jenniferbrola.com

I've seen a number of conference flyers recently that talk about "developing your Web 2.0 strategy" for your Intranet. It set me wondering if an organisation have such a thing as a separate Web 2.0 strategy - in the sense of an agreed roadmap for the next few years? The Case For Generally, when a substantial change is taking place, it does make sense to have a structured approach that involves all stakeholders and asks the usual good questions: why? Where? When? and Who? This applies if the change is internally driven (e.g. to improve supply chain efficiency) or due to external circumstances (an economic downturn is an example that springs to mind). Having a Web 2.0 strategy will allow an organisation to focus efforts - avoiding duplication of effort and sharing knowledge gained. Without it there's a risk that users become confused with multiple innovations all offering similar features, for example. It also means that resources can be pooled, so that infrastructure can be properly supported rather than 'best efforts' by an enthusiast. The Case against I can see two different camps that would counsel against a specific Web 2.0 strategy, however: The 'Integrators' will say that Web 2.0 should not be treated as something apart from what the organisation already has or is trying to achieve. A wiki, for example, is an approach to content management, so to have a strategy for wikis that is set apart from that for content management just creates parallel systems and potential conflict. Much better to have strategies for outcomes - Communication and Collaboration, for example, and use the most appropriate tool, whatever the label. The 'Liberals', for quite different reasons, would argue that the whole spirit of Web 2.0 is to experiment and see what happens. Devising a strategy misses the point. It is both lumbering and risks losing the very benefits that Web 2.0 can bring: freedom from a top-down way of thinking. Sitting on the fence My own feeling is that organisations worry too much about re-inventing the wheel. If you relax control and let it happen - who knows - you might end up with a better wheel! You at least have more people that have learned something about how wheels are made. Therefore in the early stages, the 'strategy' for Web 2.0 should be to allow experimentation with low-cost, easily-started approaches and focus on learning from what happens. The strategy should also be clear what will happen when something starts to take off. At that point it makes sense to think about a longer-term perspective and ensure it integrates both with the IT ecosystem and also the business direction.

I was recently with an IBF client who was thinking about a new navigation design and information architecture for their intranet. "Can't we just adapt someone else's?" they asked. "How different can we be?". This was a thought-provoking question. Certainly we see a great diversity of layouts and designs when we benchmark (you can see a galley of examples from the "My Beautiful Intranet" competition by signing up to Intranets Live). However, intranets fundamentally all do very similar things, so much of the diversity may well be more about history than necessity. Jakob Nielsen has also claimed that with the increasing adoption of portal software, many home pages are converging. he produced a composite image of The Canonical Intranet, which showed that at least the placement of menus and page apportioning was becoming more consistent. Where intranets differ tends to center on:

• How it reflects the company structure. The degree to which the main intranet page is a common launching point for everyone or just the homepage for the head office says a lot about how centralized or federated a company is.
• How it reflects the company culture. A people-driven organisation will typically dedicate more space to news and even two-way communication such as discussion board topics. A more results-oriented organisation may focus more on a dashboard-like approach, giving an overview of performance status or workflow tasks.
• Employee's mental models of the company. If employees have a strong and consistent mental model of how the company is structured then being faithful to this in the intranet design will help them navigate (you can test this using card sorting). The downside is that it may be more confusing to new employees, and any departmental restructuring would require an intranet redesign too.

Where I would expect to see similarities are:

• Navigation elements that are in keeping with web conventions. Users grow to expect certain patterns such as branding in a banner at the top of the page and the main menu to be down the left side (or, increasingly, vertically under the banner). Conforming with these will reduce training and support costs.
• A task-driven approach to employee services. The designs that work best tend to be those that offer a menu of employee services grouped by theme rather than the department that provides the service.

Notably absent from the above list is the nature of the business. For example, there are three IBF members all in the same industry sector, but each with very different intranets due to their organisation and culture. So my conclusion with the client was that taking inspiration from other's intranets would give  a useful head start, but there had to be concious choices about ensuring it was a good fit to what makes an organisation unique.

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
• Often people can’t visualise the hypothetical scenarios accurately and have rose-tinted expectations (see, for example, the earlier post on this blog "Can't we have an intranet search engine like Google?")
• 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.

