ThoughtFarmer Blog - Official Knowledge sharing blog for the new enterprise.

ThoughtFarmer customer Miko Coffey, Head of Digital Media at the U.K.’s NESTA, is part of an elite group of Enterprise 2.0 practitioners invited as panelists to the upcoming Office 2.0 conference in San Francisco, September 5th to 7th.

Miko’s team has integrated ThoughtFarmer with a suite of other Enterprise 2.0 applications, including BaseCamp, Central Desktop, Community Server, del.icio.us, Diigo, Feedburner, TypePad and Wufoo.

NESTA’s use of next-generation web applications is particular impressive because they’re public sector. You can hear more about Miko’s success with ThoughtFarmer and other Office 2.0 solutions at the conference.

Nicholas Carr made an interesting post a few days ago about two studies of the adoption of Web 2.0 technologies in the enterprise. Nick contrasts reports by Forrester and McKinsey on CIO attitudes towards these tools. In particular, his last paragraph is worth quoting:

“The Forrester survey found a clear preference among CIOs for buying a full suite of Web 2.0 tools from a large, established vendor. 74% of CIOs said they’d be more interested in investing in Web 2.0 if all the tools were offered as a suite, and 71% said they’d prefer the tools to be ‘offered by a major incumbent vendor like Microsoft or IBM [rather than] smaller specialist firms like Socialtext, NewsGator, MindTouch, and others.’”

As a small company that services large companies and government ministries, quotes like that jump off the page at me. I don’t find the “major incumbent vendors” to be a hub of innovative software or business practices. I’ve witnessed the performance of the big IT firms with some of our larger clients and am staggered by the volumes of people, processes, and paperwork that get pushed around without accomplishing anything. Certainly there’s good, smart, well intentioned people working in these organizations, but their size appears to get the better of them. Then again, as they saying goes, no-one ever got fired for hiring .

So is this really more of a reflection of CIO’s playing it safe than it is in delivering innovation to the enterprise?
Morgan Goeller commented on Carr’s article:

“I find it very ironic that CIOs want to purchase their innovative, disruptive, distributed information tools from a single, monolithic vendor.”

Me too.

As online collaboration tools continue to permeate the enterprise, intranet managers need to make their intranet the hub of internal collaboration or risk irrelevancy.

Collaboration means working together to get something done. At a minimum, I think your intranet should facilitate the following three types of collaboration:

Instant Collaboration

Goal: Share ideas and get immediate feedback
Offline equivalent: Face-to-face meetings & phone calls
Online solutions: MSN Messenger, Google Talk, WebEx, etc.

Instant collaboration tools include instant messaging and desktop screen-sharing. Your intranet should provide links or downloads for these tools and instructions on how to use them. Advanced integration could include an indicator beside names in the employee directory to show who’s online.

Project Collaboration

Goal: Plan and execute a project
Offline equivalent: Status meetings & war boards
Online solutions: BaseCamp, Central Desktop, eProject, etc.

Project collaboration tools usually include a shared calendar, to-do lists, message boards and a file repository. Your intranet should link to your project collaboration tool and include suggestions on how to use it effectively. Advanced integration could include a personalized to-do list on the intranet home page.

Mass Collaboration

Goal: Ongoing sharing, learning and connecting with teammates
Offline equivalent: Team off-sites, workshops, conferences
Online solutions: Confluence, SocialText, ThoughtFarmer, etc.

Mass collaboration solutions make it easy to create, share, and find content. They include wikis, blogs, and social bookmarking. The best ones leverage the network effect to aggregate individual contributions in ways that create value for the entire organization. Your intranet shouldn’t be integrated with a mass collaboration solution. It should be a mass collaboration solution.

The intranet team should pursue ownership of all types of online collaboration and integrate them into a single portal. The future for intranets is mass collaboration.

Further reading:

• Collaboration Types: Part One, Two and Three

• List of mass collaboration applications

In a recent post, Lars Plougmann describes the opportunity for firms without an intranet to move directly to an open intranet using social software tools. A brief summary:

• What’s wrong with traditional intranets? They’re always out-of-date.
• What’s an “open” intranet? One where every page has a nice friendly Edit button on it.
• Won’t that lead to chaos? Yes, and that’s not such a bad thing.
• Can we trust our people to edit the intranet? You already trust them to write emails and to handle your clients.

