Globally local - locally global

"Brazil is hot on intranets" say Viberti and Saldanha

   I did not realize how lively the intranet scene is in Brazil until Fernando Viberti got in touch with me and became a Network Partner for the 4th annual Global Intranet Strategies survey. His blog is definitely worth reading: "Gestao e governança web". "Web management and governance in English."
Lots of in-depth posts.

(I use Google's Word Translator which I've recently installed in my Firefox navigation bar in order to follow intranet blogs in languages I don't speak!)

I've also heard from Ricardo Saldanha, President of the Intranet Portal Institute which is a non-profit, non-governmental organization, set up to stimulate and help professionalize the Brazilian intranet space by bringing case studies and best practices to light, in a knowledge-sharing way. Fernando Viberti is also one of the Portal Institute's directors.

Brazil also has its own Intranet Portal Award, founded by Ricardo, and now in its second year. It was started in order to recognize outstanding intranets. The first single-day event for this award is apparently considered to be a turning point in the Brazilian intranet space by intranet professionals, end users and vendors.

In addition, there is an Intranet Portal site with a discussion forum on corporate portals and intranet projetcs in Brazil. It now has around 3 thousand subscribers.

Do you need a good reason to go to Brazil on a business trip?
If so, think about participating in the two-day event in November that will be the culmination of the Intranet Portal Award for 2009. The first day will be dedicated to winners' presentations and second day to discussion tracks on IT Integration (Portal), Content & Collaboration - and Governance.

End-user intranet benchmarking site put on the list

Andrew Wright's site on end-user intranet benchmarking (Worldwide Intranet Challenge) was accidentally left off my list of Intranet blogs.
Sorry Andrew and thanks for pointing it out! It's now been corrected!

Welcome to Giacomo Mason - Intranet Management, Italy

Apologies to Giacomo Mason, whom I've known virtually for several years, and forgot to put him on the list of Intranet Blogs...

http://www.intranetmanagement.it

His blog is in Italian, but you can get the gist of it from this automatic translator that Giacomo provided:

http://www.intranetmanagement.it/en/

I tried to put the English translated version in my NetVibes, but could not make it work.

Does anyone know how to do this? Giacomo's posts are worth it!

Who's playing in the Intranet online space?

It's a tie! At last, there are as many blogs by intranet managers as by intranet consultants. Bravo!

I just redid my lists of intranet bloggers and online groups and divided them into 3 categories:
Intranet managers, Intranet blogs (consultancies) and Intranet Groups Online.

Intranet Managers

In alphabetical order...

1. Andrew Fix, Coming out of my Shell
2. Dorjem, Intranet Overseer. Helping intranet teams know more about the resources available to them
3. e24 Intranätgruppen, Jesper Bylund. Intranet manager for Malmo city intranet. Blog in Swedish
4. infoarch , About my experiences as an information architectfrom Samuel Driessen, information architect at Océ-Venlo
5. Injela, Frank Hamm, intranet manager, Aareal Bank AG. In German
6. Mark Morrell, Intranet manager at BT. Blog on "an insight into how intranets are managed"
7. Mashazine, Michael Hafner (Erste Bank Group)
8. Social Intranet: life in the trenches, Patrick Sikes, HSN (the Home Shopping Network) in St Petersburg, Florida
9. TeCoMan, Fabrice Poiraud-Lambert. In French. About "collaboration électronique au service de l'agilité des organisations"
10. Think Intranet, Strategic intranet management, by Abigail Lewis-Bowen, Johnson & Johnson
11. Wheat and Chaff , Peter Richards

Intranet or intranet-related consultancy blogs

1. AlexManchester
2. Column Two, James Robertson
3. Globally local…locally global, Jane McConnell
4. Intranet Blog, Toby Ward,
5. Intranet Experience, Sean R. Nicholson.
6. Intranet Focus Martin White
7. Intranet Life (IBF)
8. Intranet Matters, Stephan Schillerwein.
9. Intraskope (internal communication, some posts related to intranets)
10. Jboye Blog (many posts are intranet-related)
11. Michael Sampson: Currents (collaboration)

Intranet Groups Online

I’d like to give special recognition to Dorje McKinnon, a “real intranet manager” who finds the time and energy to facilitate an online group. I don't know of other cases like Dorje!

