Intranet Benchmarking Forum

Governing the intranet inside and "outside" - Intranet Governance 2.0

At an IBF Member service review meeting this week, I listened to a discussion about whether it was "better or worse" to enable or prevent staff from using social software sites on the internet. One IBF Member talked about a useful document from the Trades Union Council in the UK about good practice in this area. Interesting debate but what does this really mean?

It strikes me that we are actually talking about is governance across three different online services:

• The traditional/formal intranet
• The less formal and flexible intranet including web 2.0 applications
• The "intranet outside" including staff use of services such as Facebook

Thanks go to Richard Dennison from BT for the third area of the "intranet outside" and it is intriguing to view all three facilities as part of the tool set that employees use in their work and all three require some and different levels of governance.

The issue is not about banning the use of social software sites but understanding that they are effectively becoming part of the intranet landscape of the organisation and while available for us they do need to governed as part of the employer-employee relationship.

Let's say our traditional intranet requires strictest governance: health and safety policy and HR self service needs to be correct and verifiable. The less formal "under web" can be more relaxed but still requires governance for meeting coporate standards and leaglity. The third area of intranets outside must meet standards of corporate reputation and brand/confidentiality/data security etc.

This is about appropriate governance across all intranet manifestations and that will allow organisations to include new internet based services - as well as new internal apps that arrive from the internet as blogs have done. Hopefully food for thought......

Socializing the social in social computing

At a recent IBF members meeting I listened to several Intranet managers express concerns about how this social computing thing was going to affect their employees. One Intranet Manager explained that senior leaders in his organization thought that social computing meant that employees would waste time making trivial connections, not valuable work-producing ones.

It seems that some leaders are hearing the word “social” and seeing employees hanging out in some kind of online happy hour, all on company time. It kind of makes sense, because for most, the word social still basically means “not work.”  And the celebrity of social computing phenoms such as Facebook and MySpace doesn’t really help the problem.

I’m wondering if others have felt this response from their organizations when considering implementing social computing technologies?

I was struck by how similar this discussion was to early fears about introducing chat clients for employee use. Back in the mid-90’s, managers feared that employees would fritter time away chatting about anything but work. That's because years ago, a “chat” really was nothing more than light, frivolous conversation. Yet today, chat clients are ubiquitous and powerful productivity tools. It’s interesting, however, that the original and popular term “chat” (remember chat rooms?) has been largely replaced by “instant message,” and eventually winnowed to just “IM” to describe this type of communication.

The term social computing does seem like a good way to describe the phenomenon of using technology and online services to connect people, ideas and work in a very natural, human way. But what if the term itself becomes an impediment to adoption?

The correct term for these technologies as applied to the workplace really would be Enterprise social software, but that doesn’t really improve the problem with “social.”  Or, Enterprise 2.0 might fit the bill.  I don't think I'm alone in finding the 2.0 label to be ambiguous and over-applied, however. More traditional terminology for this type of behavior might be online collaboration, or the even dustier Knowledge Management (sorry, KM folks). While these words do carry a more workaday feel, they just don’t have the same cool-factor as social computing does.

I can think of at least one innovative social computing tool which is labeled in a very inviting, yet work-minded kind of way; IBM’s well-known Jams. The word alone conjures up just the right mix of working effort and innovative creation. A Jam feels like you’re making something new and exciting, in a totally unscripted way. This is what’s missing from social, chat, 2.0, collaboration and knowledge management.

Maybe the label will evolve as these technologies become more and more mainstream parts of working life. The “social” in social computing could become less worrisome to managers as they witness the value of leveraging the collective voice of their employees.  Or, maybe social computing will evolve into collective computing, as adoption increases, and individual actions and connections accumulate to define the collective voice and spirit of an organization.

