Financial Post: Launch a project with a ThoughtFarmer social intranet

Tweet Ephraim Freed| October 24th, 2011 No Comments »

The Financial Post interviewed ThoughtFarmer client Karo Group about their successful social intranet in a new article “Launch a project with a social intranet.” From the article:

A social intranet is just the ticket for a knowledge-based company that needs to pull together diverse employees for individual projects, says Alex Berenyi, director of systems and technology for Karo Group, a Calgary-based creative agency.

Karo, which has 62 employees in Calgary and Vancouver, built its own intranet several years ago, but never had time to add functionality to it, and so it languished, he said. “It just wasn’t compelling enough for people to use it the way it should be used,” he says.

“But for a project-based company like ours, we needed the ability to put a group together quickly. The intranet also needed to be able to find specific expertise among our staff, and to allow others to throw in their ideas, if they saw that they could be of help to the project, without going through an intermediary. When we decided to upgrade, we found it was easier to lease a social intranet system like ThoughtFarmer than to try to do it ourselves.”

Berenyi said a social intranet also can act as an accessible central repository of company information that is more effective and easier to use than traditional systems in which relevant company information is stored in a series of emails, or in a central folder.

“It’s searchable, so people don’t have to plow through dozens of folders trying to find the right information,” he says. “It improves communication and information flow, which is essential in a business like ours. There is a clear benefit in an intranet for knowledge businesses, because it facilitates better project management, improves productivity and reduces cost.”

Read the complete article.

Case study: Crowdsourcing the name for a new social intranet

Tweet Ephraim Freed| August 8th, 2011 2 Comments »

Ephraim Freed used to be the intranet manager at Oxfam America. Today he guest blogs for ThoughtFarmer and helps clients effectively prepare and launch their ThoughtFarmer intranets. This story is about how Oxfam America named its intranet.

At Oxfam America, we wanted employees to feel a sense of ownership over the new social intranet, so we had them choose the name themselves. We crowdsourced the name in a structured way that involved employees from around the globe and gave every employee a voice and a vote.

Business need: Unite a globally dispersed staff

At Oxfam America in 2008 we were using a vanilla implementation of SharePoint 2003 (SPPS anyone?) for our intranet and needed much more. The site’s information architecture represented many intranet worst practices and the search engine had been disabled due to security issues in SharePoint 2003. Text dominated the homepage and other parts of the site, most of which were used for simple document libraries only. People continually complained about how unfriendly the site was for even basic tasks and we had no training material.

In addition to technical and content issues we struggled to feel a sense of kinship across geographic distances. Like many global organizations, each office felt a little like its own separate company. For an innovative global nonprofit that sought to empower people living in poverty around the world, this somewhat disempowering intranet just felt wrong.

So we decided to build a new intranet that could unite employees from around the world and help the organization build a new sense of shared purpose and connection. From day one the CEO wanted the new intranet to be “alive, vibrant, and active.”

At the time I was the Intranet Project Lead and realized that in order to reach the CEO’s goal we would need to engage employees in the project in every way possible. Choosing the name for the new intranet provided a ripe opportunity for this.

Structured crowdsourcing process with 5 steps

Before we started the voting process I had come up with a clever name I liked. But I knew this couldn’t be my intranet – it had to be our intranet. So we laid out a clear process for selecting a new intranet name and moved it forward using our old intranet.

STEP 1 – Offered a simple prize (and recognition)

We offered neither money nor time off to the winner of the competition. Instead we offered public recognition within the company and a t-shirt from my favorite boutique clothier, Johnny Cupcakes. So the prize was basically just recognition. This avoided any concerns about favoritism or inequity, but was enough to motivate employees to participate.

STEP 2 – Collected name suggestions

We created a section on the old intranet where employees could post name suggestions. We set a deadline to suggest names and then communicated the hell out of it. All name suggestions were visible to all employees and we set no limit on the number of names an employee could suggest. After a two week period we ended the name suggestion phase with great results. Employees from almost every office had submitted suggestions and even the Senior Vice President threw his hat in the ring.

STEP 3 – Reviewed submissions

While the overall process was very open, we didn’t include every suggested name in the voting phase. Instead, a small committee reviewed all the suggested names and removed from the list any that seemed inappropriate or silly. For example, while the suggestion of “Unicorn Kisses” brought out the LOLs, we didn’t consider it a serious option.

STEP 4 – Voting on a scale

We sent a survey out to all employees with the narrowed down list of names. Instead of offering simply “yes” or “no” voting, we created a scale on which people could rate each suggested name. This offered the opportunity to identify the most popular names, but also exposed the most polarizing suggestions.

