Why iGoogle Is a Stupid Model for the Intranet Home Page

Chris| January 18th, 2010 7 Comments »

Friends don’t let friends model their intranets after iGoogle

Do you use iGoogle? I don’t. I played around with it once. I dragged a few widgets around the screen and thought, that’s kinda neat. Now, what was I searching for again?

Apparently there are some people that use iGoogle, judging by the outcry when they changed it slightly back in 2008. Maybe you use it too. But please, please, don’t use iGoogle as a model for your intranet home page. And don’t let a vendor sell you their uberpersonalizable drag-and-drop customizable widget-laden portal software. iGoogle is a stupid model for an intranet. Here’s why:

If Jakob Nielsen says users don’t customize, who are we to argue?

USERS DON’T CHANGE THE DEFAULTS.

What’s that, you say? You change defaults? Okay, let me reword that slightly.

95% OF USERS DON’T CHANGE THE DEFAULTS.

If they did, Google wouldn’t be willing to pay millions of dollars to Mozilla to be the default search engine in FireFox. Jakob Nielsen wouldn’t write articles about the power of defaults. And we wouldn’t have had to design the ThoughtFarmer Personal Home Page.

See, although people don’t change the defaults, they do have different needs, especially out of their intranet. And they have different needs even when they work at the same company. The HR manager goes to the intranet for different reasons than the accountant just down the hall, and for different reasons than an engineer in R&D or than a customer service rep in the call center.

This is where role-based personalization comes in, or audience segmentation. To deliver relevant content to each employee, the intranet manager needs to embark on a project to define the roles within the company, and then to define the content that needs delivered to each of those roles.

Our new Personal Home Page feature in ThoughtFarmer 3.6 makes implementing a role-based intranet home page a snap. And through Active Directory sync, managing the members of each role is usually a completely automated process. Watch the 69-second video demo below.

Oh, and if 95% of people don’t change defaults, why did Google come out with iGoogle? Because when you have 200 million users, that 5% is still a huge number of people. At your 1000-person company, though, invest in role-based personalization that benefits all 1000 employees, not widget-mania that serves 50.

ThoughtFarmer 3.6 Released (and I’m lovin’ it)

Chris| January 13th, 2010 1 Comment »

Wow. We finally released ThoughtFarmer 3.6. 319 days, 941 tickets and 10 development sprints after we started. It was a ton of work, but we couldn’t be more pleased with the results!

Our What’s New in Version 3.6 covers all the new features nicely, so I won’t repeat that in this blog post. What I will share are two brief stories about how ThoughtFarmer 3.6 is working for real people.

Real ThoughtFarmer 3.6 Story: Mountain Equipment Co-op

Mountain Equipment Co-op operates 13 large outdoor specialty stores across Canada, employing about 1750 people. If you’re from the USA, you can think of them as the Canadian version of REI.

Mountain Equipment Co-op deployed ThoughtFarmer 3.6 Beta as their corporate intranet in October 2009. In addition to heavy head-office use, all retail workers have access via centrally-located kiosks.

How do they like ThoughtFarmer 3.6? I’ll let their CIO answer:

“At MEC we’re using ThoughtFarmer 3.6 as the engine for our corporate intranet. I think we knew the launch was going to be a success when we heard these staff responses at our roll-out training sessions: ‘Oh, it’s like Facebook. That’s easy’ and ‘No, I don’t need more training, I can figure it out.’ Our adoption stats are much better than we had anticipated, and the percentage of content contributors is higher too. I believe we have the ease and familiarity of the interface to thank for this.”

Georgette Parsons, MEC CIO

For more comments from MEC staff on specific ThoughtFarmer 3.6 features, see the sidebar on What’s New in 3.6.

Real ThoughtFarmer 3.6 Story: OpenRoad Communications

If you pay attention to small print, you’ll recognize that OpenRoad Communications is us — it’s the company behind ThoughtFarmer. There are about 30 of us, and in addition to ThoughtFarmer, we do high-end web sites and specialty web applications.

So I guess I’m totally biased in saying this, but, in all seriousness… ThoughtFarmer 3.6 has completely transformed the way we use our intranet.

We deployed 3.6 beta to our intranet in August 2009. It was rough around the edges back then, but we still saw an immediate, dramatic increase in use. What I found interesting is that I thought I already used ThoughtFarmer fully, but now I’m using it even more.  Three reasons I see:

1. The completely redesigned Activity Stream is engaging. In an instant, I get a pulse on what’s going on with the people I work with.
2. Search Filters have transformed search. I never struggle anymore to find a certain page or document. Search is razor-accurate.
3. It’s faster. It was already fast, but every little bit counts. With the new performance optimizations, ThoughtFarmer never makes me wait.

Instant Demo Access

With the release of version 3.6, we’re introducing Instant Demo Access to ThoughtFarmer. If you want to try version 3.6, don’t wait – test drive it right now.