1. Intranet Benchmarking Forum, Linked in group managed by the Intranet Benchmarking Forum. Approval required to join.
2. Intranet Global Forum, Facebook group created by Toby Ward. Open to anyone interested in intranets.
3. Intranet Professionals, Linked in group created by Anne Mitchell. Open to all intranet professionals.
4. Kiwi Intranets, An Online Group for people that reside in New Zealand who manage or maintain intranets. Anyone is welcome to join. Founder Dorje McKinnon.
5. NetJMC&Co, Linked in group created by Jane McConnell. Dedicated to intranet managers. Approval required to join.

You can find permanent links in the lists in the left column of this blog.

Please repost, link to or tweet about this list to help give all these people the coverage they deserve!

Get in touch if you have a blog or group that falls into one of these categories, and I'll add you to the list. If you are listed above, and want to change how I described you, let me know!

Is your intranet team being down-sized?

Is your intranet team being down-sized? If so, you are in a minority. You should absolutely share the following stats with your senior management.

The 4th annual Global Intranet Strategies Survey indicates that over 2009....
- 27% of intranet teams have increased in size
- 60 % of intranet teams have remained stable
- Only 12% have been downsized

This is encouraging news during the current economic crisis. These figures represent roughly the first 100 participants in the study, and may change.
However, previous survey results (3 years of experience) have shown that the first 100 or so of participants are a reliable indication of the overall trend.

Have senior management realised that intranets are essential for doing business - internally and eternally? I really hope so!!

Have you signed up to participate in the study?
You'll receive a free copy of the "Global Intranet Trends for 2010" report in exchange for your time and contribution.
More info here: http://netjmc.com/survey/sign-up-JMC-global-intranet-survey-2009-2010.html
Please get in touch if you have any questions or comments.

Intranet Checklist for the Flu Pandemic

 With enterprises preparing their plans in case of a flu pandemic this fall, now is the time to get your intranet ready.
If you haven't started yet, you'll barely have time to make it before the flu hits according to predictions in many countries, including where I live. I strongly recommend you give the checklist below to your intranet sponsor or CEO. Make sure they know how much the intranet can help your organization get through this crisis about to happen.

(Influenza ward at Walter Reed Hospital, in Washington, D.C. during the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918-1919. Wikipedia. Public domain.)

Business critical checklist:

1. Can staff access the intranet from home?
2. Do you have on line collaboration spaces and tools in place so that teams can continue to work?
3. Is your senior management team ready (psychologically and technically) to communicate to staff via blogs and on line chats?
4. Have you set up extranets or other online solutions with your key clients and your key partners so that you can continue doing business?
5. Have you equipped all your managers with smart phones?
6. Do you have the means to send urgent messages to all managers? (text messages, twitter channel, ...)

7. Are your critical HR processes on line so that staff can carry out their basic administrative needs without coming in to the office?

Real important checklist:

8. Do staff have access to real-time chat tools for their daily communication needs?

9 Are you preparing training materials in the form of podcasts and videocasts so that new employees can get up to speed fast?

10. Have you started communicating with staff about the possibility of having to work from home or work in circumstances where our normal communication around the coffee machine may not longer be the norm for a while?

The 2009 Global Intranet Strategies Survey deals with all the points above (and many others) so if you have not yet signed up to participate, please do so. More information here: http://netjmc.com/survey/sign-up-JMC-global-intranet-survey-2009-2010.html

Will intranets become scientific?

These are exciting days for intranets!

Studies done by different organizations, in different parts of the world, with different populations and very different survey strategies are finding similar results.

I wrote about how JMC and Nielsen Norman found the same figure when looking at intranet resources: Size of intranet teams: Nielsen Norman and JMC agree. It has happened again with Prescient Digital Media and JMC.

Prescient Digital Media and JMC in synch on social media

Toby Ward, Prescient Digital Media, has published: "Intranet 2.0: Social media becomes mainstream on the corporate intranet."

Toby and I have talked several times over the past year when we have met at different conferences, comparing notes on the results we were seeing in the (1) NetStrategy/JMC Global Intranet Strategies survey and (2) the Prescient Digital Media Intranet 2.0 survey. (I'll refer to the first as JMC and second as PDM from here on.)

