Worldwide Intranet Challenge (WIC)

What are the 3 hottest intranet topics?

A recent discussion on the Worldwide Intranet Challenge (WIC) LinkedIn group asked the following question:

"What do you think are the three hottest / most relevant topics in the world of intranets and portals?".

22 comments were received. Based purely on the number of comments it would seem the 3 hottest intranet topics are:

1. Social media and collaboration
2. Personalisation and targeting of content
3. Governance

Closely followed by promoting intranet use, cloud computing, mobile access, as a portal to corporate data and demonstrating benefits. Surprisingly the usually popular topic of 'finding information' didn't get much of a mention. Below is a grouping of all comments by topic.

Social Media & collaboration

• Utilising social media tools inside the firewall (wiki, blog, microblogging, tagging, bookmarking,recommending etc...)
• Social media and collaboration
• Collaboration. Ensuring that this is easy and is pertinent to the problems being dealt with in the workplace is key.
• Privacy and the social web - protecting your personal privacy in a connected world, talking about work on personal websites/blogs, identity management at work/at home, sharing information between secure work and private home email/apps/social networks.
• Social (... aka creating a framework for dialogue and community): How can we translate the success of facebook, twitter and other tools to the enterprise, and use these features profitably?
• Using social media principles within the intranet for knowledge sharing and collaboration.
• Enterprise social networking
• Global collaboration
• Social Media and networking. How to not get overwhelmed with it and not abuse your networks.
• How to convince social media-averse management that blogs aren't shiny, new, untested tools, but in fact are now rather old school?

Personalization and targeting of content

• Targeting of content
• Personalization
• Presenting content in the context of the consumer, not the owner
• I also think personalisation is a good one,
• Personalisation (...aka making the intranet unique and relevant): Through allowing personalisation, you create a custom communication destination for every employee, improving relevance and traffic to all sectors.
• The use of 'relevancy' and 'context' to deliver content to users dynamically.

Governance

• Governance - how to control the 'out of control' portal
• Content strategy and governance
• How do you survive when company intranet portal is down". Think of it in terms of non available key applications, crisis communication, alternate communication flows for pushing messages and status of recovery actions, company culture and synergy, etc, etc...
• Ownership and tracking of content will help users to publish what people need to know in a form that users want it. This should prevent an accumulation of data waste in corporate storage, eliminate thousands of un-accessed pages and significantly improve company competitiveness. 

Promoting adoption

• How can we make people use the intranet? Why do I have to put content on the intranet? Nobody uses it.
• Building and maintaining an intranet authoring community
• Encouraging adoption - how to get best use out of existing systems, how to introduce new services, how to evangelise benefits, etc...

Cloud computing

• Cloud computing and the virtual workforce
• Cloud collaboration - move to the cloud or not? What to move and what to keep internally? What does this mean for data/network security, intellectual property, data protection, content migration, budget, planning, etc...
• Will corporates move to Cloud computing and if so what will that mean for intranets and portals ?

Mobile access

• Mobile (.. aka extending the reach of your intranet beyond the desktop): We have a large workforce most of whom do not work from an office. We've deployed kiosks for those without computers, but we're now looking at Digital Signage integration and mobile access.
• Access to content on the intranet via mobile applications.

As a portal to applications

• Using the intranet as a portal to apps such as Oracle and SAP
• Presenting relevant data and information from business systems in the portal
• Intranets are increasingly about 1 topic: the connection between and integration of people and stuff

Demonstrating benefits

• How communications can support a business
• The one topic I see us as business communicatrs having to focus on more and more is proving ROI on Intranet investment. How can we measure and report, not just in qualitative terms, but through quantitative metrics, how and to what extent the intranet adds value to the bottom line of the business. How exactly do we reduce cost and/or add value through expanding the communications within the organization?
• Goal: What are the perceived benefits like cost avoidance, saves, employee engagement, communication, knowledge management?

Other topics listed in the discussion include

• Improving business processes
• Automation of forms and processes
• Make it easy to share information
• Search is always a top issue, making sure content is easy to find and that results are relevant.
• Metadata
• Using the intranet to assist with innovation
• Using the intranet to manage change
• Using the intranet to improve employee engagement
• User experience design
• User Experience and Design. Adoption and productivity suffer without this.
• Unified Communications is increasingly becoming important.
• How: Tools to be used like, interactive forums, bulletin board, micro blogging, corporate directory, search feature, Employee pages/ profiles etc.
• Implementation : using cloud or in house development, cost, ROI.
• Translation is a looming issue
• Front line staff and internal communicators must be trained to concentrate on more effective and tighter written content.
• Will video telephony take off and what will the impact be ?
• Having an "intranet" is short sighted. What happens when you need to open it up to suppliers and customers? Is a company being to internally focused the right approach?

