How do you build a social intranet in your organization? I get this question a lot. At the Intranet Conference 2012 in Utrecht I gave a talk about 'building your social intranet'. I've shared my slides below with my answer to this question. I define six steps towards a social intranet. In a couple of posts I'll share my story and experiences on this topic. As always, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this topic.
Let me start by defining what I mean by a 'social intranet'. Based on responses from the audience, the definition of social intranet is not very specific. Some say it's internal social media. Others said it's internal Facebook.
A simple definition of a social intranet is an intranet that has been extended (and integrated) with social tools. This definition is OK, but it's pretty tool-focused. To me a social intranet is an intranet that is focused on and supports people. More specifically, it supports people and their networks so that they can do their work (or do business).
In the next post I'll write about the first step towards a social intranet. In the meantime, what is your definition of a social intranet?
Relating your purpose to your current tasks
A post by John Stepper triggered me to rejoin the blogosphere. Of course I've been paying attention to the blogposts, reading and commenting on them. But I simply didn't make the time to write a blogpost of my own.
John wrote an interesting blogpost about an internal course he's giving. And the topic of the first course is defining your purpose. That's a very big topic. And it's hard for people to define what their purpose is. John bumped into this issue when running his course.
I recognize this big time! This is what I was struggling with when I started working. I read lots of productivity books and they all said: "Define your goals and purpose. Do what you're passionate about." So, you start to wonder what it is. You see all these smart and successful people around you that seem to have a clear purpose. They can articulate it as if they always knew what there purpose is.
I found (and find) it really hard to define my purpose. I'm much better at it than 10 years ago. Why is it so hard? For one, because lots of the stuff I have to do at work (and home) has nothing to do with my goals and passions. E.g. filling out what I spend time on for my boss is not something I'm passionate about. In the second place, I also think defining your purpose is something you know inside but is hard to make explicit. Like we learned in knowledge management: There are some things we just know, but find hard to share and/or write down. Sometimes we can talk about them. But often we just know.
So, what helped me define my purpose? Strangely, the road to my purpose was to get things done. I bumped into the book Getting things done by David Allen. I think this book/method connects my goals/purpose to what I have to do right now and vice versa. My experience is if you can't connect what you have to do now to what your long-term goals are, you'll simply frustrate yourself. But what you can do is get things done (out of the way) to be able to focus on your purpose and passions more.
I'm curious if others have the same experience!
User adoption strategies for Sharepoint - part 2 #intra12
We're at stage 3: Enlivening Applicability. Ways to do this:
- Over the shoulder watching: show how people use the tool in practice and learn from them
- Group re-imagining: help a group see beyond current work practices
- Embedded champions: one participant mentioned she connected to secretaries to speed up and encourage technology adoption. (I agree!)
- Sandbox for experimentation: don't go live right away, but start small, let people play with the technology and use the technology for the roll out itself.
- Easy first steps: closing down the options, focus on some affordances of the technology not all.
- Built it and they will come: set up the tech and see if users will adopt it by themselves
Next phase (4): Making it real. How do you make it real?
- Provide zero other options. E.g. take away all other platforms but one. Experience from the participants is this works very well.
- Offer start doing, stop doing patterns
- Bulk loading party. Use when lots of content has to be migrated, for instance. This strategy is hardly used.
- Internal User groups
OK, but how do we measure user adoption? Drucker says: You cannot manage what you cannot measure. Sampson shows how a company built a business case for a collaboration platform, focusing on hard numbers (savings, productivity, etc.). Focus on the affordances on the tool, process and organization level.
What to do if nothing works? Change jobs or go back to the user adoption phases and find out what you're doing wrong.
And that rounds up the pre-conference workshop!
And that rounds up the pre-conference workshop!
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