Globally local - locally global

A must-read for intranet managers: Twitter = 17 things

"Twitter makes altruism the work of a few seconds". This is a quote from Andrew McAfee's blog post "“17 Things we Used to Do”. Maybe "altruism" is not the right word for enterprises, but the spirit of the word is definitely right on.
This post is a must-read for intranet managers.

Andrew concludes his post with: "I think it’s important .... to keep in mind that not all exchanges are governed by incentives, mutual benefit, or economic rationality. Sometimes they’re governed by simple neighborliness, and Twitter is an awfully big neighborhood."

An enterprise is also "an awfully big neighbourhood" or should be!

I am still surprised that Twitter has not made a bigger entry into the enterprise neighbourhood. The data from the Global Intranet Strategies Survey from 2008 revealed that only 15 percent of the enterprises at Stage 3 (most advanced) intranets say that they are "testing" micro-blogging or "implementing it in some parts of the organisation". Zero % have optimised it or extended it to "general use".

Five percent of the enterprises with intranets at Stage 1 (least mature) are testing it, with 95 percent saying they are not considering it.

I expect the numbers to increase significantly this year. I sure hope they do!

Any of you out there with "Twitter behind the firewall" stories to share?

And, by the way, I should NOT be saying "behind the firewall". That's a concept that is changing rapidly as organisations are finally saying (out loud) that a lot of their project work involves external people, and that employees and external partners need to share information and therefore information systems.

So, any of you out there with "Twitter to help us do our jobs" stories to share?

How great ideas are killed

Many thanks to Bertrand Duperrin who pointed me to "How great ideas are killed", a too familiar story for many of us!

How Great Ideas Are Killed

View more presentations from someguy05896.

Bertrand publishes frequently in both English and French here: http://www.duperrin.com/english/ He's one of the top bloggers in France on the subject of enterprise 2 and I recommend adding his blog into your reader. (Bertrand is a consultant with BlueKiwi-software.)

Good speaker lineup for JBoye Philadelphia 09 conference

J.Boye has put together a wide-range of speakers for the inaugural J.Boye US conference.
Creator of one of the highly successful conferences in Europe for several years attracting speakers from both the US and Europe, the J.Boye group has set their eyes on the US, and are aiming to bring more European and North American expertise together on the other side of the ocean.

The dates are May 5 to 7, with an early bird discount available until March 15th.

I'll be there, along with some US-based participants in the Global Intranet Strategies survey who will be presenting case studies. I hope to see you there too. We'll definitely arrange a Global Intranet Strategies "meet physically" session since some of us have never actually met. Be sure to let me know if you are planning to attend the conference.

Social networking benefits

We hear about this from time to time, but I actually saw it happen (and helped it happen). I saw two intranet managers from the same, very large global group connect to each other via NetJMC & Co (linkedin group for intranet managers) when one of them posted a question that the other had already worked on.
There was no way these two people could have come together other than through this or a similar initiative.

I have three comments about this:

• They connected via an external platform, created by an external party (me).
• They had no internal means of making this connection.
• Yet, they already knew each other through other means.

They can now choose to continue the discussion privately (one-to-one) or inside NetJMC & Co, hoping to attract other people with experience to share, or both.

Have you witnessed similar of other benefits from social networking within your organization? The more anecdotal evidence we can build as a community, the easier it will be for intranet managers to convince their organizations to experiment with social networking features.

Social networking features were among the lowest internally-used social media tools in the data from the 2008 Global Intranet Strategies survey. One percent have optimized social networking or use it throughout the organization. 28 percent are experimenting with it or use it in some parts of the organization. 70 percent say they have no intention to use it, at least for now!

User-generated content for employee directories

I was invited to speak at the J.Boye inaugural meeting of the intranet manager community of practice in Geneva today. (photo view from the window of the meeting room)

I talked about social media inside the enterprise, sharing figures, trends and firsthand experiences from the Global Intranet Trends for 2009 report.

What I found the most interesting part of the day was how the participants described the social media-based features they would like to implement in their intranets in the future.