The voting scale included:

• Love it
• Like it
• Neutral
• Don’t like it
• Please no!

We left the voting open for two weeks and communicated plentifully with employees to encourage high turn-out.

STEP 5 – Analysis and selection

Because we used a rating scale rather than simple yes/no voting, the final name selection required some analysis. For example, the name I suggested, “VIRGO” (VIRtual Global Office), received the highest number of “Love it” votes, but also received a lot of votes for “Don’t like it” and “Please no!”

Conversely, the suggested name “Padare,” which means “community space” in the Zimbabwean language of Shona, won a few less votes for “Love it” but got more votes for “Like it” and received very few negative votes.

So we chose “Padare” as the winner because it had the greatest overall positive response. We announced the name along with a definition of the word “Padare” and I had the privilege of buying the Johnny Cupcakes t-shirt for the winner myself. The winner chose a Boston Celtics themed design which I happily hand-delivered when he next visited the Boston office.

Setting the tone for the new intranet

While it could have gone differently, the winning name came from an employee outside of headquarters – someone from our Southern Africa office. This simple fact set a stake in the ground to guide the rest of the project and symbolized the empowerment the new social intranet would provide to employee voices.

I remember two years after the official launch of the intranet hearing from employees that they felt a sense of ownership over Padare, which is something we rarely get to say about enterprise software applications.

It can be surprising how small things like this influence the feel and trajectory of a project. The naming process required no additional money or resources and provided an opportunity to get employees excited about the new intranet. Generally when we see that one of our colleagues has a voice within the company, it increases the sense of voice and involvement for the rest of us.

However, this process may not be right for every company. I recently spoke to a company that asked employees for suggested names for the new intranet, but didn’t get any that worked well. The process I’ve outlined worked at Oxfam America, but each company must find a process that fits its own culture and goals.

Epilogue: What’s Bourbon got to do with it?

As an aside, I want to mention a high point that came after the name was selected. Before the naming process finished I made a bet with a buddy of mine in the office. He told me that “no matter what the name is, people will call it ‘the intranet.’”

I firmly believed in the importance of branding the new social intranet and investing in it a personality and meaning beyond its simple features. So I bet my buddy a bottle of good Bourbon that within three months people would routinely call the new intranet by its chosen name, whatever it would be.

Throughout the entire launch process we referred to the intranet as “Padare” and even used active language such as “Padare lets any employee post to the news section,” which made Padare into an actor rather than just a place or application.

Sure enough, at an all-staff meeting three months after the official launch of the new intranet the President, COO, and HR Department each referred to “Padare,” never once mentioning “the intranet.” True to his word my friend conceded the win to me and brought in a bottle of Knob Creek.

The branding campaign was so successful, in fact, that up until the day I left Oxfam America colleagues referred to me as “Papa Padare” and “Padre Padare” on a daily basis. I even saw nicknames for Padare itself. The day I noticed someone had a browser shortcut to “Padare” titled “Pad Thai” I felt a sense of accomplishment. The new intranet had such a character of its own that colleagues even gave it their own personal nicknames.

For inspiration around intranet names, see the previous ThoughtFarmer post What to name your intranet?

Real intranet managers: Tanis Roadhouse’s blueprint for building a social intranet

Tweet Ephraim Freed| July 12th, 2011 6 Comments »

Sign up for a free live demo of ThoughtFarmer. Get an inspiring glimpse at true employee engagement and meet one of our friendly social intranet experts.

This is one in a series of posts from our Real Intranet Manager Interviews where we highlight the creative and thoughtful people behind successful intranets of all types. Read more about the series, or see posts on Emily Staresina of Stockland Property Group, Luke Mepham of Aviva,  Christy Season of SCANA, William Amurgis of AEP and Dinesh Tantri from ThoughtWorks.

Tanis Roadhouse, Collaboration & Intranet Manager

Tanis at a glance

• Name: Tanis Roadhouse
• On Twitter: @theothervoog
• Age: 33
• Hometown: Regina, Saskatchewan
• Organization: MD Physician Services / Canadian Medical Association (CMA)
• Job title: Collaboration & Intranet Manager
• Employees: About 1300
• Headquarters: Ottawa, Canada
• Name of intranet: The Verve
• Date of most recent overhaul: December 2010
• Technology stack: ThoughtFarmer

Tanis Roadhouse’s social intranet marathon

Just two days after I spoke with Tanis Roadhouse, the Collaboration & Intranet Manager for MD Physican Services / Canadian Medical Association (CMA), she ran her first marathon, a fitting metaphor for her social intranet success. Even though MD Physician Services and the CMA implemented out-of-the-box social intranet software (ThoughtFarmer) for their shared intranet Verve, they didn’t go live until a full year after Tanis first started the project.

