Yesterday saw this year's 2nd IBF member meeting in the UK and 5th member meeting globally this year. Thankfully our great new meeting space had good air conditioning because we have untypically hot weather here in the UK at the moment!
A record attendance of 50 members made for a buzzy exchange of intranet news, ideas and plans for the first day, followed by a lovely evening out and a packed visit to BT centre near St Paul's cathedral. BT's intranet is currently top of IBF's benchmarking league tables in all 4 of our benchmarking areas.
Over the two days we heard updates on intranet changes from various members, a success story from Aviva about rapid Sharepoint 2007 implementation and intranet relaunch, heard and saw the use of videos and flip cams at Abbott Pharmaceuticals, discussed best practices demonstrated by members across communication & culture benchmarking and worked on practical social media policies.
We'll be picking up some key themes from the meeting over the next few blog posts, and for IBF members all the slides and documentation will be downloadable from our extranet next week.
At each IBF member meeting we have a stop press section to demonstrate and swap notes on members' current intranet successes and challenges. At last week's IBF member meeting in London one of the subjects which generated much discussion was around the use of the intranet as a communication channel in these current turbulent economic times.
Whilst some member organisations have opened up news stories and senior leader blogs to open comment from intranet users, others are finding managers still nervous to do this.
As we discussed, in the current climate many organisations have some large scale communications to do, and it's not always good news. Open and two-way communications can help, as was demonstrated by one member organisation on the day. So is this a time to open up your one-way communication habit and encourage more feedback, discussion and comment online?
One the key success factors hinges around whether the company culture is ready for it. If you have a culture where employees are encouraged feed into plans, face-to-face Q&A with leaders etc, then they'll feel happier to do the same online. If your communication culture is very one way, just opening up a comments option online probably won't suddenly provide a solution and change things.
Although it might feel risky, most of those IBF members who have embarked on open two-way on-line communications have had very successful results. One example regularly shared outside the IBF group is BT.
So questions to ask yourself - does your intranet support your current
communication culture? Is it ready for the next one? Is it adapting to
changing times and changing communication cultures? Will it be ready
when it's really needed, or if a new leader comes along with a different
style?
In a post last month, Sam Marshall talked about some recurring patterns in intranet strategy and governance. Having recently joined the IBF benchmarking team, I’ve been digging around in the archives to see how members fare in another area of the IBF benchmarking model: communication and culture. This looks at how well the intranet supports the culture of the organisation and functions as a two-way communication channel.
Looking at how organisations score, one of the weakest areas within communication and culture is how effective the intranet is at making employees feel informed about what’s going on and that they can contribute to the organisation. The themes arising here where scores are weak include:
The intranet is seen as a one-way channel to push information and communication to employees, with other channels (often email) used for getting employee input and feedback.
A lack of visibility of senior executives online and, even where they are visible, a lack of opportunities for employees to engage in two-way discussions with them.
Surveys and polls may be run from time-to-time, but a lack of ongoing opportunities for discussion.
Where two-way communication does happen it is carefully managed and edited by internal communications.
Corporate strategy is not clearly communicated via the intranet.
Recommendations for improving employee involvement on the intranet depend very much on the culture of the organisation, and include:
Making sure that senior leaders are visible online and enabling employees to interact with them (e.g. – via online chat or Q&A sessions)
Introducing less formal two-way communication options, such as the ability for employees to comment on news articles and internal blogs.
Facilitated discussion boards that allow employees to discuss business-related issues. Discussions may be pan-organisational, or focus around a particular event or area of the business.
Gathering feedback from internal cascades or team briefings via the intranet.
Where employee questions and concerns are answered via email or in face-to-face sessions (e.g. – town hall), posting them, along with the answers and any additional follow-up material, to the intranet
One of the things we ask in an IBF Benchmarking exercise is how well connected the intranet team is to its users. The best companies have feedback tools on the intranet, work closely with the IT helpdesk and with the publisher community to listen to what users want.
