Intranet Benchmarking Forum

Members focus on Intranet Usability - and do we use 'real' people for personas?

At IBF I've just chaired our first member meeting in London of the new decade, and as usual with our established confidential community of intranet leaders there was much debate and discussion!

Our focus for the day was intranet Usability, one of IBF's core benchmarking areas.  This short video clip from Louise Hewitt, one of IBF's usability benchmarking leads describes the key content for the day.

We had live links to intranets from member such as United Utilities, Scottish Government and a video tour from BT.  When digging into persona use we heard about examples from BDO Stoy Hayward, Corus and the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF).   We talked about the updated benchmarking model at IBF and members shared their good practices, as highlighted by the benchmarking, and of course, their challenges.

One of the many areas for deep discussion and debate was around persona use, in a session led by Benchmarking Lead, Sam Marshall.  Members had mixed experiences in using persona's, although all seemed to agree they are a great tool in focusing developers and publishers on the user.  We talked about the process of persona development, how it can be a long, detailed and in depth process, or actually how a simple in-house workshop can produce excellent learnings for an intranet team.  The act of creating persona's as a team can reveal a lot about your users you didn't know or had maybe forgotten.

Debate occurred around the use of fictional personas vs real people personas, with one member advocating the use of real people as they'd had great success in this.  Those people involved had become intranet ambassadors for a new intranet.

We wrapped up the 2 day event with a tour and dinner at the National Theatre and then a visit to Citi Group Centre in Canary Wharf. Citi gave us all a very open insight into their global intranet development plans, and gained lots of ideas and feedback from the membership group in return.

We're now busy planning our New York meeting in March, our Paris meeting in May and London meeting in June.  If you're an IBF member we'll see you there - if not why not consider membership and get involved in this community of good practice sharing.

Intranet Garden Video Blog February 2010

It's a cold and wet February in the garden at the Engineer, as Paul Miller - CEO and Founder of the Intranet Benchmarking Forum - discusses the new world for intranets as they become a metaphor for the world of work and technology. As intranets move outside the firewall, Paul discusses their future as a non static entity outside the organisation. Watch this space.

 

 

Time to tag? IBF explores intranet social bookmarking

Social bookmarking was part of the new wave of applications including blogs, wikis and social networking that swept through the web in the early 2000s. Along with content sharing sites Flickr and YouTube, social bookmarking service Del.icio.us (now Delicious.com) which was launched in 2003 introduced the public to the concept of users being able not only to generate content but to enrich it with tags that meant something to the consumers of that content whether they had created it or not.

While some social applications such as blogs and collaboration tools have been adopted behind the firewall in around half the organisations surveyed by IBF last year, social bookmarking or tagging would not appear to have found as much favour: just one in ten organisations said they were already using social booking on their intranets. This is puzzling because the potential applications for social bookmarking would appear to be broad and barriers to entry would appear to be low with a number of free and web-based solutions available. In addition, major social software suite vendors Jive and IBM already include bookmarking applications while Microsoft has added it in SharePoint 2010.

In 'The Art of Tagging' briefing paper, just published on the IBF member extranet we look at the potential for social bookmarking behind the firewall including how so-called folksonomies compare with more traditional, structured information architecture such as an enterprise taxonomy. As well as comparing these tools we look at whether the two contrasting approaches to knowledge management are mutually exclusive or whether there are opportunities for the two to work together. We also investigate whether some other applications can benefit from integration with social bookmarking including search, content management and employee directories.

In one example we look at the role social bookmarking can play in enhancing the employee directory:

"Unlike traditional, centrally controlled taxonomy or tagging systems, social bookmarking permits organisations to make use of the connections between people and the content that interests them. This is a key feature of what IBF calls ‘wave three employee directories’:

"All these connections require a focal point where they can be brought together. This is where the employee directory comes into play: every connection can ultimately be traced back to a person and aggregated in his or her Employee Directory profile. The profile thus becomes a rich source of information not only about content associated with employees, but also about their network inside the organisation and their activities. In this way, the wave three Employee Directory is the 'behind the firewall' equivalent of social networking sites such as Facebook or LinkedIn, adapted to the information and communication needs of employees within an enterprise."

 The benefits of social bookmarking in this context lie in:

• enhancing the directory with words employees have used to tag content and showing this as part of an employee record
• using recent tags used to update a ‘current interests’ section in the employee profile
• facilitating the discovery of employees with similar interests or facing similar issues."

The paper makes reference to several case studies and includes practical implementation tips for intranet managers considering social bookmarking in their organisation.

Are you using social bookmarking in your intranet landscape? What has been the impact in your organisation?

This is a guest post from IBF Research Associate, Andrew Marr. IBF Members can download the full briefing paper, as well as accessing our extensive research archive, on the Member extranet. You can find out more about IBF's Research Programme and download free reports on our website.

Intranet Garden Video Blog: Financial Value Special

In this first Garden Video Blog Special of 2010 - Paul Miller comments on why it's essential to know the key exploited and unexploited value areas of your intranet. To finally put a monetary figure on the value of your intranet assets and services - IBF has developed its Financial Value benchmarking.