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! :-)

Next Generation Ecosystems by @dhinchcliffe #e20s

As promised I would blog about the final keynote of the Enterprise 2.0 Summit soon. Now's the time! Dion Hinchcliffe wrapped up the Summit with a good keynote about 'Next Generation Ecosystems'. I'll share my notes with you. His slides can be found here.

Dion's presentation started out with a whole list of trends in the social business/enterprise 2.0 space. Like:

• Implementations of e2.0 tools have become bigger and faster
• All data show sustained benefits after rolling out e2.0 tools
• Everything is becoming social inside company (people-focus)
• Ownership of social is not clear
• The predicted social data explosion happened
• Mining social data has become a major industry (lots of different vendors)
• Internal and external is blurring, but it has not gone as far as most thought it would go
• There's some talk about social business standards
• Social is becoming more integrated in work (was isolated before)

Dion also relates to the Alcatel-Lucent (slides about the case can be found here) and Cenex case. What I found interesting is that Dion said 25% of the participants is active and 6% are seen as contributors. Compared to other cases, Dion calls this a high-level of adoption.

When relating to the gains of social in the enterprise, Dion pointed to the recent McKinsey study. This study showed that companies using social technology can quantify the benefits and that "fully networked companies" benefit the most from social.

I really liked how Dion showed that social business and enterprise 2.0 is not happening in isolation. There are greater trends, like the high productivity levels, the consumerization of IT and the changing technology landscape that shape social. These greater trends require companies to organize for radical change.

So, what should the social business flow be like: listen/analyze > guide (strategy) > engage (and then listen again).

Dion closed his presentation with a list of key success factors:

• Everyone must be able to participate (use the social tools)
• Turn on network effects by default
• Cultivate the right communities
• Plan for change and the unexpected (take advantage of them)
• Remove barriers to participation
• Listen, analyze and engage continuously
• Integrate social into the flow of work

This wraps up my live-blogging of the Enterprise 2.0 Summit. I hope you enjoyed the posts. Shortly I'll blog about my insights and learnings from this year's Summit.