Globally local - locally global

J.Boye in Aarhus - hope to see you there

I will be in Denmark the first week of November for the J.Boye Aarhus 09 conference. I participated in the conference last year and found it to be a stimulating and friendly event.
This year I’ll be running a workshop on Tuesday November 3rd on Intranet Governance, and doing the keynote for the intranet track on Wednesday morning.  It will be the first public presentation of the Global Intranet Trends for 2010, and I need to get my presentation ready!

The programme is looking very interesting and I’m looking forward to seeing many friends again. The Aarhus conference offers lots of opportunities to network and meet new people, and I recommend that you consider joining us if you can. Let me know and we'll arrange to meet up.

Intranets & business impact

I have uploaded the presentation in the long version that I had planned to give at the J.Boye Philadelphia 09 conference. I was unable to travel and delivered a shorter version remotely.
Here is the original slidedeck. Ask me any questions you have and I'll be glad to answer them here or by email if you prefer.

Intranets & Business Impact by JMC

View more presentations from Jane Mcconnell.

Update on the J.Boye blog

I was interviewed by Dorthe Raakjær Jespersen of J.Boye about intranets: success, hurdles, major trends and what surprised me in the 2009 survey results. You can read the transcript here. on the relatively new JBoye blog.

By the way, the J.Boye blog triggers quite a lot of detailed discussions, so check it out and maybe put the feed in your reader. For a taster, read "Is corruption an issue?" by Janus Boye and the conversation that ensued. Other good posts to check out are "When system integrators take all the money" and "Decentralised web teams require central control".

How to measure the value of your intranet? IFVB by IBF

We are all looking for ways to measure the value of an intranet. Intranet managers often ask me how other organisations do it. The issue has been explored in the Global Intranet Strategies Survey since 2006, by asking some basic questions about indicators and techniques used.
We classified indicators into 4 categories:

• Soft - subjective and qualitative aspects such as increased employee satisfaction with the intranet
• Hard - objective measurements such as cost savings, decreased resources
• Quantified soft - combination of soft and hard, for example time saved converted into monetary value (dependent on agreement that the time saved does truly represent cost savings for the organisation)
• Derived - metrics using data from other enterprise or business systems such as sales reporting data studied before and after a sales portal is implemented on the intranet

One thing that is clear is that organisations with the more advanced intranets (in Stage 3 for example) measure more than the others:

• The Global Intranet Trends for 2009 Report shows that from 70 to 80 percent of all 3 stages use "soft" indicators.
• Stage 3 leads in the use of "hard indicators" (55 percent, compared to just over 30 and 20 percent for Stages 2 and 1 respectively).
• Stage 3 also leads in "quantified" at just over 30 percent, followed by Stage 2 at just over 20 percent and Stage 1 just under 10 percent.
• "Derived" are the hardest to conduct, and all 3 stages are at a similar low level under 15 percent.

The IBF team have made a significant step forward in designing a systematic approach to the question of intranet value. The IFVB (Intranet Financial Value Benchmarking) is designed to help organisations identify both the cost of the intranet and the value it brings to the organisation. It highlights both exploited and unexploited values. It is based on a full view of looking at all the functional and business areas of the organisation and includes different types of indicators.
The model was developed with financial analysts and some of the IBF’s member organisations including BT whose intranet manager Mark Morrell will be participating in IntranetsLive next Tuesday May 5th. He will be talking about how BT used the IFVB to highlight both areas of current value and new areas of potential value to explore. The IFVB model uses time-saving and increased productivity figures ("quantified soft") as one of the major types of indicators, but places them in a context that also includes "hard" indicators as well as some "derived indicators".
We intranet people know intuitively that a well-designed intranet helps people save time, thereby work more productively. However, this belief will not necessarily be shared by high level budget holders who may not have personally experienced the satisfaction of finding the right person to answer your question in seconds, or the frustration of spending a hour searching for a document and never being sure to have found the right version. The global approach used by the IFVB model, organised by function and business activity, gives more strength to the time-saving figures by placing them in a business-oriented framework side by side with other figures including process streamlining, savings in travel costs and real estate through remote and mobile working, and more.

I highly recommend tuning into IntranetsLive next Tuesday, May 5th, to hear what BT has to say about IFVB. More information here. You can get a first time visitor's pass if you are not a member.

(IntranetsLive is the monthly online intranet event created by IBF and followed by intranet managers around the world. IFVB is a service that can be purchased by members and non-members of IBF)

Unfortunately, I won't be online next Tuesday, as I'll be in Philadelphia at the JBoye event, but would love to hear from any of you on how you have gone about evaluating the value of your intranet.
Have you ever done a study on ROI?
If so, what types of indicators did you use?
Any specific point you'd like to see developed in this year's Global Intranet Strategies survey around the ROI issue?