The intranet team spent much of that year rigorously gathering requirements, engaging stakeholders, learning and planning in the lead up to launching Verve. And while they had a very successful launch in February 2011, it wasn’t seen as the end of the project; rather it was really just the start of the second phase.

To understand their project and their blueprint for success, it’s important to first learn about Tanis’ background.

Not an intranet nerd, but a “knowledge knerd”

Tanis doesn’t have a traditional intranet manager’s background (if such a thing exists). She worked for a long time as a techincal writer and has a Masters degree in Organizational Communications. She started out at MD Physician Services, a national firm that provides Canada’s physicians with a range of financial planning, investment, and banking services in both French and English, as a Business Analyst and has since morphed into the Collaboration & Intranet Manager.

Tanis didn’t come from a traditional technology background, but told me she’s a “knowledge knerd” — a term you’re sure to see me tweeting about in the near future. Tanis said:

I’ve always looked at our social intranet project from a knowledge management perspective and how we can improve the way we access and share what we know. When we were doing requirements I realized how much knowledge and information was sitting in email. How do we make it so a new employee can learn that stuff too?

We sometimes think that project management is really just communication. Tanis is a communicator at heart, which may be one of the keys to her success. She and the intranet team have run their project according to virtually every intranet best practice and have avoided many of the common pitfalls that stall intranet projects. They took a thoughtful approach and neither rushed nor stumbled, just like a a good marathon run.

Screenshot of Verve, the CMA's ThoughtFarmer-powered intranet

7-point blueprint for building a social intranet

1: Start with an inspiring vision: the value of a collaborative culture

Shared vision for collaborative culture: Many new employees had used social software within other companies and were keen to see it at MD Physician Services. The company itself went through a three-year business transformation process which left Executives and staff at every level thinking about collaboration and communication.

Codename “groundswell”: This unofficial name for the intranet project emerged out of many employees’ shared passion for and value of a truly collaborative culture.

Must respect & value colleagues: As intranet manager William Amurgs said in a previous post from this series, a good intranet is rooted in respect for employees. Tanis told me:

We really do believe that the contributions of everybody in the organization are important. Their knowledge, backgrounds, skills – what employees can collectively contribute to products, services and ideas is much greater than the sum of the parts. When we can bring to bear the best thinking we’ve got as a group, that gives the best outcomes for our members.

2: Secure executive support

Connect social intranet to business imperatives: Tanis lucked out where many intranet managers are less fortunate: The CEO and other executives were already committed to building a truly collaborative work environment. While a social intranet doesn’t accomplish that alone, it is a critical enabler and Tanis tied the project direclty to the company’s strategy.

Communicate early & often: Executives from the two main divisions of the company were on the steering committee for the project, which allowed Tanis to maintain communication with the C-suite. Since the new intranet launched, the intranet team has kept Executives in the know. “We regularly send the Executive team highlights of what’s been going on in Verve, including interesting groups and great stories. It’s easy for them to get in there and see what’s going on.”

CEO who walks the talk: It sounds like MD Physician Services has the social intranet manager’s dream executive champion: ”Our CEO was always a supporter and now is on Verve. He updates his status with where he is, he comments and he blogs.”

3: Pick a name that matters

Include many perspectives: The team that brainstormed and selected “Verve,” the name for the new intranet, included representatives from throughout the company. Tanis said that “early on we engaged with content owners in our intranet naming exercise. The name needed to have similiar definitions in English & French and be truly reflective of the collaboritive environment we were after.” By including many perspectives in the naming discussions, Tanis ensured both a rich dialogue and broad engagement.

Account for dual-language company: Many intranet teams treat multilingual requirements like the “Check Engine” light on a car’s dashboard – they see it, but ignore until it goes away. The team at MD Physician Services made sure to select a name that had the same spelling and meaning in English and French. ”We needed a name that made sense for a national company with offices across Canada, a country with two official languages.” They also sought out intranet software with excellent multilingual functionality.

Inspiration & aspiration: The name “Verve” represented the energy and enthusiasm that the company was building into its culture. The name captured the shared vision behind the new intranet and acts as a constant reminder of the company’s aspirations.

4: Gather requirements to learn the business

Leverage your social network: Tanis found colleagues to speak with by asking her existing contacts for suggestions of influential and passionate employees. She built new ties by leveraging her existing social network.

Talk to people in the field: Tanis and her team went directy to employees in the field to learn about the challenges they faced. This approach contributed to their undestanding of the overall business and user requirements, as well as strengthened and broadened employee engagement in the project.