That’s one of the questions that’ll get an airing on the debut Intranets Live programme on Tuesday November 4 (book a free guest pass). We’ll be getting the views of Shiv Singh, workplace tech guru at Avenue A Razorfish in New York –  and any of the hundreds of intranet professionals signed up for the programme will get the chance to grill him too. In a recent blog entry, Shiv contends that “intranets are not intranets any more” because they do not have to be top-down and browser-based. Instead, he says: “The best intranets take advantage of social technologies, desktop applications (like widgets) and mobile solutions to provide greater value to employees where and when they want it. It’s not about the intranet, but about employee productivity using digital technologies.” Shiv also argues in favour of intranets becoming “consolidated, dashboard interfaces that serve as a true virtual desktop” and suggests a restructuring of intranet departments so they better align with employee expectations. (The future of intranets is also something we here at IBF have been pondering. We’ve just released a series of discussion papers – exclusively to our members – under the umbrella title ‘Intranets 2015’. In them, we consider how major trends including the rise of semantic web technologies, greater workforce mobility and the growing urgency of the green agenda are shaping the intranets of the future. And our CEO Paul Miller recently wrote an article on ‘Intranet 3.0’ for consultancy Rufus Leonard.) Shiv isn’t the only big-name guest lined up for the first Intranets Live. We’re also interviewing David Sacks, founder and CEO of Yammer, about the business value of micro-sharing. Yammer is a tool for employees in the same company to share status updates with one another answering the basic question “What are you working on?” It’s just won a TechCrunch50 award. We’re already using Yammer among the IBF team. There was some uncertainty at first – one of the first posts was from a team member joking they’d given up work to focus on keeping their entries on various networking sites up to date! But a couple of months in, we’re finding it’s aiding knowledge flow, and it’s providing a boost to good old-fashioned team spirit – an elusive quality in a mostly virtual organisation like ours. David has a fascinating career history. Former COO at PayPal, he went on to produce the Golden Globe-nominated satirical indie movie Thank You For Smoking and to found www.geni.com, recently named by Time magazine as one of the world’s 50 best websites. We’ll be asking him not just about the value of micro-sharing in enterprises, but also discussing what this means for company firewalls and for intranet professionals trying to manage the ‘intranet outside’. As if that wasn’t enough, the two-hour show will also feature a live intranet tour by Kellogg’s, who are going through a major re-launch, and a ‘day in the life’ interview with Catherine Murphy, intranet manager at Capital One. Oh yes, and we’ll get an update from Jane McConnell on key findings from her well-regarded Global Intranet Survey. Plus there will be competitions, breaking intranet news and a clinic by our Intranet Doctor, who’s promising to heal your intranet pain! You can be part of it all on Tuesday November 4 (3pm-5pm GMT, 10am-12 noon EST, 7am-9am PST) by booking a free guest pass to programme one. (After that, you can choose to buy an annual subscription to Intranets Live. This will get you access to 12 more monthly shows).

There was a delay of a few months between my writing this Intranet Trends article for UK agency Rufus Leonard and its publication. In the meantime, the final trend about the financial value of intranet services has risen in prominence. But that aside, you may find this article on Intranet 3.0, of interest. Predicting the future is always a tricky subject so I started it off by tracking against my previous predictions to assess whether or not I had been successful. Let you be the final judge!

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• 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?

At last week's IBF Global Member Meeting in Liverpool there was a discussion about what to say when the CFO tells you (as the Intranet Manager) to cut back. The three main points that every Intranet Manager should be prepared to demonstrate at any time are:

1. State the current investment level
2. List current Intranet services and deliverables including their benefits to the organisation
3. List additional beneficial intranet services that can be added at low cost to help the organisation improve or cut costs

Examples of things that should be on the list for 2. or 3. (and their likely benefits) include:

• Travel Booking (saves transaction costs)
• Online Meeting Tools (saves time and travel costs)
• Live chat (can augment employee engagement in economical difficult times)
• Leadership online (as above)
• „One Source of Truth“ (can reduce risk and error, increase reputation)
• Room Booking (saves manual labour)
• On Boarding Services (enables new hires to work efficiently faster)
• Off Boarding Services (enables to minimize knowledge drain)
• HR Self Services (saves transaction costs and manual labour)
• Web Library (saves distribution costs and time on finding books, reports, etc.;   avoids duplicate buying/subscriptions)
• Sell advertising space on the intranet to external organisations (actually generates income and provides benefits to employees)
• ...