A Knowledge Sharing Summit for Online Professionals

If you are in the US or can get to the East Coast from Europe (flights are cheap these days!) in early May, I suggest you consider attending the J.Boye conference in Philadelphia from 5 to 7 May. I'll be there opening the intranet track.
There will be other speakers from Europe which makes it a great chance to share ideas and experiences in a truly international context.
Some participants in the Global Intranet Strategies survey from the US will be there too: 3 will be presenting aspects of their intranets. We're definitely going to have a Global Intranet Survey get-together since we know each other virtually only!
If you decide to sign up, use the code "Jmcphilly" which will give you a reduction of 20 %.
I know times are hard right now and budgets are tight, but if there's any way you can make it, I'm sure you will not regret it. The J.Boye events in Europe are well-attended with lots of repeat participants from year to year. This is their venture into the US and they are doing it with a very professional, international flavor in spite of the challenging economic context. I'm looking forward to it very much.
Don't hesitate to contact me directly if you'd like more info.

Following Intrateam Event from Copenhagen

Toby Ward, IntranetBlog is doing a fantastic job blogging - in detail! - the talks given at IntraTeam Event in Copenhagen. I keynoted the first day, and thoroughly enjoyed the first part of the event. The audience was very probing in their questions.
More about that later. Unfortunately I had to return to Paris Wednesday night for a client on Day 2.
I'll blog my impressions later, but in the meantime follow what Toby is putting on line. I look forward to reading his posts from today, Day 2.

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.

Making your intranet essential - workshop 23 Feb, Geneva

I'll be running a workshop in Geneva Monday 23 February called "Making your intranet essential". Figures and data from the last 3 years of the Global Intranet Strategies survey highlight differences between intranets that are "nice to have" but not yet fully integrated into how the organization works, and intranets that have become indispensable.
We'll be looking at these differences and addressing some fundamental questions:

• What is a "mature intranet"? What role should it play in an organization?
• How can you raise senior management awareness of how intranet can help the enterprise "work smarter"?
• Can social media be introduced in cases where the current "classic" intranet is not yet up to speed? In other words, can a weak "intranet 1.0" be strengthened by injecting "2.0 elements" or is this distracting?
• How can content publishers be best supported?
• How does the role of the intranet manager evolve as the intranet becomes more critical to business?

If you're in the Geneva region, and interested, get in touch with the J.Boye group who is organizing this workshop.
If you have comments on the topic, I hope you'll share them here.
(And don't forget the new Linkedin group for intranet managers "NetJMC & Co" where topics like this can be discussed online with over 180 other intranet managers from around the world in a "closed group" with no vendors nor agencies. The group is new, and the discussions are just starting.)

IntraTeam Event 2009

I'll be off to Copenhagen again this year to keynote the IntraTeam Event 2009 event which takes place from March 3 to 5.
Last year I talked about the value intranets bring.
This year I'll be talking about "Intranets and Operational Excellence; trends and challenges". The intranet as the way of working is increasing. This brings opportunities and risks. The role of the intranet manager needs to evolve in relation to the new role the intranet plays in many organizations. This will be one of the big challenges.
IntraTeam Event 2009 is an opportunity to meet some of my illustrious intranet co-consultants from around the world: Howard McQueen based in the US; Martin White based in the UK and James Robertson based in Australia.
 You can get us all in a room at the same time, ask a tough question, and probably get at least 3 if not 4 different answers! Come to IntraTeam Event and give it a try! If you register with the code "NetJMC15" you'll get a 15 percent reduction.

Intranet Media Channel debut 4 November - free passes

The first week of November has two major events taking place in the intranet spaces. I'm excited to be part of the IBF initiative "Intranet Media Channel" - which in fact I think of more like an online radio talk show about intranets.
It follows on the heels of the very successful IBF 24 where for 24 hours we travelled around the world looking at intranets live and talking with intranet managers. I gave a short talk then about intranet trends, and will be doing a short piece on a regular basis for the new Intranet Media Channel.
You can read more about it here. IBF is offering free passes for the launch session, so take advantage and sign up.
The main items on the November 4 programme are:

• A live intranet tour by Kellogg's followed by a phone-in Q&A
• Studio guest Shiv Singh from Avenue A Razorfish in New York
• The Intranet Doctor: He’s there to heal your intranet pain!
• A day in the life of intranet manager (Catherine Murphy, Capital One)
• The TechWatch interview with David Sacks from Yammer will look at ‘how to get business value from Twitter’

I'll be doing a short 15 minute "broadcast" around some trends coming out of the current Global Intranet Strategies Survey from Denmark where I'll be for the whole week for the JBoye event, and - by the way - if any of you are there, let me know so we can be sure to arrange to meet up at some point during the week. I open the State of the Intranet track, and am running a tutorial on Making your intranet essential.