Connect with social media super users: The intranet team sought out and gathered requirements from employees known to be social media mavens. This fostered engagement with people sure to be more comfortable on a modern social intranet and helped Tanis understand the expectations of her “hipper” users.

Build birds eye view of company: An intranet manager can develop a unique understanding of a company that few other employees have. Tanis’ extensive and broad requirements gathering helped her develop an “enterprise view” of the organization and its needs. “We took all those requirements and started to boil them down into things that could be met through a social intranet and other things that were business processes that needed to be reworked.”

Distill & compare against software: ”We set up the intranet requirements against various software and decided early on to look at off-the-shelf intranet software because we didn’t want to invest in custom development.” Requirements and software are not like the Chicken & The Egg conundrum. Requirements come first, or at least they should. But don’t mistake technical specs for user requirements. One of our clients showed us a simple way to write user-centered requirements that aren’t overly constricting and technology focused.

5: Partner with IT early

Not about technology, but is about IT: Like many companies, the MD Physician Services social intranet project was led from outside the IT Department because it was seen as a strategic initiative. But the IT Department will implement and manage the software for any intranet project, so it’s critical to build strong communication with the technical team.

Technical details critical for project planning: Tanis made sure that user needs & business requirements guided the intranet project, but technology is always an issue. By involving the IT Department from the start, an intranet project can avoid being slowed down by unexpected technical details or complexities.

6: Treat content owners like royalty

Content migration iceberg: Tanis and the core intranet team were surprised at the huge amount of content that needed to be migrated. Fortunately, they planned for it early and engaged content owners from the very beginning. (See Bryan Robertson’s post on planning intranet content migration for lots of concrete tips.)

Big change from tight control to open & flexible: Moving from a standard CMS to a social intranet was a big change. “You can never do enough for staff who are migrating content. It’s a huge job, especially to go from an environment where you don’t have a lot of control to where it’s very open and you can have control and flexibility.”

Involve early, before choosing new software: Tanis involved content owners very early in the process to engage and empower them:

We brought content owners into the project early, before we picked the tool. We gave them early access, even before it was branded and we had a name. The very first group on the new intranet was for content owners so they could share information and ask questions.

Unfortunately, many intranet teams make the mistake of involving content owners only when the time for content migration rolls around.

Provide content audits for them: The intranet team conducted content audits of material on the old intranet for all the content owners. This helped each content owner understand the scope of his or her content and plan ahead.

Training opportunities galore: Tanis and her team provided extensive training to content owners. The training covered both the technical details of using the new intranet and best practices for writing web content and communicating internally.

7: Embrace continuous improvement

Launch is simply end of first phase: Tanis’ team definitely celebrated their successful launch, but they knew it was a milestone, not an endpoint. Some companies make the mistake of resourcing an intranet redesign, but not ongoing improvements.

Phase one was getting info into Verve and having people start to use it. We just wanted to make sure the stuff people needed to do their jobs was there. Now we are taking a look at functional content like ‘Employee Resources.’ We’re going to do an IA (information architecture) and usability study of this content and try to improve it.

Perfection not needed at launch: Simply moving to a social intranet was a huge step forward for MD Physician Services and the CMA. Tanis and her team focused heavily on engagement throughout the process to ensure adoption, but still have a lot of work to do on the information architecture for some sections. If they had waited until every page was perfect the launch would have been delayed much longer.

Have a plan: Your intranet project plan shouldn’t end at launch! Tanis already had a series of specific improvement projects in the pipeline on launch day. For example, they have a section on the new intranet for supporting employees in the field. The first phase was to move that information from multiple sites into one section of the new intranet. The second phase will be to test and optimize the content so field staff are getting exactly what they need.

What’s your blueprint?

This is the story of Tanis’ social intranet journey. While no two intranet projects are the same, this story exemplifies many useful tactics and strategies for planning a social intranet. Have you had a similar experience? What good practices would you add to this list?

Add a comment, share your thoughts, tell your story.

Social intranets: Not just for knowledge workers

Tweet Ephraim Freed| May 11th, 2011 No Comments »

Mountain Equipment Co-op (MEC) sells kayaks and mountain climbing gear out of retail stores across Canada. The majority of MEC’s 1500 employees spend their time stocking shelves, maintaining displays, working the registers and answering questions from their outdoor fanatic customers. With such a small portion of staff who sit in front of computers all day MEC is not exactly the poster child for a collaborative social intranet that makes knowledge sharing easy. And yet, after 18 months their social intranet, named Mondo, has taken on a huge role in the company’s culture and has seen outstanding adoption.

