The thorny issue of archival content on the intranet

Gord| March 30th, 2010 2 Comments »

So by now you may have seen our site Intranet Secrets. I hope you’re enjoying it. We’ve had some great feedback and some very, very funny submissions through our form. Who knew the intranet could be such a dark and troubling place.

There are quite a few secrets, which while they look made up, are in fact totally true. Like this one:

Yes, it’s true. Those are almost verbatim the words that were uttered by an intranet manager I once met. I’ve used it many times in conversations with clients about slimming down their intranets.

Now, you’re thinking, I’d love to delete a lot of old content on my intranet, but I just can’t. I know that Chris told me to blow it up, but I’ve got some pretty big reasons as to why I can’t. Like regulatory. Or records management. Or just plain old paranoia.

And now that’s disk space is so cheap, there’s really no cost to simply keep a copy of everything my organization has published to the intranet for the past 15 years. Besides, someone might need it one day. And then it will be here for them.

Right?

Of course, we know that there’s issues with that. While disk space is cheap, the cognitive load experienced by intranet users is high. Ever tried finding a particular document or collection of documents amongst 100,000 others on an intranet with a sub-par search engine, questionable information design, and highly varying degrees of reliable content? And our time is precious and expensive. Managing and maintaining 100,000 and growing pages on the intranet can cost lots.

A noble goal for many of our customers is a smaller, more relevant intranet. People like James Robertson have been calling for this for years. But it too is hard to do.

What help is there?

Recognizing the characteristics of your content is a great first step. This classic from Paul Chin in the Intranet Journal from 2004 is one of the few articles I’ve ever found that tackles the time-based dimensions of your content. What’s your content’s lifespan?

Once you recognize the short-term / long-term orientation of your content, how do you design your site for it? One of the best metaphors that comes to my mind is the IA community’s adapation of Stewart Brand’s notion of scaffolding in his book How Buildings Learn. Peter Merholz and Jesse James Garrett blogged about this in 2002. I still think it’s a powerful concept. And reminds me a great deal of how we deal with each other through physical space (which I’ve blogged about before via Edward T Hall’s notion of proxemics).

What’s the “stuff” of your intranet? The “skin” or the “structure” — how do you assemble your content based on its temporality or permanence?

And finally, what patterns can we use from the wiki body of knowledge to help re-enforce editorial activities that will keep the intranet a cleaner and tidier place?

Stewart Mader’s WikiPatterns site has a great example with Built-in obsolescence. If you know your content has a shelf life, why don’t you design for the future audience with that in mind now? It’s like a content time capsule.

Mike Briggs of Sun had this important point in his post on stale content: keep the authors tied to their content as much as possible. The publish-and-forget anti-pattern of intranet publishing, combined with the “orphaned content” anti-pattern are harder to have happen if you keep the connection alive between content and author. You created this page, it’s your responsibility to keep tabs on it, remove it when you see fit, or pass the ownership onto someone who will. That’s a design pattern that we baked into ThoughtFarmer from the start: there is no anonymous page ownership. Page and author are always coupled together.

Archiving is tricky. How have you dealt with it on your intranet? Have you ever preformed a giant web harvest snapshot and backup of your intranet, like the US government did with their federal sites in the past few years?

Has anyone ever come asking for one of those 70,000 deleted pages? What will your intranet look like if you could time travel to the future?

Intranet Personalization that Works

Gord| December 3rd, 2009 2 Comments »

This article originally appeared on December 3, 2009 on the Dachis Group Collaboratory.

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ThoughtFarmer is an alliance partner of ours, and provides intranet software that fosters collaboration and communication. After many deployments, they have seen many challenges to personalizing the intranets of organizations. We asked Gordon Ross, the Vice President of ThoughtFarmer, to share his thoughts and experiences with us.

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One of the classic intranet design challenges that never seems to get any easier is the design of the homepage.  Employee Communications wants corporate messaging and CEO announcements. IT wants applications and personalization features. Employees want the cafeteria menu.

Juggling these varied interests is tough. As the intranet moves from a few-to-many internal communications tool to a hub of social activity, collaboration, and community, the homepage runs the risk of becoming even more crowded, complex, and simply irrelevant to the everyday lives of employees.

The libertarians in the organization know the answer to this dilemma and have yelled it loud and proud for years: “Personalize! Let the user choose what they want!” The paternalists know they have the answer too: “Centralize and publish! Decide for the user!” And so the tug of war continues.
 
We’ve been of the mind that you can have the best of both worlds. Through implicit personalization you can turn facts that you know about an employee into a powerful filtering tool to provide them with relevant information. But before we tackle how exactly we’ve gone about doing that, let’s dive a bit deeper into what it means to be relevant in the first place.