However, this doesn’t mean you always get good advice by listening to what users say. There are potential limitations such as:
Users tend to ask just for incremental improvements to what they already know
Comments may be from a vocal minority and not be representative of what most people need
The request may be at odds with your organisation’s strategy
For example, a commonly heard message when talking to users about information-seeking is that most people say they would prefer to ask a colleague than search a system such as an intranet. This has been shown even as far back as Tom Allen's work in 1977 (pdf).
However, if you dig deeper, this doesn’t appear to be true of all situations. Older generations may have an ingrained expectation that databases rarely have the right answer because they used to require complex search syntax; teenagers seem to assume Google can answer everything (limitation 2). Some types of information are much more likely to be available from a system than a person. If you wanted to know film times at the local cinema, would you have more success asking a friend first or use the web? (limitation 3).
Finally (limitation 4), one reason why intranets are attractive is that they can reduce internal service costs. You may not want highly-paid staff answering the phone all day for routine queries, no matter how much the caller may prefer that mode. You want to keep them free for the high-value, non-routine work that really needs people to people interactions. Each query has a cost, but asking a colleague in an organisation doesn't usually expose the requester to that cost. If your staff were a premium-rate helpdesk, its unlikely they would be troubled so readily if the alternative was to get the answer on an intranet for free.
I’ve
recently been doing some research for an IBF report titled: “The inclusive
intranet: Meeting the needs of hard-to-reach staff” – soon to be released to
IBF members! So it seemed appropriate that I started this blog post while
working in a cafe today, connected up to work on my laptop and mobile
broadband, with all the usual connections to the world and my colleagues via
email, IBF extranet, Twitter, Yammer, Twirl etc.
The
ability to work anywhere, anytime is increasingly being demanded by workers
across a range of industries, and as we keep hearing – by the time Gen Y enters
the workplace this kind of flexibility is going to be expected as a matter of
course. But as well as being the product of shifting patterns of work, the ability
to connect to the tools and information needed for work is a fundamental issue
for some, hard-to-reach groups of employees. For example:
factory workers
retail staff
field engineers
building inspectors
consultants
sales teams
flight and rail
workers
catering staff
building inspectors
call centre
representatives
insurance
assessors.
Intranet managers looking to bridge the gap and extend
the intranet experience to such groups face a number of challenges:
Work
location can mean no computer access or slow connection speeds where access is available, and with the potential unsuitability of the environment restricting
options for offering intranet access.
Mobility
can be an issue where staff who are frequently on the move only have limited
access to the intranet on company premises – security fears or cultural issues
such as trust can hold back moves to extend access.
Job
role can impose constraints such as computer use being seen as detrimental to
productivity (for example, in a factory or retail environment), time
constraints (for example, in a call centre) or even no intranet access for
staff in temporary roles.
So,
why bother extending the intranet to these audiences? As part of the research I
interviewed five very interesting case studies - from ArcelorMittal, Boots,
Centrica, CoreMedia and Nokia – to find out about the benefits they’ve realised,
and which included:
Better
communication – for example, fast and effective communication to factory
workers via intranet kiosks.
Increased
productivity – for example, eliminating re-entry of data by enabling data entry
from the field via mobile devices.
Better
engagement – for example, enabling staff on the move to build relationships and
make connections with colleagues.
Cost
savings – for example, automating key processes via the intranet and making
them available to all employees.
Improved
customer service and sales – for example, enabling retail staff to track
performance via in-store PCs and tills.
Attraction
and retention of talent – for example, providing mobility options to employees
in the sales force.
Improved
business continuity – for example, mitigating the impact of a disaster by
enabling remote access to critical business functions via mobile devices.
The
report also offers recommendations on how to overcome the challenges and
realise these benefits, also looking at the technology options for extending
intranet access in innovative ways. Highlights of the advice and best practice
covered in the report include:
Not
delivering what the intranet or communications team think that a particular
audience need! Getting stuck in locally can be very revealing for a head office
team who may have no previous experience of (for example) how a call centre
representative or field engineer works. Even if this isn’t possible due to
travel restrictions, much can be done to get a real insight to local needs.