(Check out the full MEC case study with lots of graphs & screenshots.)

Mondo breaks the adoption barrier: so long 90-9-1!

You’re likely familiar with the common social software adoption ratio of 90-9-1: 1% of users are heavy contributors, 9% are intermittent contributors and the other 90% only lurk in the system. Well, that ratio doesn’t mean much to MEC. Even though most of their employees don’t have their own work computers, MEC has achieved a 70/20/10 ratio on Mondo. A full 30% of MEC employees contribute to content on their social intranet. That means basically one out of every three employees is an author on Mondo. That’s the kind of adoption rate most intranet managers barely dare dream of.

So what’s in MEC’s intranet special sauce?

All employees can add content

The starting point for MEC’s success with Mondo is the open nature of their social intranet. Any employee can add pages to the intranet, upload files, create groups and start discussions. MEC trusts employees to be responsible in what they create and has reaped the benefits of that trust. Employees have created all types of groups and can easily share information with colleagues from any location. Administrative staff in some offices have become über-users who create new solutions on Mondo for increasing efficiency and saving time, on their own. (See the full case study for a graph showing page creation over time.) But an open social intranet isn’t the only key.

Adoption inflection point: Intranet access from home

Last fall, MEC made Mondo accessible from home over the internet. Starting at that point all employees could access the company’s social intranet in the comfort of their own homes, as well as from shared kiosks in stores.

From company news to HR forms, MEC information became much more accessible for all employees. It was at this point when MEC saw Mondo adoption surge. Since they made Mondo available from home the percentage of staff who logged into the intranet each week grew steadily from 55% to 85%. Eighty five percent for a retail chain!

Migrated daily processes to the intranet

Access from home was only part of the strategy. Staff throughout MEC started shifting standard processes from email and paper to Mondo. For example, Dan Eagan, who worked in the operations group, created and embedded interactive forms on Mondo using Logiforms, a third-party open source tool. He created one form that allows any employee to initiate a stock replenishment request when inventory gets low. This new process was simple and fast and replaced a clunky process that took much longer. Not only was MEC able to save time and paper, but they empowered employees to use their daily knowledge to keep the shelves fully stocked.

MEC even moved staff shift scheduling for retail stores to the intranet so employees had to go to Mondo. Easy page editing and version control mean updating the shift schedules is a breeze and store staff can easily check their upcoming shifts from home. (See the full case study for more examples of streamlined processes.)

Come for the social, stay for the work

The official tagline for Mondo is “work, play, connect.” Few intranets so readily invite employees to engage in non-work related activities, but this has been an important part of MEC’s social intranet success. Because MEC employees are explicitly allowed to engage in non work-related groups and discussions on Mondo they’re more likely to spend time on the intranet. While they have a little fun on the intranet they more quickly become technically adept at creating pages, attaching files and starting groups. And while employees are on the intranet for social purposes they see company news, can search for HR information and can complete important tasks.

By creating an open social intranet and encouraging staff to engage socially, MEC created a speedy journey to high adoption. All of these features together made using Mondo easy, interesting and useful. Those three ingredients are all part of MEC’s intranet special sauce.

Selected ThougthFarmer for ease of use, low TCO & multilingual interface

MEC didn’t select ThoughtFarmer social intranet software lightly. They conducted extensive user research to find out what their large employee base needed. They examined a range of options and chose ThoughtFarmer after an exhaustive comparison. In the end ThougthFarmer beat out SharePoint & Drupal due to its ease of use and because of the low total cost of ownership.

ThougthFarmer looks great and works well right out of the box and doesn’t require on-staff developers. This, along with the availability of ThoughtFarmer’s support team, meant MEC could maintain its lean IS function and still have a modern, social intranet. Additionally, MEC needed an intranet with multilingual functionality so both English and French-speaking staff could feel comfortable. ThoughtFarmer’s seamless multilingual interfaces and easy multilingual publishing helped MEC make their final decision.

Read all the details about MEC’s social intranet journey in the full case study, available for free on the ThoughtFarmer website.

Government & Social Intranet Software: USGS Case Study

Tweet Chris McGrath| March 2nd, 2011 No Comments »

How is government using social intranet software?

Read how the USGS Nevada Water Science Center reduced intranet staffing from two half-time staff to almost nothing by introducing a collaboratively-maintained social intranet: “Water in the Desert: ThoughtFarmer & USGS“.

“ThoughtFarmer has become the go-to resource for everything from HR information, to signing out a digital camera or boat, to checking the budget on a project, to getting a virtual introduction to a colleague on the other side of the state. ‘It has really been even more successful than we thought it would be,’ says IT specialist Shannon Watermolen.”