There are many more such examples and we would like to hear what your principal arguments are for using the intranet as a cost cutter as opposed to cutting intranet costs. Further reading:

• 12 ways to use your intranet to save costs
• Recession-proof your Intranet strategy

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text-indent:-.75in; mso-ansi-font-weight:bold;} @list l3:level7 {mso-level-legal-format:yes; mso-level-text:"%1\.%2\.%3\.%4\.%5\.%6\.%7"; mso-level-tab-stop:none; mso-level-number-position:left; margin-left:1.75in; text-indent:-1.0in; mso-ansi-font-weight:bold;} @list l3:level8 {mso-level-legal-format:yes; mso-level-text:"%1\.%2\.%3\.%4\.%5\.%6\.%7\.%8"; mso-level-tab-stop:none; mso-level-number-position:left; margin-left:1.75in; text-indent:-1.0in; mso-ansi-font-weight:bold;} @list l3:level9 {mso-level-legal-format:yes; mso-level-text:"%1\.%2\.%3\.%4\.%5\.%6\.%7\.%8\.%9"; mso-level-tab-stop:none; mso-level-number-position:left; margin-left:1.75in; text-indent:-1.0in; mso-ansi-font-weight:bold;} ol {margin-bottom:0in;} ul {margin-bottom:0in;} --> 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.

How many times have you heard that said?  If I had a pound for every time an intranet manager quoted their users saying this - I'd be a rich woman... But what makes enterpise search such a challange? A recent report by KMWorld describes some of this challange as..."Unlike Web search, enterprise search makes different demands on an information access platform: for better accuracy;security; more formats; more reporting tools; more language understanding; and better interaction design." From Best Practices in Enterpise Search Users want it like 'Google' - but they want it to cover everything that might be stored in the enteprise, whatever the format, they want the results to provide the most relevant and up to date results first (and it probably wasn't indexed very well in the first place!). At IBF we're currently looking at the biggest 'pain points' for our members in the area of search in readiness for our Qtr4 member meetings.  One mentioned frequently is... Management Buy-In One consistent challenge seems to be that the 'management' (or budget holder) doesn’t buy into the notion that search is an iterative process. A common refrain is (guess what) “We implemented Google. Are we there yet?”

• How do we dispel the myth that plugging in tool solves all search woes?
• What are the best metrics to manage/monitor search quality and satisfaction?
• Now that we’ve got [insert search engine], what should we do to deliver high performing intranet search? (i.e., quality, efficiency, findability, etc.)
• Now answer the question on a must-do basis - where and why do we need ongoing resource in this area?
• How do you achieve management buy in to resource this? 

On this last point, Martin White, an industry recognised expert and author in this area suggests the size of the team that should be in place behind GOOD search..."But the hard work only really begins once the search software has been implemented. On a regular basis search logs have to be analysed.... In larger organisations there may be 10,000 searches a day there may need to be a team of three or four people working behind the scenes"How many organisations really take resourcing search that seriously? Yet search is often the most frequent complaint from users For more on this, Martin's book on Making Search Work is a highly recommended read More pain points next week...

Ever felt a little isolated as an intranet manager and wondered whether you have the right people, process and technology in place? What better way to be reassured than to look at what other organisations are doing with their intranets and to talk to those responsible for them? If you were amongst the hundred or so organisations attending this years IBF 24 event then you achieved just this, watched and listened to; a series of in-depth intranet tours from the likes of BBC, BT, IKea, Nissan, Nokia and SAP, debated; establishing a balance between governance and control and learnt about how to calculate the financial value of your intranet. "A first in the global intranet space" says Jane McConnell author of the annual Global Intranet Analysis Report, IBF 24, gave those attending not only an insight into how others manage their intranets but for many a mechanism for influencing key decision makers and leveraging change. The Intranet Benchmarking Forum have published an archive of IBF 24 recordings, £400 / US$800 / €600 May you never feel lonely again! More about IBF 24

• A behind the scenes by the KM Review
• Missed IBF 24? Think again! News article
• The debate continues @ http://www.ibf24.com/

