they get things done inside the organization?

How did you or your company choose a platform for social intranet? Is it or is it not a truly social platform?