This is the latest of our Intranet Case Studies.

Intranet page to manage a resource -- in this case, a boat -- on the USGS Nevada Water Sciences Center intranet. Click screenshot to read the full case study.

As an agency of the United States Federal Government endorsements of specific commercial products are prohibited. The opinions of the US Geological Survey employees highlighted here reflect their personal opinions and do not constitute an endorsement of ThoughtFarmer or its developer by the USGS.

Tracy Hutton: Getting the C-Suite On Your Side

Tweet Chris McGrath| February 1st, 2011 1 Comment »

In mid-2005, Wikipedia was largely unknown, Facebook required an Ivy League email address to join, and YouTube hadn’t even launched.

In this nascent environment, Tracy Hutton, then Vice President of Employee Experience at Intrawest‘s Placemaking division, convinced her executive team to embrace a radical concept for their intranet: everyone would be allowed to edit everything.

They launched ThoughtFarmer, and the resulting success led to an oft-cited Enterprise 2.0 Case Study and Tracy’s nomination as a “Rising Star” by British Columbia’s powerful Human Resources Management Association (BCHRMA).

Now a professional coach and a consultant at The Marcus Buckingham Company (and a brand new mom! congratulations!), Tracy presented “Getting the C-Suite On Your Side” at the Social Intranet Summit in October. In the video and slidedeck below, Tracy shares her strategies for securing executive buy-in through the story of launching her social intranet, “The Portal”, at Intrawest Placemaking.

For more from the Social Intranet Summit, sign up for the Social Intranet Summit Webinars. The next session is “Creating Effective Requirements”, and will be presented Wednesday, February 16th at 10:00am Pacific.

Getting The C-Suite On Your Side (Video on Viddler)

Getting The C-Suite On Your Side (Slidedeck on SlideShare)

Improving Legal Knowledge Management Through a Social Intranet

Tweet Gordon Ross| October 4th, 2010 3 Comments »

It’s hard to believe it was May 2008, some 2 years ago, when Heather Colman from the Toronto-based law firm Hicks Morley first shared with us her experiences of migrating her Lotus DominoWiki to ThoughtFarmer. Heather, the Knowledge Management Specialist at Hicks Morley, is an exceptional ThoughtFarmer customer who has kept us and the Canadian legal and knowledge management community informed of her journey using a social intranet to help her firm collaborate and communicate in new ways.

For us, it’s been great to have the opportunity to watch an organization’s use of our software change and evolve over time — so much of the discussion in the Enterprise 2.0 space is often centered around launch campaigns and adoption strategies and while that’s important, it’s fascinating to see what happens after the system becomes part of the everyday fabric of the organization. And to recognize how long that change actually takes.

At the end of September, Heather updated the Knowledge Workers Toronto meetup group of her firm’s journey to date and thanks to the magic of modern video technology and Martin Cleaver, you can watch her presentation just like you were at The Twisted Kilt, a fine Toronto pub and eatery.

Pull up a chair and grab a pint! (the 1 hour presentation starts at the 2 min 45 sec mark, audio cuts out, but comes back quickly for the remainder)

After two and a half years of usage, Heather highlights several key benefits of their social intranet including:

• enabling lawyer’s personal knowledge management activities
• improving the overall findability of precedents and key documents on the intranet, both through search and browse features
• increasing the transparency of who is doing what on the intranet
• improving collaboration within different practice area groups

Heather credits in large part the ease in which content and documents are added to ThoughtFarmer, lowering the barrier to content creation and the resulting collaboration and communication.

To follow Hicks Morley’s full journey of social intranet evaluation, adoption, and ongoing usage, here’s a collection of links and articles over the past two years.

• May 2008: Wiki Me This – Canadian Lawyer Magazine
• November 2008: Wikis in Legal Practice – Toronto Wiki Tuesdays / SLAW
• February 2009: Hicks Morley Case Study – LLRX.com
• May 2009: Navigating the Enteprise 2.0 Highway (1 year adoption) – LLRX.com
• September 2010: Improving Legal KM through a Social Intranet

We’re very lucky to have Heather join us at the end of October for the Social Intranet Summit here in Vancouver, so if you’re interested in knowledge management, social intranets, and law firms, be sure to join us at the Vancouver Convention Centre for some great conversation.

Hiding from the gaze of the social intranet

Tweet Gordon Ross| July 12th, 2010 2 Comments »

Every week ThoughtFarmer calls customers to discuss the practical matters of running an intranet: the good, bad, and the ugly. We do these calls in the hope that we can learn lessons on how to make our product better and more valuable.
I had one such call earlier today with a professional services firm who talked about the evolution of the use of ThoughtFarmer at their company. Like all of the calls we have with customers, it was rich with insights into the real world problems and day-to-day challenges faced in organizations trying to be more communicative, collaborative, and productive.