Many of their wish-list features centered around the concept of user-generated content for enterprise directories. This is a definitely a serious gap in most intranets today. Few organizations have optimized employee directories and made them a key piece in enterprise collaboration.
The majority of organizations offer very little in flexibility and user-generated content in the directory. The numbers below are percentages of the full survey population who responded “yes, in most or all parts of our enterprise” to the following statements:

• Employee directory has a free text field where the employee can add in personal notes such as their expertise or skills. (22 percent)
• Employees can set up individual profile pages or “My pages” where they can publish information about themselves, their projects and their interests. (13 percent)
• Expertise is managed by a set of controlled terms so that expertise is comparable. (9 percent)
• The employee directory also includes information generated through social media applications such as projects and/or communities (project spaces, wikis) and blog posts, produced by the person. (4 percent)

You see here a slide from a more detailed presentation on employee directories I published for the members of NetJMC & Co (Linkedin group for intranet managers). The figures show that even Stage 3 intranets, theoretically the most mature, are not very advanced in this area.

Stage 2 leads here and I'm wondering why.
The chart compares the 3 Stages and you'll see that Stage 2 is ahead of Stage 3 in this area. This is interesting, because Stage 3 is more adventurous than Stage 2 in many usages of social media. We'll see in this year's survey if this difference when it comes to employee directories is confirmed or not. (see definitions of 3 stages here).

Dream a little - then make it happen.
Some comments from the participants in the J.Boye CoP today regarding a social media angle to directories:

• "We want to add information to the directory, make it a way for staff to declare their interests, make it searchable by all staff, tagged, and possible the beginning of a community of interest around topics."
• "We want to promote social networking so that it is easier for people to put together teams of experts. But we fear the reaction of 'why look outside our own department where we have our own experts?'."
• "If we implement Facebook-like pages, it will help the people in small units, scattered around the world to feel more a part of the group."
• "We need a dynamic, collaborative directory to share contacts among people. However, I'm not sure people will share their contacts with other people."
• "People are concerned about privacy. We want to build a well-designed, non-threatening application that makes it clear we are only sharing so-called public information, not private details."

Critical mass will be slow to come.
One thing for sure, if you open up your directories or build applications like above, you'll then be confronted with the challenge of getting employees to fill in information about themselves. Some employees will do it, of course. But the real business value will come when you get critical mass.
Lots of firsthand experiences and suggestions about overcoming this were offered by participants in the survey last year. I'll share some of them later.

In the meantime, any experiences or thoughts to share?

Wikis make people nervous. Why?

Among the most popular posts on Globally Local in 2008 were those about wikis.

You can see from the titles that they all deal with the positioning of wikis and the intranet:

Wikis versus Other

Wiki versus or Wiki plus

Wiki magic, wiki panic

How have you positioned wikis in your enterprise? Do they make people nervous?

2009: Efficiency, Energy and Voice on the Intranet

2009 will be the year of efficiency, energy and voice on the Intranet. Here's my take for the next 12 months:

1. Intranets need to catch up to what virtual teams need.

Management will look to the intranet as a way to achieve greater efficiency. Work habits and behavior are changing and will change even more, accelerated by the pressure of economic constraints. Travel is already decreasing and will continue to drop. The intranet will become the hub for virtual teams even more than it already is.
However...both the intranet and people will have to change. People will need to learn to use virtual meeting tools such as web conferencing and shared document spaces effectively. There's a lot of awareness-building and training to be done here. In many organizations, the tools are not yet in place.
Intranets and collaborative spaces are struggling to serve teams with both internal and external people. If solutions are not found by business and IT managers, teams will find their own solutions "off the grid".

The intranet manager and team who can tackle collaboration and provide efficient, workable solutions for virtual teams will raise the importance and the visibility of the intranet straight to the executive suite.

2. Intranets should be used to help energise nervous workforces.

Some people are worried about losing their jobs, being "sold", being out-sourced. Others are more stressed out because of time pressure, lack of resources, demanding deadlines and the way work is encroaching more and more on personal time.
Management needs to use the intranet even more than before to communicate to employees during this time of change and doubt. There needs to be regular, real, non-corporatespeak communication top down. It will be taken seriously if it comes along with opportunities for people to ask questions and get answers.

The intranet manager and team who can offer these features (most likely using web 2.0 tools) will take a big step towards increasing senior management awareness of the intranet and bringing real value to the organization.