Self-service publishing: Implement with care

Self-service social computing tools such as Wikis and Blogs offer fast routes to publishing and collaboration on an Intranet. These applications enrich the Intranet “Under Web;” the informal layer that foments beneath formal information channels.  (The “Under Web” concept was listed as one of the Trends for 2008)

The under Web taps into “real” work, using social computing to allow employees to connect, collaborate and innovate in ways previously unimaginable. At a recent IBF members meeting, I heard about remote engineering teams using a Wiki to share information between Russia and China. These teams used this tool to share knowledge about work they did not know had been done elsewhere. It was a good example of how a Wiki can empower a global workforce to connect and collaborate.

For an Intranet to derive the most value from this informal space, tools must be implemented carefully.

First of all, it's important to provide Wikis and Blogs only after processes for publishing “formal” information channels to the Intranet are well established.  If the right people are publishing to the right place on the Intranet, and there is good editorial workflow and governance, then the Intranet is sturdy enough to add an open, less-structured layer of content. If there are no good controls in place, then handing everyone a Wiki to use will blur the lines between informal and formal communication. What’s worse, it may threaten the information structure needed to support robust personalization and effective information discovery.

Some organizations may be able to pull off a totally self-published Intranet, but these organizations tend to be smaller, more focused, and will have a very strong culture of online communication.

Here are some more tips for getting the best out of self-service publishing.

•  Log in using common authentication to ensure accountability for posts or edits.
• Establish User Experience guidelines that distinguish
  the Wiki or Blog space from the more formal layers of the Intranet, yet still
  visually connect these spaces to the Intranet as a whole.
• Publish and, if possible, require acceptance of,
  codes of conduct for self-service publishing. Better yet, make sure online
  communication is included in the overall code of conduct for the corporation.
• Publish FAQs or Help for getting started, how-to
  and etiquette.
• Search: Require Wiki and Blog owners to “opt-in”
  to include their content in Intranet-wide search.
• Require labels or tags before publishing.
• Automate archiving after a certain amount of
  inactivity.
• Use RSS output if available to provide feeds of
  Wiki content into Portal implementation (or elsewhere, as desired, on the
  Intranet)
•  Finally, leverage the power of this technology
  by training content managers and editors to connect their formal content
  (stories, news articles, features, etc.) with these informal channels. CMS
  templates should allow content authors to easily add links to related Wikis
  and/or Blogs in a consistent location. Easiest is to build a template that
  provides a search result window for wiki and blog-generated buzz on the topic
  of the story.

Look how far intranets have come.....

It was in 1995 that I sat in a meeting room in a major pharmaceutical company and showed a primitive demo of what the phone book could be like if it was rendered in this new system called HTML. Goodness how the executives in the room loved what they saw! Give it to us now, this could be great etc........

Like most demos, there was a good distance still to go between the practical capabilities of the technology externally - particularly in terms of what the company could tolerate internally - but the intranet journey (for that global organisation) had at least begun.

At the start of 2008 we have already seen a good deal of trends and predictions from the intranet industry (myself included) but it strikes me that before the year gets into full swing, this is a good time to reflect on just how far intranets have come in the past 10 or so years.

Intranets (probably because they are used by so many people) seem to attract high levels of generalised criticism. What we do less frequently is reflect on just how far they have progressed and how deeply they have become immersed in the fabric of organisational life. Imagine a medium or large scale organisation without an intranet? They are everywhere.........for goodness sake, even my children use them at school!

It has been quite a slow passage from that demo in 1995 to the scale of presence and penetration that intranets have today. But we appear to be entering a new maturity stage where the initial intranet chaos has been tamed and the value generation from the ever more usable online assets behind the firewall is rising at a steady pace.

Intranets will and are changing the shape of how we work. What else can we point to that can say that with confidence?  Did all the "change management" of the past decade deliver a fraction of the substantial re-structuring of where and how work is done, that intranets bring?

I can hear the cries of protest from those in organisations still trying to manage the chaos. Certainly, when you see hundreds of major intranets a year as I (for better or worse) do, then you inevitably extract and focus on those that are further ahead than others but we are all at different stages on what are fairly similar intranet journeys.......spring forward to 2018 and imagine where we will be then!