The firm I spoke with this morning started their intranet journey with us a couple of years ago when they replaced a stale intranet powered by SharePoint 2007. Their SharePoint intranet was a place to store content, a document repository of sorts, but there wasn’t much conversation and it certainly wasn’t a collaborative environment; it was difficult to use and wasn’t providing much value to the company’s project teams.

They evaluated several products and chose ThoughtFarmer to provide staff with an environment where everyone in the organization could contribute, collaborate around projects, and hopefully have their intranet become a knowledge hub for the company.

After the roll-out of ThoughtFarmer, the economy took a nose dive and they lost staff due to lay-offs and a lack of project work. As they lost projects and staff, the professional services firm’s focus on utilization and working billable hours increased. As anyone who’s ever worked as a consultant knows, time is money. Working on billable work is what drives the bottom line in knowledge-worker consultancies.

This shift towards focusing on productivity and staff’s billable utilization had an impact on how the intranet was used. People were not spending as much time with the intranet, not sharing the types of project success stories and communicating with each other on non-related project work, as “no-one wanted to be seen on the intranet.” With all of the activity stream information, status updates, and social visibility features on the intranet, people became concerned that using the tool would be a sign of non-billable work, a sign that they were playing around on the intranet and not doing their “real job.” The ability for their work to be observed and tracked by senior management and executives was scaring employees from using the intranet in the way they’d originally intended. They were afraid to “work in public” on the intranet.

What real work looks like

As a result, news items or team blog posts that were to be posted or interesting content that people wanted to share was now being sent to the intranet coordinator to post to the site, even though everyone had permissions to do so in the “anyone can edit anything” environment they’d created. The reason: the intranet coordinator was seen as a safe person who wouldn’t get in trouble posting content to the site, because that was their job. They were allowed to be on the intranet, after all.

The purpose of their hard times intranet shifted from a collaborative space to a communications space. Official company news items published internally are still read heavily, so too is the CEO’s blog published through the ThoughtFarmer blogging features. “Everyone wants to hear what he has to say,” said my interviewee. But the communications was less of a many-to-many model of Intranet 2.0 and more of a few-to-many broadcast model, a more classic centralized intranet model of communications.

Their business development and sales efforts appear to be working and they are optimistic that their financial recovery is well underway. The future of the intranet will again be more collaborative, as project teams take on new work and again have the challenges of making tacit knowledge explicit and engaging staff geographically distributed across the country and time zones. And we’re happy that while they weren’t able to realize their vision of collaboration during their hard times, the intranet was able to shift its focus and provide value as a communication platform when it was required. It adapted to their business needs and managed to help the company communicate in the way they saw fit.

What’s interesting about all of this publicly viewable work, about the social visibility that intranets like ThoughtFarmer affords, is what it says about the social norms of the workplace and the definitions of what constitutes “real work” and what’s not. And how that changes dramatically when there’s a lot on the line, like in the midst of an economic downturn when jobs are being lost and uncertainty and fear rule.

What opportunities were lost due to people keeping their heads down and hiding from the intranet? What could they have done differently during hard times to better connect people in the organization to stimulate business development efforts? How could forging those connections through the intranet have helped?

I wonder how many other companies struggle with convincing employees that their intranet is a legitimate place to get work done, a credible source of value and productivity within the four walls of the organization. Are the consumer-like design patterns of activity streams and status updates that make social intranets appear like Twitter and Facebook undermining the credibility of the tool, or is there something else at play here?

Making the Business Case for the Intranet: Penn State Outreach

Tweet Gordon Ross| July 6th, 2010 2 Comments »

ThoughtFarmer has been working with Penn State University’s Outreach department since January 2009 when they launched their new ThoughtFarmer-powered intranet, our.outreach. Bevin Hernandez recently keynoted at Enterprise 2.0 in Boston and shared some of her experiences with conference attendees, talking about some of the cultural elements and aspects of social intranets. You can view her presentation on the E2Conf website [PDF].

photo: Bevin Hernandez keynotes at Enterprise 2.0 – credit: Alex Dunne

In a two-part blog post, we’ll take a look at the history of their social intranet our.outreach and then share some of the usage data gathered across the last 18 months on the intranet. We’ll start with how Penn State made the business case and their famous launch and then look at activity on the intranet and what trends have happened over 18 months of organizational change.