First, some background on the two studies

The JMC study is a yearly event (now in its 4th year). It targets intranet managers who must be pre-approved before they can participate. It deals with many intranet issues out of which social media is only one topic. It is a deeper survey, requiring from 45 to 60 minutes to complete. 226 organizations worldwide participated in 2009.

The PDM survey, also conducted on a global scale, was more open in inviting people to report on their 2.0 initiatives. Anyone could participate, but only those who identified themselves received a complimentary copy of the full final report. The survey, as its title suggests, was primarily focused on social media, although a number of questions on other intranet topics were included. It took place between autumn 2008 and spring 2009, and 561 organizations took part. It was a considerably shorter survey.

When looking at the usage of social media tools, the two surveys used different scales:

• PDM - 5 levels of adoption: "no plans and no interest", ""none but considering options", "not yet but have plans", "some, limited use" and "enterprise use".

• JMC - 5 levels of adoption: : "not currently used", "being tested", "used in some parts", "in general use", and "optimised".

Comparing PDM's "enterprise use" with JMC's "in general use" plus "optimised" , we see some tools where the two surveys are amazingly close, and others where the JMC figures are more conservative.

"Old-time 2.0 tools" - nearly identical numbers! 

What I call the "old-time 2.0 tools" got similar results in the two studies. By "old-time", I mean those tools that have been around for years, long before social media and 2.0 became hot. Although they have been put under the 2.0 umbrella by many people, they've been around much longer: instant messaging, podcasts, rss, photo & video sharing and discussion forums.

Instant messaging:
PDM: 29 % "enterprise use"
JMC: 27 % "in general use" plus "optimised"

Podcasts:
PDM: 6 %
JMC: 7 %

RSS:
PDM: 13 %
JMC: 11 %

Photo or video sharing:
PDM: 9 %
JMC: 11 %

Discussion forums:
PDM: 19 %
JMC: 18 %

"Hot" social tools: PDM higher, JMC lower 

"Hot" social media tools make user-generated-content widely available. They open up the enterprise. These tools require special governance, or so many organizations think. In fact, normal, professional code of conduct applies to them, but they still scare us. These are the ones that make management nervous.

Internal blogs:
PDM: 13 % "enterprise use"
JMC: 4 % "in general use" plus "optimised"

Internal wikis:
PDM: 17 %
JMC: 6 %

Social networking:
PDM: 6 %
JMC: 1%

Tagging:
PDM: 9 %
JMC: 4 %

Getting more scientific

It seems logical to me that a survey like Toby's which is directly focused around 2.0 will attract participants who are specifically interested in 2.0. On the other hand, the JMC survey targeted intranet managers in general, regardless of their interest in 2.0.
So, I conclude that the differences on the "hot" social media tools and the similarities on the "old time" 2.0 tools confirm that each survey is coherent within its targeted population.

Question to readers: Will intranet strategy and management become a science one day?
My take is that we are clearly building a more solid basis for analysis and decision-making.

- - - - - - - - - -

Note: the 2009 Global Intranet Strategies survey is currently open, and will close at the end of August. If you'd like to participate and get a complimentary copy of the Trends for 2010 report, get in touch. Signup procedure explained here.

How to kill an intranet

  Four easy steps if you'd like to bring sudden death to your intranet. (This is a real story!)

1. Remove or redeploy the intranet team, and put external communications in charge.
2. Stop training authors.
3. Turn the home page into a flashy news tool with lots of fancy widgets.
4. Remove all user feedback mechanisms from the home page.

This is real - I did not invent it!
All I can say is RIP (rest in peace) as in the old westerns.
Maybe John Wayne will come riding back into town and save everything! Or maybe management will come to their senses.

Thank you, my anonymous friend, for this real life example, and let's hope very few others follow this path.

Sunday in Seillans

Sunday, July 5th - the first stage of the Tour de France.
The village in the background is Seillans, less than one hour from chez moi.
We arrived around 10 am, the Tour de France went by around 3 pm. Five-hour wait, five-minute event - the riders passed in 5 minutes. But of course, the fun is in the wait!