Signal to Noise

As good, responsible information designers, we take seriously the issue of trying to reduce the signal to noise ratio on the intranet.

We have our work cut out for us: the highest possible ratio of signal to noise is desirable. But what is relevant? What is not? Relevance is a thorny word, one that’s used and abused constantly. But what does it really mean? I’m fond of this functionally oriented definition:

Relevance: something (A) is relevant to a task (T) if it increases the 
likelihood of accomplishing the goal (G), which is implied by T.

So what’s the likelihood that you, as an intranet manager or interaction designer, are going to be able to reliably predict which pieces of information will be required for the task an employee is currently working on in their quest to achieve a particular goal?

Getting Things Done

When employees visit the intranet, they are engaged in productive inquiry – an activity where they are deliberately seeking what they need in order to do what they want to do. Said another way, it’s not inquiry in the form of general curiosity, but inquiry in the service of wanting to get things done.

Getting things done in the modern organization increasingly entails the creation of information. Productive inquiry (embodied through the act of searching the intranet, for example) begets collecting or communicating or creating information. Getting things done creates relationship between people and information. And when the action happens in the context of a social intranet, one which has the capability of storing the actions of any given user, we suddenly know a whole lot more about that person and what may be relevant to them.

We have a couple of ways on how we relate people to information in ThoughtFarmer. Our recent homepage redesign is a reflection of our thinking on this subject in action.

The Proxemics of the Intranet

To understand how we relate to information and each other on the intranet, we sought inspiration from the “real world” of material objects and physical space and the pioneering work of American anthropologist Edward T. Hall, to introduce a concept of proxemics to the intranet. Proxemics was Hall’s contribution to the study of how people relate to each other interpersonally and socially through their physical proximity to each other. Hall identified four expanding zones of relation: intimate distance, personal distance, social distance, and public distance. Each of these distances represented boundaries of physical space from centimeters (intimate) to tens of meters away (public) and represented the ability to engage in certain relationship-defining acts between people across those distances.

Hall’s expanding zones of relation represent a nice metaphor through which we can look at the relationships employees have with each other, with their company, and their content on the intranet. Intimate distance represents information all about you: your page edits, your comments, your status, etc. Personal distance represents stuff that’s been done to you or your content by others. Social distance is everything within your network, including your management relationships and group / division / regional relationships. Finally, public distance on the intranet is everyone and their activity in the organization.

We’ve adapted this approach to the homepage to create a useful filter through which we can enhance the relevance of information, all the while maintaining a middle ground between user need and organizational need.

News items can be published throughout ThoughtFarmer as a default content type within the system. Users have the ability to publish news on the homepage directly, within their departments and divisions, for their project groups or as “informal news” via a blog post. Our first step towards implicit personalization was to merge these news sources together, providing users with a mix of “global corporate” material and “local departmental” material.
 
Instead of just broadcasting them public news (the corporation, its initiatives, news from HQ) let’s throw in a mix of social, personal, and intimate content as well. City newspapers have known this model works for years to capture the attention of their audience. International, national, regional, and local current events all wind up sharing space on the front page of your typical daily city broadsheet.

The second design intervention was the redesign of Recent Activity or our “workstream” feature. The signal to noise ratio of this feature was previously way too noisy. On installs of significant size and activity, there was simply too much content to comprehend for the majority of users and the filtering wasn’t intuitive.
 
In version 3.6 of ThoughtFarmer, we’ve organized activity into Your Groups, Status Updates, and All Site Activity. Your Groups aggregates activity that is happening in the groups you belong to. That might be a formal project or an informal community on the intranet (i.e.: Digital Photographers). Users have further control (explicit personalization) by being able to filter which groups they want to show/hide on the homepage.

Status Updates are Twitter or Facebook like user updates, answering the question, “What are you doing?” This feature is now a familiar design pattern within Enterprise 2.0 software suites, enabling phatic communication throughout the organization.
 
And finally, should you want to drink from the proverbial information firehose, you can browse All Site Activity, an aggregation of high priority activities merged from every user across the site. We’ve recently spoken with a few intranet administrators and managers that find this feed quite useful and fascinating. They observe it flow by in real-time throughout the day, occasionally intervening or helping users out in different areas throughout the site where activity is occurring.