You can read the complete discussion on the WIC LinkedIn group (you need to be a member).

Social media resources for intranet & communication professionals (part 2 of 2)

In part 1 of this post, I talked about the need for intranet and communication professionals to take the lead within their organisations and set the example for how to use social media tools to help the business. The following are some useful resources to help you connect with other intranet and communication professionals.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn has been described as 'Facebook for adults'. It allows you to post details about your career and connect with over 55 million people (and growing quickly). Once you have joined LinkedIn, you can join up to 50 interest groups. Groups allow you to participate in discussions, read and post relevant news items, look for relevant events and jobs, create voting polls, and generally connect with people who have the same interests as you.

For Intranet and Communication Professionals, if you haven't already, I'd sign up ASAP. This is the business you are in - communicating and sharing information. It will be easier to recommend and promote the benefits of interactive communication and social media if you are active practitioner yourself!

Then I'd suggest joining the following groups:

• Worldwide Intranet Challenge- helps organisations build business critical intranets through the sharing of best practice intranet techniques.
• Intranet Professionals- provides a simple way for intranet professionals to network with peers regarding technology, usability, and best practices. Nearly 1500 members.
• Internal Communications- for people who manage company publications, internal announcements, employee communications, or manage the intranet.
• NetJMC & Co- a peer-to-peer network to exchange ideas and information among intranet practitioners. (No vendors, no agencies).
• Knowledge Management Group - for people interested in knowledge management.
• Employee Communications and Engagement - dedicated to the art and practice of employee communications and engagement. Over 3000 members.
• CMS User Group- links up professionals in the CMS Community - a worldwide network of web designers, developers and entrepreneurs, sharing information and empowering each others' success. Over 2000 members.
• Content Management Professionals - a collaborative community of practice advancing the field of content management
• The Content Wrangler Community - content management, content quality, content standards, content reuse, user-generated content, rich media, Web 2.0, social networking, writing, translation and localization. Over 4000 members.
• Intranet Benchmarking Forum - an exclusive, confidential intranet and portal benchmarking group of more than 70 major organisations worldwide (not open to vendors/ consultants)

There are thousands of other groups that you may find relevant as well. Just use a keyword to search for the type of group you are looking for.

Twitter

Twitter allows people to post messages of less than 140 characters (Tweets). Messages can include links to interesting articles or websites. Using Tweetdeck(or a similar tool) and relevant search terms, you are able to easily keep up to date with the latest news in your industry. In just 10 or 15 minutes each day, you can read the latest tweets - it's like having your own personalised newspage. If you haven't already, join Twitter and become an active participant now.

For intranets, I'd suggest at least using the search terms 'intranet', 'intranets', 'portal' - and maybe the software that your intranet uses (eg. SharePoint). It's also worthwhile following key Twitterers. Below is a list of people I follow who talk regularly about intranets. 

rachellai83 collabguy intranet2 Hitwise_US TonyByrne intranet intranetdesign Intranets20 intranet_portal IntranetExperts tobyward

adenin s2d_jamesr jboye nadine_mcmahon seanrnicholson intranetlife StepTwoDesigns frankx ShvetsovaNata andyjankowski netjmc

mdoll EphraimJF ChristySeason Peter_Richards markmorrell carolyndouglas IntraTeam Alex_Manchester sammarshall nancyatibforum ibf

Facebook

Facebook is the largest social networking site in the world with over 300 million members. Surprisingly to some people, it is possible to not only use Facebook to keep in touch with your family and friends, but to use it in a similar way to LinkedIn (eg. by joining groups that have similar interests). Some groups you may want to consider include:

• Worldwide Intranet Challenge- provides case studies and ideas for how to make your intranet business critical
• Intranet Global Forum- An online community dedicated to intranet best practices, knowledge sharing and collaboration between intranet professionals. Set up by Toby Ward who writes the Intranet Blog. Over 600 members.
• Content Management Professionals - CM Pros is the worldwide organization for people who want to learn more about content management from other professionals
• SharePoint Community Special Interest Group- for anyone with an interest in improving and growing the worldwide SharePoint community.

I have found that some people prefer to keep their professional and personal lives separate, so they will used LinkedIn for business and Facebook for family and friends.

Xing

Xing is kind of like the European version of LinkedIn. With over 8 million connections and growing quickly, it is another great resource to connect with intranet professionals. Groups relevant to intranet professionals include:

• Content Management- German and English. Content refers to printed content, media asset, and othe unstructured and stzructured data in intranet, extranets and the internet
• Corporate Communications - German.
• Information and Documument Management - In German, English, Spanish, French - Document, Information, Content, Records, Process & Knowledge Management
• SharePoint 2010- In German and English. Articles about SharePoint.
• Интранет Клуб- Intranet Club for Russia organised by Natalia Shvetsova (WIC Partner)

Other helpful tools

Other tools that I have found useful include Delicious ('the tastiest bookmarks on the Web') and Digg.