Getting
senior management backing, often from a local senior manager of the audience in
question. For many companies, extending the intranet to (for example) a field
sales force or large factory population may be seen as an essential progression
for the business, rather than having a hard and fast business case.
Helping
users who may be less familiar with computers to get up-to-speed by offering
appropriate training and support options such as a helpline, encouraging use by
migrating key procedures online, or training a core group of champions/
managers to help others. A gradual approach seems to work best in most cases
and also allows for any cultural barriers to be brought down.
Establishing
rigorous governance – once a previously hard-to-reach audience gets intranet
access it can be a case of the floodgates opening and head office
(unintentionally) bombarding them with information. In a way it’s a “champagne
problem”, showing that the new tool has really struck a chord. Nevertheless it
will require rigorous ongoing governance to protect such audiences from
overload, and help head office get the best of the new channel. Having managed
a call centre intranet myself, I know that this challenge shouldn’t be
underestimated!
The report is packed full of practical
examples which I hope will help other intranet managers successfully navigate
the road to extending their intranets to hard-to-reach staff... coming soon to the IBF extranet.
Last week I spent some time putting together a document outlining best practices for migrating content over to the new SharePoint platform.
J&J will be moving off their existing Documentum e-room platform and over to SharePoint over the course of the next year or so. Right now, as we begin to communicate to teams about the SharePoint features that enable and facilitate collaboration, the immediate question is most often "so how do I migrate my e-room?"
The challenge is to facilitate the easy migration of business-critical information without recreating the same static dumping ground on the new Teamsite. And while business groups are asking for help from automated e-room to Teamsite migration tools, the IT Services organization in charge of the program has decided that such tools will only serve to move the large piles of outdated stuff from one place to another. So they are taking the position that a manually-managed migration is the only way to ensure a good Spring cleaning of the e-rooms.
Since there is a bit of consternation, and not a small amount of confusion around this whole process, I needed to quickly figure out an approach that would meet the requirements of the procurement teams while supporting the use of the collaborative capabilities of SharePoint that is the whole point of the platform. It would be a pity, after all, to just use the thing as a document library, and that's it. But I fear that this is very much a possibility with SharePoint, unless care is taken to guide the creation of the teamsites carefully, and monitor, encourage and push for collaborative, event-driven activity around work flows and processes.
Sounds easy!
Well, to start with, I came up with a few ideas that could be useful to others who are faced with the same challenges (regardless of the orginal platform):
Think about work activities, not document folders: Since SharePoint offers a lot of opportunities to integrate work information with work activities - such as contacting team members, responding to questions or problems, or collaborating on a document, a problem, a project, or an event, the crux of the whole effort is going to be getting people to start looking at documents not just as pieces of information, but as elements in work activities that can be managed through the Teamsite:
This way, team can start to discuss, edit, share or review not only documents, but next steps, tasks, activities, events, meetings, etc all around a specific project. All this information can be pulled together into a view that the business owners define.
So, as you upload documents and folders, consider the following questions, then consider associating the information with the capabilities and functions available on your teamsite:
What are the work activities around this information?
Who needs to act on this document? Who is part of the work activity? (permissions on the document, or the teamsite)
How is it created, edited, reviewed and improved? (Create a wiki view of the document)
When and How do you discuss the document contents? (discussion forum, events calendar)
Who needs to reference it? (visitor permissions to the document or site)
How can it be found? (test for search, add to general Intranet site)
Does the data change? (KPI, data tracking web part)
How long does the document remain active? Where are old versions? (archiving/naming schemes)
We are all still very much in the "learn as we go" phase here, so I'd be interested in thoughts from others who have handled the SharePoint migration challenge before - did everything just end up in a new pile of documents on SharePoint? Or was anyone successful in actually getting work-related activities and collaboration active around these former, static repositories of information?