Making the Business Case for a New Intranet
Every year Penn State University Outreach hosted the Day of Connection. Staff from across the 1800 person department at Penn State would come together in a day-long conference to listen to keynote speakers, share stories and experiences, and connect with co-workers from the various program areas under the Outreach umbrella: Continuing Education, World Campus/Online Education, Youth Programs, Cooperative Extension, and Penn State Public Broadcasting. The Day of Connection was designed to educate, inspire, and connect Outreach staff, offering a unique opportunity to forge links across a wide-ranging and geographically distributed organization.

It was a special event for participants, many of whom had never met each other before or only heard about each others’ work through meetings, newsletters, emails, and traditional means of communication. But while the Day of Connection left employees feeling energized and engaged, it was limited in its reach: approximately 400 people could participate and it was only one day of the year. And it was costly: travel, facility, and coordination costs were significant to organize the one day event.

Following the January 2008 Day of Connection, Outreach’s Vice President Dr. Craig Weidemann tasked a group of Outreach HR and Internal Communications employees to review the format and goals for the next Day of Connection. The team analyzed results from a 2006 internal communications survey and the follow-up survey for the 2007 Day of Connection. They also reviewed the direct and indirect costs over the past 5 years for the Day of Connection.

One of the key findings from the 2006 survey result showed that employees wanted to use technology to enhance their productivity at work. At the same time, the existing intranet scored low in their evaluation of communication channel effectiveness. On a 4 point scale from 1 = Poor to 4 = Good, here’s how their internal communications efforts stacked up:

• one-on-one meetings with immediate supervisors: 3.21
• all-staff meetings: 2.71
• newsletters: 2.66
• email listserv announcements: 2.53
• intranet: 1.99

My Outreach: the Penn State Outreach intranet prior to January 2009

The team returned to the VP with a proposal to move Day of Connection online via a renewed intranet, aimed at reducing costs and increasing reach and access.

By moving online, Outreach would be able to invite all staff to participate instead of selected Day of Connection participants and experience the benefits of allow employees to connect the other 364 days of the year. Effects would be lasting, coordination costs would be reduced, and other communications initiatives would benefit.

The intranet launch positively addresses many of the challenges of a traditional Day:

From internal document on our.outreach: “A Serendipitous Collision!” – January 28, 2009

Intranet Return on Investment: 365 days of connection

The renewed intranet was sold on the return on investment of turning Day of Connection into an online event. All funds previously allocated to the annual Day would be turned into a many-to-many, collaborative intranet environment where knowledge sharing and connection would become a regular occurrence in Outreach, not just a one day event.
The project got the go-ahead, a new employee was hired to project manage the effort, and the team set out to create the new Outreach intranet.

Defining the Intranet’s Goals

The team crafted goals that were designed to address the previous shortcomings with the Day of Connection as well as take into account the findings of the previous communications research.

“The intranet will engage employees to connect across Outreach with peers, management, and leadership, encouraging collaboration and knowledge sharing. These connections will provide greater service to our learners, our communities, and each other. It will:

From internal document on our.outreach: “A Serendipitous Collision!” – January 28, 2009

Launch of our.outreach

The launch event on January 28, 2009 was the culmination of 7 intense weeks of work by Outreach, including the Christmas holiday break. The our.outreach team launched a multi-pronged marketing campaign throughout the organization, including postcards, posters, technology training sessions, welcome packages, videos, and day-of launch party celebrations. For more details on the remarkable launch campaign, please read Best Enterprise 2.0 Launch Ever? Penn State’s ThoughtFarmer Roll-Out on the ThoughtFarmer blog.

Penn State Outreach’s re-launched intranet, powered by ThoughtFarmer

After the party

As remarkable as the launch of our.outreach was in its scale, scope, and inventiveness, the true success of the intranet could not be measured in one day. January 28, 2009 was the beginning of a new way of communicating, collaborating, and learning at Penn State, one which had never been attempted before. But the real results would be uptake in usage, new connections formed, knowledge sharing, and changed behaviours amongst staff.

In our next article, we’ll look at 18 months of activity on the intranet since the January 2009 launch and share some of the usage statistics that Penn State has gathered, detailing their adoption efforts.

Enterprise 2.0 Case Study: Continuum, designers of Reebok Pump and Swiffer Sweeper

Tweet Chris McGrath| June 30th, 2010 1 Comment »

There seems to be a big appetite for case studies of how Enterprise 2.0 software is being used in the real world. I want to invite you to check out our case study of Continuum, the Boston-based design innovation firm responsible for brilliant ideas like the Reebok Pump and the Swiffer Sweeper.

This is the latest of our Intranet Case Studies.