Read the entire post for more.

In Wikinomics, Don Tapscott describes the “perfect storm” that is ushering in a new era of mass collaboration: the Web as a computing platform; a global economy; and a demographic tidal wave he refers to as the Net Generation.

Born between 1977 and 1996, the Net Generation grew up immersed in a digital world. The internet dominates their personal and social lives, from instant messaging to peer-to-peer filesharing to virtual communities. They publish and participate in online social networks and swap ideas as easily as they swap songs and videos.

So what happens when one of these fresh college graduates joins a firm and finds a staid, traditional intranet with a tightly controlled publishing model?

They hate it.

This is a very real problem for companies trying to attract and retain new talent. These twentysomethings operate on principles of openness, participation and interactivity. If a company’s technology infrastructure, including the intranet, does not encourage free communication and collaboration, it misses a big opportunity. Worse, it alienates these younger, internet-savvy employees.

This issue is obviously bigger than just the IT department. It involves the culture of the entire organization. That notwithstanding, what can we as intranet managers do to attract and harness the talents of the Net Generation?

Turn users into authors. Help your employees edit, create, annotate, rate and comment on the intranet. By trusting them in this way, they’ll trust you back. You’ll create honest, satisfied, engaged employees. You’ll also create an environment where knowledge flows freely and breakthrough ideas can emerge.

Turn authors into friends. Expose your company’s social network online. Allow employees to associate, connect and form relationships with one another through the intranet. This isn’t touchy-feely hogwash. One of Gallup’s 12 questions to gauge employee engagement is “Do I have a best friend at work?” Intranets that turn authors into friends improve employee engagement and strengthen workplace community, especially with Net-Geners.

Skeptical? Then consider some of the world’s most heavily-trafficked web sites: MySpace (#3), YouTube (#6), Facebook (#10), Blogger (#12), Flickr (#20). They are dominated by the Net Generation, and they operate on the two principles listed above: they turn users into authors, and authors into friends. To create an intranet that “clicks” with N-Geners, we would all do well to imitate these sites.

I’ll leave you with a quote from Wikinomics: “Companies able to adapt to the new demands of N-Gen now will gain a tremendous source of competitive advantage and innovation. Those that don’t will be left on the sidelines, unable to refresh their workforces as the N-Geners flow to other opportunities.”

Sounds ominous. But I think he’s right.

Well-known usability guru Jakob Nielsen has just published his Intranet Design Annual for 2007. In the report Nielsen picks his top 10 intranets of the year and surveys a wide range of intranet trends from submissions around the world. Nielsen’s summary:

This year’s winners emphasized an editorial approach to news on the homepage. They also took a pragmatic approach to many hyped “Web 2.0″ techniques. While page design is getting more standardized, there’s no agreement on CMS or technology platforms for good intranet design.

For followers of Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 techniques and methods, it is interesting to see Nielsen talk about the adoption of tools like internal weblogs, use of AJAX in the user interface, and wikis. He also mentions the use of star ratings and user comments, both features we’ve implemented and had positive feedback on from users of ThoughtFarmer.

Finally, it was interesting to see the breakdown of corporate ownership for the intranet (35% communications, 27% IT, and 19% HR) and the inability of many organizations to get a grasp on their intranet’s ROI. Nielsen writes, “The ultimate imperative for usability is to ’show me the money.’ What’s the benefit to the business of improving the user experience? Sadly, most intranet teams continue to have weak data on their work’s monetary value.”

Rod Boothby runs an interesting blog about innovation, knowledge workers, and enterprise blogging over at Innovation Creators. His most recent post includes a poll of “break out read/write intranet systems for 2007″ — of which, ThoughtFarmer made the list.

These software companies all make tools that could be used by a large company to create a readable and writeable Intranet. Please indicate how likely you think it is that each of these companies will hit a home run in 2007. 1 is not likely. 5 is guaranteed success.

We’re in some good company there. It’s a pretty diverse list of major platforms, some of which are new to me. In general, I think everyone on the list shares the desire to redefine how intranets work and create value for organizations. I’m not sure how entirely scientific the poll is, but Rod’s done a good job in capturing many of the Enterprise 2.0 type platforms out there today.

So go check it out and be sure to give us a few stars…