Intranet Week 2008 was held in Boston last week, the Intranet Benchmarking Forum was among the event sponsors for this IQPC conference.  IBF North America Director, Nancy Goebel, chaired the event, and Abigail Lewis-Bowen (an IBF strategist) came along to take part in panel discussions on governance and design. Some of the main themes of the two-days of main conference presentations included: 1. More and more about social networking: Everyone seems to be talking about how to introduce some aspect of "social media" into their organization. And most intranet managers seem to be attempting to do this through careful implementations of "2.0" tools, mostly the introduction of discussion forums, blogs, or "myspace" like applications. We heard the compelling story of Blue Shirt Nation, the Drupal-based networking and discussion site created on a shoestring budget by Steve Bendt and his colleagues from Best Buy. Among Steve's tips for success:

• It's important to understand the social contract your company needs
• Be a listener
• Efforts fail from poor community management, deploying overpriced, shiny features
• Never make an investment you are too proud to give up
• Okay to fail, fail frequently, with a low cost implementation you can try, try again

2. Continued move to distributed governance models: We heard a number of different takes on intranet governance, and the general trend in this area is moving away from centralized "command and control" approaches to more de-centralized, distributed author models. Whether by necessity due to budget cuts, or in response to "self-service" publishing trends, it seems many intranet teams are handing content control back over to line of business site owners, SME's and in some cases, anybody who wants to author. This decentralization seems to be facilitated by an increased understanding of the use of templated systems to ensure content quality and UE consistency. The new catch phrase for this approach seems to be the "gardener" role, where community, content, and quality is cultivated carefully and weeds gently removed as needed. 3. Poor content management solutions: Several intranet managers from larger corporations echoed a common frustration: It's difficult to find one good CMS that fits the needs of a larger organization's intranet. Marshall Alexander of Cisco told of more than one effort to deploy a centralized CMS, and Laurel Castiglione of GM told the same story, although she said a common CMS is "coming soon" for GM.  Cisco's story of deploying a hand-built solution to managing navigational consistency without a CMS in place sounded familiar: IBM's Intranet (and Internet) ran without an enterprise-wide CMS until very recently, and parts of the Intranet are most likely still migrating over to the common platform.  The lesson here might be not to wait for the perfect CMS to come along, but instead to focus on content quality and cleanup to improve information discovery. 4. Dumping intranet detritus and improving search: We heard a few compelling figures from presenters on the amount of intranet content they ditched in an attempt to improve search. Susan West from Delta Airlines said their clean-up initiative deleted a whopping 70% of intranet content, while Helen Galasso who heads up Coldwell Banker's CBWorks intranet said her cleanup eliminated 50% of content.  And it's not just large companies that have a ton of garbage on their intranets. In telling the story of how Serena Software dumped their intranet in favor of Facebook, Kyle Arteaga said that a content audit showed only a very small percentage of company content as actually proprietary. Serena puts their proprietary stuff on HiveLive and lets the rest go free on Facebook. Since every intranet has problems with search, it was interesting to hear Cisco's Marshall report less than enthusiastic on their success with the Google Search Appliance.  Great ammunition for every intranet manager who has fielded endless pleas to “just get Google.” Clearly the solution to poor enterprise search is not just about the engine, but mostly about content quality, and partly about information structure and meta data. Many intranet managers spoke of their nascent efforts to enhance search results by implementing social results along side traditional ones, through tagging and ranking tools. 5. Improving the off-the-shelf experience: With many intranet managers struggling to retrofit user requirements into off-the-shelf solutions, George Levesque from Staples, Inc. delivered an interesting look at approaches for thinking "outside the box"  and innovating by repurposing an existing products without expensive customizations. These ideas included using a mantra to stay consistent and focused on the goals of the project, while looking to low-tech solutions to basically "fake" information integration in the portal environment without high cost. Overall, Intranet Week offered a good roundup of valuable experience and insight into many interesting intranets and intranet-related projects, in an intimate setting that allowed for frequent networking and discussion with presenters.