The Power of Defaults

The debate about personalization vs. segmentation on the intranet has been much discussed and researched by many pioneering intranet designers and consultants. As keen observers of user behaviour in the real world, we believe that well chosen default options are a sound design strategy. Adoption rates of personalization features are low, driven by a lack of understanding of the business benefit from the user and the inertia of human nature to simply be lazy and accept defaults. By placing the user at the centre of the information universe and using their relationships to information and each other as the default filter, we can provide them with an intuitive view of their world, making significant progress towards our goal of a more relevant and valuable intranet.

New feature: Activity tracking

darren| February 27th, 2008 Comments Off

The following is the first in a series of posts on some of the new features in our latest release of ThoughtFarmer.

Tracking the history of changes in ThoughtFarmer has been a core feature since our first release. In 2.5, however, we’ve made a number of enhancements that have greatly improved the usefulness of this feature.

Activity is generated every time a user performs an action in ThoughtFarmer. Adding or editing a page, adding a comment, updating your status: all actions trigger new activity events. Each activity is linked back to the person and the related page. ThoughtFarmer then takes these activities and aggregates them throughout the site:

• On user profile pages, all activities by a person are aggregated
• On directory pages, all activities related to content within that section are displayed
• On the home page, activities across the entire site are displayed

Even on a smaller intranet, all this activity tracking can quickly get overwhelming. ThoughtFarmer manages the volume by filtering out low-priority events on areas that see high volumes, like the home page.

ThoughtFarmer also helps you filter site activity by proximity: an idea inspired by the concept of proxemics, first articulated by American anthropologist and cultural researcher Edward T. Hall in the 1960’s.

While proxemics describe how we relate to each other in physical space, we’ve applied it to the intranet and how we relate to each other through information space. You can think of proxemics in terms of concentric circles. At the centre of your information universe is your content: pages you’ve created or edited. Expanding outwards, you come across other people and the edits or changes they’ve made to your content. Outwards further, you see the activity related to content in the groups of which you belong – here you may find modifications to documents related to your project or location or department, but not content you necessarily created. Finally, you reach the edge of the organizational content space and can see the entire set of changes across the intranet.

We’ve been using 2.5 internally now for several weeks and the new activity tracking has really been a useful way to find new content and track what’s going on within our intranet.

Towards a Proxemics of the Intranet

Gord| December 18th, 2007 Comments Off

Relationships are funny things. A combination of formal and informal roles, responsibilities, and feelings, they’ve given the designers and users of social software a hard time. How do we make explicit something as subtle as friendship? How often does “friend” just not seem at all like the right term to be using in Facebook to describe an acquaintance? The result is often not very pretty.

In a business setting, enterprise 2.0 tools have a slightly easier time of things. Relationships can be formally codified within an organization. He’s my direct report. She’s my boss. That’s my department. This is my project team. These are relationships that, while they may change, don’t vary or depend on my day to day emotional state and how I feel about them (wish as you may).

So we’ve been thinking, wouldn’t it be useful to utilize those relationships to tune your notifications from the intranet?

Keeping abreast of what’s happening in your organization through monitoring the activity of your intranet is something that we’ve been working on in the design of ThoughtFarmer for a while. The current incarnation is fairly basic: we have a simple filter of recent changes on the home page that shows who’s updated their status (People), what pages have been edited (Pages), and what comments have been made (Comments). It’s enough to provide you with some signals that stuff is happening and you may or may not be interested in that stuff.

What we’re working towards in an upcoming release of ThoughtFarmer is a model that provides somewhat more fine-grained control of what’s happening. Our current model, if there’s lots of people in your organization, is a bit coarse: seemingly random noise from the knowledge repository of your company. To help us refine that concept, we’ve sought inspiration from the real world and the pioneering work of American anthropologist Edward T. Hall, to introduce a concept of proxemics to the intranet.

Proxemics was Hall’s contribution to the study of how people relate to each other interpersonally and socially through their physical proximity to each other. Hall identified four expanding zones of relation: intimate distance, personal distance, social distance, and public distance. Each of these distances represented boundaries of physical space from centimeters (intimate) to tens of meters away (public) and represented the ability to engage in certain relationship-defining acts between people across those distances.

These then represent a nice lens through which we can look at the relationships we have with each other, our company, and our content on the intranet. Intimate distance represents information all about you: your page edits, your comments, your status, etc. Personal distance represents stuff that’s been done to you or your content by others. Social distance is everything within your network, including your management relationships and group / division / regional relationships. Finally, public distance on the intranet is everyone and their activity in the organization.

Individuals, groups, their activity, and their content have a gravity to each user. Like Grover from Sesame Street, some are near, others are far. We acknowledge this model doesn’t take into account the interpersonal ties and informal social bonds that exist throughout an organization, but hope that intranet proxemics will help provide a subtle and useful mechanism for keeping aware of what’s going on within the organization.