2009 - a turning point for the forward-looking intranet manager and team.

I see 2009 as a year to be dedicated to efficiency, energy and voice on the Intranet. Here's what two participants in the 2008 Global Intranet Strategies Survey have to say:

“As we roll out a series of collaboration tools, the role of the intranet manager is about to explode in terms of importance and impact on the organization.”
“I expect web 2.0 to reinvigorate our user base and present new opportunities for ROI metrics. This will give heightened awareness to the intranet as a mission-critical tool.”

What's your take on 2009 for intranets? Please jump in.

Millennials not blogging? Just be patient!

In the Accenture study “New-Generation Workers Want Technology Their Way", one of the discoveries made by Accenture is that young people don't blog. Quote: 

"Blogging is more myth than reality.  Regardless of age, Millennials spend an average of only 30 minutes a week blogging.  This is far less than the time they spend searching for information on the Internet, listening to portable devices, text messaging, instant messaging, communicating on social network sites or interacting in virtual communities."

In my own experience, this low level of blogging reported by the Accenture study is not surprising. Blogs serve specific purposes in enterprises, and young people are usually the least able to fulfill these purposes at the very start of their employment in a company.

Some examples: The primary use of blogs in very large organizations (over 50,000 employees) is to distribute news.  Another major purpose of blogs in many organizations is to share expertise or to track projects. The very new employees are probably not the best positioned to write company news, to be an subject expert or to be running a project.

This is especially true of the young people involved in the Accenture study, some of whom are not yet employed. The study surveyed  "400 U.S. consumers between the ages of 14 to 27. All respondents aged 14-17 have completed at least middle school, and all respondents 18-27 years of age have completed at least high school. All respondents included in the analysis were in school, recently graduated or employed."

One of the participants in the NetStrategy/JMC 2009 Global Intranet Strategies survey reported that in his organization, the young people were very at ease with the idea of blogging, but did not have much to say. The older people on the other hand had a lot to say but were not comfortable with the tool!

I do agree with many of Accenture's conclusions, in particular the following:

“....In order to acquire and retain the best talent, organizations must understand the technologies that the new workforce expects and then find a way to support their employees without compromising enterprise security.”

However, I would not limit that conclusion to the Millennials. I have met many employees who are beyond the age of 27 (!)who feel their organizations are not yet offering them the right tools for the way they want to work.

We tend to get fixated on the word "blog" instead of focusing on the purpose. A blog is the right tool if you have 3 needs that converge:

1. Regular updating or communicating about a subject.
2. Letting other people comment and ask questions.
3. Grouping these exchanges in a fairly structured way (chronological and by category).

I have seen very little generational gap when these needs come together in an enterprise context.

What experiences have you had about blogging and generational differences in your organization?

Mixing business with personality

I was especially struck by one word on Richard Dennison's slides at JBoye08.
The word is "personality".

Richard talked about how BT is using social media and how one impact of this is "mixing business and personality" in the corporate world. He feels this is essential. There is no reason to turn into anonymous, homogenous people when we step into the work world each morning. Note he did not say "mixing business and personal", nor "mixing business life and family life".

I interpret "mixing business with personality" to mean "bringing your own personality to how you do your job" or "doing your job while being yourself".

What a difference this would make in most organisations if people could do this. Check out Richard's slides, and when you get to number 33, see how this corresponds to what's happening in your organisation.

Intranet 2.0 - hype, reality, future trends (2008)

The slide set I used at the Melcrum Intranet 2.0 forum in London last June has been viewed 3,131 times since I uploaded it to Slideshare. Nice number - (I like uneven numbers - what does that reveal about me...?).

Entitled "Intranet 2.0 - hype, reality, future trends" the slide set has attracted a lot of viewers. It detail on how 2.0 "stuff" was perceived and used last year.

I'm currently working on the consolidated data from this year's survey and will be publishing the report on November 25th. Social media was a key part of the survey.

At first glance, it seems that some of the 2.0 dust has settled. Enterprises are not experimenting more, but some are beginning to optimise. There are still a lot who say they are unable to find a business case for social media. Others - more rare - find business benefits.
More after 25 November.