I was glad when IBF asked me to blog this week: It’s been three weeks since I began my new
role as Manager of Portal and Collaboration at Johnson & Johnson, and in
that time I’ve been working hard to get a picture of the current environment; evaluating
Web sites, IT infrastructure, culture and organizational makeup as I begin to pull
together a strategy for driving collaboration across this highly decentralized function.
To begin with some background; J&J recently transformed
their Procurement function by realigning the organization. One part of the
transformation clustered procurement activity into major categories. In J&J’s highly decentralized and global
organization, this means that folks who worry about finding sources for good
packaging, for example, can now connect globally and across the J&J family
of companies to find better packaging sources – increasing quality and lowering
costs.
After realigning the business, the function turned its attention
to figuring out how technology and culture could facilitate the global and
cross-company collaboration needed to achieve this vision, identifying a new
role in the function to help make this happen.
Meanwhile, J&J’s IT organization is in the midst of a
shift into the SharePoint environment. SharePoint 2007 sites and migration programs are springing up all around
the company. Some parts of the organization have been using
Documentum’s e-Room technology, so e-room migrations are also a hot topic for
user groups and teams looking at the new SharePoint platform.
My biggest challenge is to keep focused on the “big picture”
while still identifying all the moving pieces involved in a Portal rollout,
including identifying how much governance to wrap around our deployment to help
guide users into the new space.
For the high level stuff, my approach is to focus on some basic collaboration concepts:
·Create a “2.0” mindset
·Equip the Workforce
·Lead by example
·Grow from the bottom up
This is an approach that has been seen before – many tales
of successful collaborative initiatives focus on the “top down, bottom up” approach,
while the topic of how to create a “2.0” mindset is all over the collaboration
blogosphere. The concepts may be basic,
but the details required to achieve each one are more complex.
So, after identifying these concepts, I zoomed
in on the immediate challenge of deploying a new Portal, identifying on
capabilities that will facilitate or enable collaboration in the Portal
environment. A lot of these are no-brainers, but I found it useful to create a
sort of “checklist” of collaboration features to help remind us of our goal, especially
as we can easily get sidetracked by the minutia of more traditional site
migration and management activities:
Portal features for enabling collaboration Presence: Creating a sense of “people there” in an online
space can be accomplished in a few ways:
1.Real time presence through chat/awareness
indicators
2. Pictures and profiles of real
employees in the community
3.Names and contact information on pages
and documents - who to contact about this information, for more info, etc.
a.Organizational charts with pictures and
profiles connected
Communication: Collaboration can happen when traditional
communications channels are enhanced:
1.Allowing 2 and multi-way communication
among employees and between employees and leaders through discussion boards,
blogs, Q&As.
2.Multimedia: Providing video and audio
communications for key messages and meetings. Also providing traditional
material (any document, training, etc.) in downloadable formats for iPods
or other mobile media device.
3. Live polls
and surveys: Keeping an active pulse on the community and providing a draw
for return visits.
4.Use of Wikis to empower employees to be
active communicators on the Portal - not just “listeners”
Enabling work: The Portal can offer active, useful
spaces for managing projects, programs and events as an integrated part of the
online space. This is the promise of Sharepoint - integrating a “traditional”
filing cabinet web site approach with spaces that enable day-to-day
interaction, document store, tasks, schedules, events, email.
2.0 and Social networking: Here we look at
technologies that provide a lens for the collective activity of the
community. Examples include:
1.Ranking
and rating and “like minded” tools (“People who liked/used/saw this, also
did this)
2.Share tagging/folksonomies
(i.e. del.icio.us)
3.People who know people
In a few weeks I'll blog more about how I'm forming a multi-faceted collaboration approach that goes beyond the Portal to facilitate collaboration and drive culture change throughout this organization.
Encountering resistance to innovative ideas, is nothing new for intranet managers. I often hear a frustrated, “Arghhhh, why can't they see the benefits of this?” (and instead just focus on the risks).
