Blogs in the Enterprise

I thought I would share some personal statistics about blogs in the enterprise and hopefully others can share as well. I have heard all the rubbish about internal blogging being dead, but I just don’t believe it. Here are some of the growth stats from the last 6 months.

• Increase blogs: 44%
• Increase posts: 66%
• Increase traffic: 61%
• Increase comments: 73%

Now before people start asking about the ROI, the quality of the content and stuff like that, I want to mention what I’m so happy about. It’s the massive increase in comments. One of the biggest problems we had when the blogs platform went live was that people would email the blog owner with their feedback, rather than leave a comment. It wasn’t in their nature to post a comment that the entire company can see.

I hope that this is the start of a changing culture where people feel comfortable to have their say in the enterprise. I also hope people listen…

The 4th annual Global Intranet Strategies Survey

If you don’t know about it, you probably should, so what am I talking about? It’s the 4th annual Global Intranet Strategies Survey run by Jane McConnell. Now if you’re an intranet manager, I suggest you use the information below to sign up, and as a participant, you get a copy of the report. If you don’t qualify as a participant, I suggest you do two things,

1. Subscribe to Jane’s blog, as she refers to the report and it’s trends, and
2. Get the budget to buy this report when it comes out.

I have found this to be one of the most comprehensive surveys done on Intranets and enjoy reading it each year. I find myself mentally benchmarking sections of our intranet into the three stages of maturity and try to find ways we can improve.

Get onboard, details are blow…

 

Details on the Survey

The 4th annual Global Intranet Strategies Survey opened at the end of June and will stay open until August 31. All participants receive a complimentary copy (pdf) of the ” Global Intranet Trends for 2010″ report that will be published in the second part of October.

 

The key themes this year are:

• The workplace: Are intranets catching up with what people need to do their jobs?
• Collaboration: How does the online workplace support virtual teams and communities of practice?
• Social media: To what extent is social media being used internally and for what purposes?
• Search: Is enterprise search still a perennial problem? What strategies and resources are being put into place to optimize it?
• Ownership, governance and strategy: Who owns the intranet and what operating models and strategies are in place to drive business value?
• Measuring value: What indicators are being used to measure the value the intranet brings to an organisation: adoption, usage, satisfaction, workforce coverage, reduction of risk, business value?

 

Instructions for applying:

http://netjmc.com/survey/sign-up-JMC-global-intranet-survey-2009-2010.html

 

More information: 2009 Global lntranet Survey goes live! Participate!

http://netjmc.typepad.com/globally_local/2009/06/2009-global-lntranet-survey-goes-live-participate.html

 

You can contact Jane McConnell (jane@netjmc.com)directly for more information.

Killer apps are not always business focused.

Some of the most popular intranet apps are not business focused, but they help promote the intranet as a medium and build trust, not to forget traffic. Two of the most popular are buy and sell style notice boards and company discounts. People are often not aware that they can get good discounts on products and services just because they are an employee of the company.

I was talking to another intranet manager some time ago and one of their key metrics on the success of the intranet is around how you feel as an employee of the company. Now if you just forked out 1,800 bucks for a new home PC and found out you could get a 20% discount because you worked at Shell or BT, would you be happy.

The disappointing part is that these often get shut down by nervous legal departments. For years employees have sold things to each other, promoted social events and shared information using tea room notice boards, via email or by word of mouth, but if they do it on the Intranet, legal gets involved.

I am sure I am missing something, as I am definitely not a lawyer, but previously, all these activities were done without tracking or monitoring. Now if we move this to the corporate intranet, we track every post down to the second and by who. I feel this is a much better situation, as if someone is doing something wrong, we just remove it and ask them not to do it again. If they continue to do things wrong, we block their access.

My feedback is to push back on legal, don’t get me wrong, you need to be compliant, but push back. Ask the lawyers if this type of thing is covered in the company code of conduct. If it is, ask why it needs to be covered again just because it’s on the intranet.

Long live some fun stuff on the intranet!!!

The fall of governance.

Governance is easy to put on paper, takes some time to get setup, but it takes ages to get it working like you planned. This is the story of how quickly all that work can disappear in one re-structure, and how you can hopefully avoid this happening to you.

A few weeks ago, I was involved in a re-structure and the communication area got hit hard. This is where the problems started, as most of my governance was mapped around the communication department. The downside of having your intranet governance based around the communications department, is that they generally don’t care about structure, processes, information management, or anything other than communication, and we know the intranet is used for much more than that.

When creating a governance structure, you roughly go through these steps;

1. Define the processes for managing the intranet,
2. Define the roles and responsibilities involved in managing these processes,
3. Get this signed off by the most senior people you can find!!
4. Get people into the roles,
5. Educate them on role, weed people out, get people in, do what you need to build a community.

