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.

This is the latest of our Intranet Case Studies.

This segment of the technology industry attracts sharp minds who are intrigued by the same difficult problem: How can technology make workplace collaboration more effective? The answers require experts not just in technology, but in ethnography, human factors and psychology too.

Last night our VP Gordon Ross discussed the writings of Richard Sennett with Michael Idinopulos, a deep thinker from SocialText with whom I’ve engaged in lively online debate. We also talked about some of our common problems as vendors, such as figuring out the best way to explain comprehensive software suites in terms that the target customer appreciates. Are we enterprise collaboration, chaos management, Facebook for the enterprise or social intranet software? Is “social” even a good word to use?

Michael, Deb Schultz and Gord in deep discussion

Shortly before that, we were guests at an event hosted by Aaron Fulkerson and Isaac Garcia, CEOs of MindTouch and Central Desktop, respectively. Aaron introduced Darren to the noted Open Source developer Miguel de Icaza, creator of Gnome (Miguel is famous in geek circles). Aaron showed me his MindTouch tattoo (don’t worry, it’s on his calf), and we talked openly about a large bid that we’re competing against each other on. Isaac shared his advice on server farms as we move towards a hosted version of ThoughtFarmer.

I attended the Jive “New Way” briefing on Monday and enjoyed the free chocolates . Jive puts on a flashy show, and their new executives are seasoned presenters. I have to say, though, that there are too many men in suits at Jive for my liking. It was comforting to see their soon-to-be-very-wealthy co-founder and CTO, Matt Tucker, doing network configuration on the Macs at their booth. He’s still a geek.

Percentage of execs in suits apparently peaks around $100M in revenue

Lawrence Liu, now of Cisco and formerly of Telligent and before that, Microsoft, told me that all these software packages are overbuilt and 5 to 10 years ahead of where the customer base is at. We discussed ThoughtFarmer’s forthcoming SharePoint 2010 Connector, and he said there’s a lot of money to be made riding Microsoft’s coattails — if you don’t mind being their lackey.

Gord, Darren and Chris at the ThoughtFarmer booth. Photo by Jordan from Traction Software -- another friendly competitor. Thanks Jordan!

Rather than avoid or resent my competitors in this space, I like to embrace them. They’re great people with great ideas that I can learn from. And as Isaac said last night to the guests at his event, “This is a huge market. There’s going to be a lot of winners.”

Imagine this scenario, which plays out millions of times a day: A colleague emails you a Word doc. You double-click the attachment. It downloads and opens in Word. You make some changes and click “Save”. The “Save as…” dialog pops up, you choose a smart location for it, give it a filename, then save it. Next, you open your email program again, hit “Reply” on your colleague’s email, select “Attach file”, locate your file, and hit okay. Finally, you send it back.

Ugh.

Detaching, editing, saving, re-attaching and sending is a nightmare. And it’s a nightmare that almost all of us are forced to deal with daily.

At ThoughtFarmer, we’ve come up with a brilliant solution for this problem that we call round-trip file editing. It’s a knowledge worker’s dream, and we’re unveiling it next week at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston.

Here’s how that same Word doc works with round-trip file editing: You go to a ThoughtFarmer page that contains the Word doc. You click “Edit”. It automatically downloads and opens in Word. You edit, and every time you hit “Save”, the file is automatically uploaded back to ThoughtFarmer, ready for your colleague.

Unlike SharePoint, which only does round-trip editing on Windows using Internet Explorer for certain types of files, ThoughtFarmer does round-trip editing with any browser, on Windows or Mac, and with any type of file — Office, PhotoShop, AutoCad, you name it. It works through the firewall — if your browser can see your intranet, you can do round-trip editing. You can even work on the file offline and it will automatically sync up when you reconnect.

All this is made possible via our new Desktop Connector:

The ThoughtFarmer Desktop Connector lets you open files from your ThoughtFarmer intranet and edit them directly in their native application. No detaching, no emailing around, no re-uploading.

For anyone who’s suffered through downloading and re-uploading of files while trying to collaborate with a colleague: we’ve been there, we’ve felt the pain, and now we’ve done something about it.

If you’re in Boston next week, come visit us at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference for a demo.