So how do you deal with this? After all, it is of significant importance for the successful development of an intranet to overcome such resistance in a quick - and ideally lasting - manner.
In my experience, being able to show examples of other organisations that have already implemented those ideas (successfully) is one of the best way to deal with this kind of resistance. Think about it: for them your concepts are just plain new, they typically cannot envision what it would really be like to have it implemented, what it would mean for them personally in terms of change, risk and benefit. How many other intranets have people outside of the intranet department seen or used in their lives? Typically not many and if they have the are rarely very good ones.
Learning by seeing as enabler for intranet innovation.
And that's what I like most about the upcoming IBF 24 global online event focussing on intranet innovation: with IBF 24 you can actually show other people from inside your company what leading intranets look like and what kind of value they deliver to their respective organisations.
Getting your CIO, sponsor in senior management, Head of Communications or HR to physically attend a conference in a city somewhere on intranet topics might be impossible. Getting them (or any other stakeholders) to join you in a meeting room in your own company to have a look at the intranets of IBM, SAP, Nokia, Nissan, IKEA, Mircosoft (or any other of the presenting companies) might be far more likely to be crowned by success. And if they like what they see there and have their doubts resolved by the intranet managers of those companies, then chances are good that from this point on resistance to change diminishes.
As intranet people, we’re often to be found facilitating or participating in conversations and initiatives relating to collaboration. And especially with the intranet becoming more and more a medium for these ways of working. But let’s step back a moment, and get our hands dirty with this collaboration business, from the ground up.
While participating on a discussion forum recently, the topic came up around our willingness to collaborate and share. One posting in particular encouraged sharing from members irrespective of how they perceived their knowledge or experience, or whether they thought that they had the “right” answer. And it went on to point out that only through our shared experiences and conversations will we generate new knowledge and answers.
We know this! And at a fundamental level, trends such as knowledge management and Web 2.0 encapsulate an almost intuitive reaching out towards these kind of interactions and the value they can create. Yet the barriers to these interactions remain formidable, even with technology increasingly available to support them. At one level, these barriers are about the traditional structures of corporate culture which are largely proving incompatible with more open, emergent ways of working. But these structures didn’t appear as if by magic, and so at another level, we get to look at the personal values and behaviours that we have as individuals around collaboration (online or offline). And to make these values and behaviours at the centre stage. Otherwise, we can debate all things 2.0 until we’re blue in the face, and until the trend fades away leaving little real change in our organisations.
So, what are these values? This is not an exhaustive list, but here are the one’s I would start with as being key...
Willingness (to be wrong!) - as in the example I started with, we have to be willing to share the knowledge and experience we do have, and take it from there. A good litmus test is: how willing are we to ask the so-called “stupid” question?
Responsibility for our actions - doing things because we know they will add value for the organisation, our colleagues and ourselves (not because they’re in our end of year objectives).
Openess about our activities, looking for the synergies between our projects and others, blogging (for example) about these projects and their real progress (rather than “controlling the message” when something doesn’t go quite to plan).
Spirit of adventure in all that we do! Being prepared to experiment, and see the opportunities for using the tools available in perhaps uncommon ways to create value.
We all have our areas for improvement, but an individual embodying the majority of these values in an organisation no longer has the need for “engagement” or “empowerment”, rather a guiding purpose and supportive framework to go about their business. Now that’s what you call changing corporate culture from the ground up! Ok, so we can’t avoid the other barriers, but it’s always refreshing to look at these things from the perspective of what individuals can do. And who ever failed to be inspired by someone who truly lives these kind of values? As intranet people we get a unique position in the organisation (not to change the world, though it is tempting) to facilitate some of these conversations around collaboration, and influence them by example.
Update: I've just been reading David Gurteen's March Knowledge Letter - he expresses this well as the "Thinking 2.0" or "Mindset 2.0" that we need if "Enterprise 2.0" is going to live up to it's potential.
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.