These roles and responsibilities often filter down the food chain from communications manager, to internal communications manager, to assistants, or contractors, or agencies, or anyone else they can find, but these end up being the first people to go when times get tuff (like now for instance).

So, generally, this is how I ended up losing 90% of my governance structure in one hit….. Dam that hurts…..

Now, how do I stop this happening again, Get it in the job description, this way the tasks get picked and hopefully assigned to one of the remaining roles. If they decide that the role is no longer needed, explain how the site is no longer needed and how quickly you can shut it downJ

So, back to re-building, I will let you know how it goes…

Intranets in the financial crisis.

During a financial crisis enterprises go into lockdown and start cutting costs. Eliminate, Simplify, Standardise, is what you will hear from management, but is this a bad thing. I have been trying to get this message across to site owners for years.

If you’ve been fighting to reduce the amount of content management systems or sites in the enterprise, it’s easy to build a business case now. Migrating content into a central CMS is a slow and intensive task, but not that expensive, while hosting and supporting multiple CMS is expensive. I did a cleanup project some years ago and managed to remove over 30 servers from0 the enterprise, replacing it with 5 (including DR).

The easiest way to get project approval and senior management support in today’s climate is to have a major cost savings. Unfortunately, they’re not as open to improved processes and knowledge retention as a business case at the moment.

The funny thing about improving navigation

Improving search and navigation of the intranet is one of our key goals, but it’s hilarious the reaction of people when it starts to surface things that they never knew about, or thought was long gone.

As the intranet manager, users often think you are also the content owner, not the co-ordinator, so you get blamed for a lot of stuff. A recent initiative we did was to surface all the services available for users in a targeted directory, which so far has been very successful. The only problem was that is surfaced more than some expected. There was one piece of content that I was told needed to be removed and I should never have put it up. I’m sure it came as a shock when I advised them it’s been on the intranet since Jan 2007…

It’s good it’s bad..

Implementing things to a global audience is fun and scary at the same time. I hate the fact that people only give negative feedback and keep the rest to themselves.

 

 

 

 

 

Internal blogging

Last year we started using a blog to be more transparent around feedback we received on the employee portal. People where honest, brutally honest, and I was concerned for a while, but after a few weeks, they people who were most angry about the changes became our biggest allies and thanked us for being more open.

We worked out that the main issue is that users think you should be able to change the functionality of an application overnight, so they think we are ignoring their feedback and doing nothing. When we started blogging, we were able to keep them up to date with the progress, and started involving them in the decision making process, so if we were changing the look and feel of something, we would create 3 mock-ups and have the users decide which they preferred.

A good day with SharePoint workflow

 

As SharePoint continues to dig its claws into the enterprise, it’s great to see little things that work well. I have been working on a collaboration site, and the business requirements spiralled out of control and it soon became a million dollar project. The main cost was around setting up complex workflow processes, but personally I think these are dangerous. You can spend so much time trying to get it right, and inevitably people go back to email as it gets too complicated.

 

I played around with the collect feedback workflow (standard out of the box) in my collaboration site, so I can request feedback on a document like a project charter, or functional specification. I then put in the email addresses of the people I want feedback from, gave them a due date and hit go. My colleague was sent an email with a link to the document, and the ability to provide feedback. It’s all tracked, and easy for me to acces.

 

This simple task, when using email, can often get out of control and time consuming, adding time and cost to the project. Using SharePoint I can set a due date and advise people that if they do not provide feedback in the time provided, the offer will be closed. Bit of tuff love to keep the project on track…

Building web applications in the enterprise

Building web application in the enterprise is an interesting game. The problem is that large enterprises come with many processes, so if you are building something that is going to be available to all staff, you need to be transparent to the whole organisation. This means too many cooks in the kitchen.

For me, this is the death of the quick win, or the killer app.

Do you think Wikipedia could have started in a large enterprise, no, not a chance, it would have had five layers of workflow, sign off processes, too many permission levels, content staging environments for legal to sign off and a few other things I can’t even think of. It’s too simple, but it works.

Personally, my new strategy is phases. From now on, every application will have two phases, minimum, something like this;

• Phase 1 – This is the killer app, remover all unreasonable and overly complicated functionality, tell stakeholders that it will be in phase 2.
• Phase 2 –This is where you add the complicated part if you think it’s still needed and adds value, push all unreasonable requests to phase 3.
• Phase 3 – Due to budget constraints, phase three has been postponed indefinitely.

Just because the enterprise is complicated does not mean the web needs to be.