Delicous is like having a portable web toolbar. You can save your favourite web pages to Delicious and then access these again from anywhere you have internet access (of course a good intranet that is place-independent will also allow you to do the same thing!). In addition to saving bookmarks, Delicious also allows you to build a network of like minded contacts. You are able to view other people who have bookmarked the same pages as you, and then see what other pages they may have bookmarked. You can also recommend bookmarks to your contacts.

Digg is a way for the most popular content on the web as 'dug' by the end users to be identified. A popular blog post for example, may get submitted to Digg many times which will cause it to climb the ladder of popularity. Read more about Digg.

What social media tools do you use?

In what other ways do you use the above tools? Are there any other social media tools that you have found helpful for your business?

Communication & intranet professionals should set the social media example (Part 1 of 2)

I ran a workshop recently consisting of 17 communication, intranet and IT knowledge workers. The age range was late 20s to late 30s. All were well qualified and educated professionals located in Australia. At the beginning of the workshop I asked the following questions:

• How many of them had a Facebook account - 8 people, Who has heard of Facebook - everyone
• How many had a MySpace account - 0, Who has heard of it - everyone
• Who uses instant messaging (including work) - 12
• Who has a LinkedIn profile - 2, Who has heard of LinkedIn - 5 (including the 2 who had profiles)
• Who is actively using Twitter - 2 (though 4 others had set up an account but were not using it)
• Who wrote a blog regularly (including work blogs) - 1 (me)
• Who has posted a question or responded to a question in an online discussion group within the last 3 months (including any work discussions) - 2
• Who has viewed a video on Youtube - everyone, who has added a video to Youtube - 1 
• Who has ever posted a comment about a news story or a blog  - 4
• Who has used Wikipedia at some stage - everyone, Who has ever contributed to Wikipedia - no-one
• Who considers email as their main way of electronically communicating with work colleagues - everyone!

While the above is far from scientific, I must admit I was not surprised at the relatively low level of content contribution to social media from a seemingly ideal demographic. My experience is that while people are happy to consume content there is a lot less enthusiasm towards contributing content. Even from my own circle of friends & family, most from an older demographic I must admit (lets just call them gen x!), there is only one other person who has a blog and uses Twitter regularly. A few of them have Facebook accounts which they use mainly to stalk their kids!

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Use of social media within an enterprise

While I think that many people are aware of the popular social media tools and are consumers of content (ie. viewers of Youtube and readers of blogs), I think using these tools to contribute content as a normal part of business is an exception (Facebook appears to be widely used, but not for business - Note: I see Facebook recently passed Google over Christmas as the most popular internet destination).

Data from the Worldwide Intranet Challenge (WIC) supports this theory (the WIC provides intranet feedback from nearly 11,000 intranet end users from 30 organisations in 12 countries). The chart below shows the average response to the question:

How often do you use the intranet to discuss work topics (eg. using discussion forums or blogs).

 
  
As can be seen from the above chart, 29 of the 30 organisations (listed on the left and represented by an 8 digit code) who have participated in the WIC all rank less than 'Infrequently'. It would be interesting to know why the number one ranked organisation rates much higher in this question compared to the other organisations... you can find out why by attending the Intrateam Intranet and Web 2.O conference in Denmark, March 2-4 ;-)

It's a similar result for the question:

'How often do you use the intranet to publish content?'.

 

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How highly do employees value social media and interactivity?

Supporting the above results is the chart below which shows the correlation between how valuable employees think an intranet is and the various qualities of the intranet. The higher the number, the greater the correlation.

 
 
  
As you can see, Web 2.0 type tasks such as being able to discuss work topics, provide feedback or comments and collaborate online are at the lower end of the scale.

Another question asking how important various characteristics were in contributing to a valuable intranet showed a similar trend, with staff being able to contribute and interact rated the second least important quality (out of seven).

  
While I believe that social media tools are widely available in the workplace, the adoption and use of these tools into business as usual is taking a little longer.

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 So what is the point of all this!?

This purpose of this post is to paint a realistic picture of how social media tools are being used within organisations in order to highlight the fact that more work is needed before active use of social media tools becomes mainstream. Social media tools that encourage interactivity and collaboration between employees have real potential to add significant value to organisations, to enhance knowledge workers productivity & efficiency and to improve employee engagement. 

Anyone that has posted a question to a LinkedIn discussion forum, discovered a relevant news story through Twitter, or viewed a video on YouTube will understand the value of social media.

To accelerate the adoption of social media in the workplace, there is an opportunity for intranet and communication professionals to take the lead within their organisations and set the example for how to use these tools to benefit the business.

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Part 2 of this post will explain some practical ways for people to use social media to enhance their productivity at work.