Intranet 2.0 Forum in Zurich - from guest blogger, Stephan Schillerwein (part 2)

Here is the second and final report from Intranet 2.0 Forum in Zurich in early December.

Many thanks to Stephan Schillerwein, from Schillerwein Net Consulting, organiser of the Zurich event. (Schillerwein Net Consulting is a network partner in the NetStrategy/JMC Global Intranet Survey since 2006.)

Stephan offers us something rare today - real case studies on companies moving towards life in the 2.0 fastlane!

(You can read Intranet 2.0 part 1 here.)

"Using RSS for optimizing Communication in the Enterprise and driving traffic to the Intranet"
Stephane Cheikh, SITA (Societe Internationale des Télécommunications en Aéronautique) described their first step in the 2.0-direction which led them away from „corporate spamming“ (with lots of internal email newsletters) and a broad variety of news locations to an RSS-based solution with full choice for each employee. The RSS-reader is desktop based (Skinkers) and so far about half of all employees configured the news and alerts to their needs. The volume of newsletters has already been cut by 75%. An important driver for adoption and user satisfaction was found to be the usage of external feeds and thus the combination of private and corporate interests.

"Social media in the corporate context: lessons learnt at BT"
Richard Dennison, Internal Programme Manager at British Telecom presented the impressive transition BT has made towards becoming an Enterprise 2.0. While the full case is available on Richard's blog, here are some major points:
how to get people out of their routine and into acting and thinking in new (social) ways? As changing the corporate culture in such a big company is nothing short of impossible, the benefits of the new ways (and tools) have to be so evident and convincing that people start using them out of self interest and thus adapt step by little step (think evolution, not revolution). But also the demonstrated will of the company to re-invent itself was an important factor at BT.
One of their key principles is that anonymous posting is not possible. Hence everybody can say what they like … but will also be held fully accountable for what they say.
Examples of 2.0 tools at BT include „BTpedia“ which serves as a knowledge base and to build communities, RSS powered news (with far more than 150 internal feeds), podcasting, blogging, more than 300'000 wiki pages and fully configurable "My Pages".
How to harvest the wisdom of crowds if you have no (or rather small) crowds? Even BT's "population"“ is tiny in comparison to the user base of the web. Thus the percentage of active contributors has to be higher internally.
If your company focusses on risk instead of potential value, then there'll always be a reason not to do social media. I feel that this is really crucial in all intranet 2.0 activities (to illustrate this I used the little "nobody wears shoes here" story in my own presentation at the event). 


"Trust-based collaboration with enterprise wikis – consolidated experiences gained in 20+ projects"
Juerg Stuker from namics, presented some key things to consider in respect to internal wikis:

Wikis are about people, transparency and also about creating a new kind of competition among information and the people contributing it.
Personal fears about the medium shouldn't be adressed in the wiki itself, but in face-to-face conversations
The wiki has to stand above hierarchy (lots of implications there, huh... ;-) ) as many voices freely articulating their opinion is what creates value in the wiki. Walls, silos and anything top-down (politics, hidden agendas, too much regulation...) will silence or drive away these voices.
Creating trust by trusting employees first and walking the talk are important contributions by management. Adding to the wiki is something you can't delegate to your assistant.
Just like shared office kitchens, wikis require someone that is responsible for cleaning up. That's the job of the WikiGnome.
Actively create opportunities for people to use the wiki, e.g. quickly set up a wiki page instead of discussion something at length in emails.

"Intranet 2.0 – the Vodafone experience"
Juan Figuerola-Ferretti showed how a complex landscape of internal information, communication and collaboration systems and the increasing trend of internal conversations taking place outside of the corporation (e.g. in facebook groups) created the urgent demand for an internal social networking platform to bring people and information back together again.
OxMox, as the platform is called, connects people with their actions, bookmarks, peers and expertise and thus enables a new perspective when looking at the vast amounts of information available, by contextually searching for people rather than for information objects. 

Followup links and events
Most of the speakers are active bloggers, so you can take part in their intranet 2.0 journeys on a continual basis. The links can be found on the Intranet 2.0 Forum's speaker page.

Interested in more on 2.0? Join us on facebook in the Enterprise 2.0 Summit & Open group and visit the international Enterprise 2.0 Summit, which will take place on 4th march 2008 in Hannover, Germany at the world's largest IT-fair CeBIT 2008.

Thanks again, Stephan for such a great writeup!

Comments

[Jürg Stuker]

The full presentation on Trust-based collaboration with enterprise wikis can be downloaded. (German only)

[Jane]

Thank you Jürg, for the link to your presentation. I modified your comment to make it clickable.

[Stephan Schillerwein]

You're welcome, Jane, it was a pleasure! Thank you for posting it on your blog and merry Christmas. :-)