Why Intranet Governance Matters

Gord| January 6th, 2010 6 Comments »

What’s going to be the big trend for intranets in 2010? Is this the year companies truly adopt social features in the enterprise? Will we finally come to an agreement on how to demonstrate ROI for enterprise 2.0 tools? What’s on the minds of intranet managers?

If you’re like the intranet managers that Jane McConnell just informally polled, then here’s your answer: Governance.

80% indicated that governance (principles, examples, and integration into “business as usual) was “very interesting and relevant for me.”

Governance. Not quite as exciting as microblogging or enterprise mashups. No, it’s not the technology topic you were probably expecting or want to be excited about. Of course, without it and without excitement for it, your intranet is destined for a bumpy ride.

Approaches to governance vary widely in organizations – historical structures and policies shape how governance is applied (or not). So to shed some light on this topic, I thought it would be useful to provide a few links and some good definitions to help intranet managers and owners to ground themselves in some governance basics.

What is governance?

Let’s start with a few good definitions:

Simply put “governance” means: the process of decision-making and the process by which decisions are implemented (or not implemented).
- Source: United Nations ESCAP: What is good governance?

Governance is the process whereby societies or organizations make important decisions, determine whom they involve and how they render account.
- Source: Institute on Governance

The take-away for both of these definitions should be clear: governance is about the decision making process.

And what does it mean to get your decision making process sorted out?

UK governance expert Graham Oakes has a great answer: “Well defined governance allows us to focus our energy on the decision, not the decision making process.”

Intranet success depends on the coordination of a wide range of people inside an organization. It is a multi-stakeholder initiative. Often there is ambiguity about the roles of the stakeholders. Who decides on what content goes onto the intranet? Who decides what technology is to be used? Who decides what the purpose of the intranet really is? Who decides who winds up paying for it?

And governance is not simply about “ownership” although turf wars between divisions also tend to characterize some of the issues that intranets face. Ownership debates about the intranet reveal the conceptualization of the intranet as a thing or material object, something that can be owned and possessed. Increasingly with social intranets, we feel this is an inadequate metaphor, where a more apt metaphor is that of a complex system, an ecology or a village or city.

While there is clear responsibility and accountability for the well being of a village or a city (someone is governing and “running” the city), its citizens share largely in the responsibility for making it what it is. The same is to be said with the social intranet, intranet 2.0. It’s the reason why Penn State Outreach named their intranet “our.outreach” instead of “my.outreach” — everyone owns their intranet, everyone is responsible for the well being of the content, the quality of the communication and collaboration amongst staff. That was a very intentional choice that the creators of the intranet made in naming it “our” — it signified a different approach, a change in thinking.

Just like the mayors and council who govern a village or city, intranet managers need to start asking themselves the question: how do I bring my intranet citizens into the larger decision making process? What does it mean to be an active participant in the ongoing decision making process of the intranet and indeed, the organization as a whole?

We’re interested in governance and the challenges faced by our clients in operating within complex multi stakeholder environments. What governance challenges have you faced? How have you succeeded? What lessons did you learn along the way?

New Customer Story: Entropic Communications

Chris| December 29th, 2009 No Comments »

Read how ThoughtFarmer helped unite Entropic Communications after a flurry of mergers and acquisitions.

This is the latest update from our brand new Intranet Case Studies section!

Screenshot of ENTRance, Entropic’s global intranet

Best of 2009: Top 5 Posts on our Intranet Blog

Chris| December 22nd, 2009 No Comments »

As 2009 draws to a close, here’s a look back on this year’s most popular blog postings on our Intranet Blog:

1. Best Enterprise 2.0 Launch Ever? Penn State’s ThoughtFarmer Roll-Out

With more than 4 times the page views of any other post, the story of Penn State’s creative launch of ThoughtFarmer has captured the interest of intranet managers around the world. The project manager, Bevin Hernandez (@bevinhernandez), has now been invited to speak about Enterprise 2.0 deployments at several conferences.

2. 5 lessons learned about cross-cultural social networking

We’ve learned lots from deploying our multilingual intranet solution around the globe. This post captures 5 lessons learned from a tri-lingual deployment in English, Korean and Japanese. (In related news, our newest sales coordinator speaks Dutch, English, French and Spanish!)

3. 8 Tips for a Successful Social Intranet Pilot

One reason this post was so popular is the debate it started between SocialText’s Michael Idinopulos and me. In the end, I think we both made valid points.

4. The New Laws of Intranet ROI

Our analytics guru Bryan shares several mathematical models of network value. Meaty ROI information like this is hard to come by.

5. Selling ThoughtFarmer: What’s Worked, What Hasn’t

I’m a bit surprised at the interest this post generated. It was an honest, authentic post about some behind-the-scenes thinking at ThoughtFarmer — and I guess we’re all drawn to that kind of openness. We’ll have to strive for more of that in 2010.