I suppose I’ve kept Twitter at an arms length for quite a while. But as I’ve been busy researching how to extend the intranet to reach different audiences I started to take a closer look at it. I have to say that a great starting point for making sense of all this twittering business is Commoncraft’s video: Twitter in Plain English. But doing is the first step to believing, so I’ve recently started twittering, and was surprised to find myself on a new learning curve in online interaction. I’m used to email and IM (they’re comfortable!) and to blogging – but this is a different way of interacting online. I saw a description of it recently as being the “water cooler for the internet age” – the place where (in a business setting) a whole lot of connections happen and knowledge exchange goes on that wouldn’t usually occur in our more formal channels. It’s the place where I’d chat with someone and exchange the “I’m doing…”, “I’m thinking…”, “I’m looking for…”, “Did you hear about…” etc. Doing may be the first step in believing, but seeing some benefit is the real clincher! As it happens I saw that a colleague I’m following in another country was tweeting about an intranet topic that I’m particularly interested in, and was able to connect with him to get some more information. Not rocket science, but I wouldn’t have had this opportunity without the “water cooler” effect online. It’s a small (if encouraging) example of benefit, but Twitter stills feels like something else I have to go and do, rather than it being part of the natural flow of my day – so far! It seems that the potential for using Twitter in an enterprise environment is getting recognised and talked about quite a lot, here are some of the uses I’ve come across or thought of so far:

• Quick updates between virtual team members. One example I've come across is technicians out on the road: “Instead of techs calling in when jobs are running over time, they send a simple 'tweet' that gets relayed through to other techs, and to manager who can then schedule resources more efficiently.” Rather than having to call individual technicians or drivers (for example) sending a single tweet would be a more efficient way to update the whole team at once.
• The “water cooler” effect. Connecting people who wouldn’t have met otherwise, building relationships, sharing knowledge. It could also cut across organisational hierarchies in a way that the traditional water cooler can’t achieve. It may also mean that the home worker population can increase without loosing either the value or the fun of the “water cooler” connections.
• Pop-up alerts for frontline staff – a Twitter-esque application could be a good way of getting quick alerts to frontline staff, with links back to the intranet for more information where appropriate. Using something like Tweetburner, communicators could track how many people click follow up links. It would also enable an instant feedback loop from the frontline which would be great, especialy during a product launch.
• Connecting people around a particular subject – for example, using Tweetbeep I can keep an eye on any tweets relating to intranets. Within a company, I could watch particular topics of interest, project-related terms, or even updates from a particular department such as HR. While the news page on the intranet may offer a more formal stream of information, using something like Twitterfeed could enable communicators to pull together formal news updates, blog posts, and quick alerts into one stream of information – with a built-in instant feedback loop. And using something like Yahoo Pipes, feeds can be translated into different languages.
• An easy way for remote employees to log key information – for example, the time and expense tracking software from Harvest has integrated Twitter to enable employees to log a time entry or an expense while out on the road. The “powered by Twitter” mashup possibilities here are endless...
• To connect conference attendees (and those who couldn’t make it!) – Twitter could be useful both before and during the conference to help shape the agenda and provide live feedback, ideas and questions during. Taking this a bit further… there’s an interesting article about an attendee at Google’s OpenSocial conference last year sending live Tweets to his followers as it unfolded – what happened next was that he started taking questions from his Twitter group and relaying them to the speaker live. With attendance to big employee conferences generally shrinking due to belt tightening, how about connecting employees not in the room with live tweets of what’s happening in the room, and bringing their questions in?
• Informal research or opinion polls – I like the idea of using Twitter for informal research or to gather opinions around a subject. It could be used by HR or even a manager with a local team to get a quick “temperature check” of employee reactions to particular issues, as well as ideas, questions and feedback.

There are of course also lots of examples surfacing of companies using Twitter to keep in touch with customers (for example, product updates, offers and customer service) as well as it’s potential uses for crisis management and discovery. And with commercial uses of Twitter growing, there is speculation about whether they will eventually charge for business users, although how they will distinguish business and personal use isn't really clear. I’ve also come across a few mentions of companies building their own: Jitter (although I don't know if Janssen-Cilag have taken this beyond an initial trial), Prologue, and Trillr (which Coremedia have developed and been using it internally, and are now looking for companies to participate in their experimental platform). So is Twitter a serious contender for business use, or just another tool that threatens to push us over the information overload edge? The jury’s out for now. I’ll be exploring this topic further, along with other means of extending the intranet to reach remote audiences, in a research paper for IBF members later this year. In the meantime, we are twittering at IBF and you can follow us @ibf.

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