Winners of the ThoughtFarmer Best Intranet Competition

Tweet Chris McGrath| January 30th, 2012 No Comments »

In September, we put out a call for submissions to the ThoughtFarmer Best Intranet Competition. We challenged our clients to show us their best in 3 categories: Best-looking, Most Innovative and Best Collaboration.

The winners were unveiled at the 2011 Social Intranet Summit. Today, we’re pleased to announce the winners to the world.

Best-looking intranet

Winner: WATG, Newport Beach, California

Who they are: Renowned destination design firm WATG has designed some of the world’s most famous hotels and resorts, from The Atlantis in the Bahamas to the Emirates Palace in Abu Dhabi.

Why they won: Just like their projects, WATG’s ThoughtFarmer installation is well-designed. It employs a neat, minimalist aesthetic that complements the stunning photography.

Honorable Mention: Fortis Business Media, Nashville, Tennessee

Who they are: Fortis produces newsletters, videos, software, books, and directories to attorneys, human resources professionals, and other business executives.

Why they won: The name of Fortis’s intranet, “The Pub”, rolls right off the tongue so that users have incorporated its usage into the office vernacular — and it’s also a play on their core business of publishing. The look and feel is comfortable and inviting, taking design cues from an old English pub.

Most Innovative intranet

Winner: KWL Consulting Engineers, Vancouver, Canada

Who they are: Kerr Wood Leidal specializes in water engineering for municipal infrastructure and resource development. They are employee-owned and strive to maintain an open, collaborative environment.

Why they won: Like many firms, KWL periodically refreshes the mobile phones of employees. Using ThoughtFarmer, they held an open auction for dozens of smart phones and raised money for charity. They created a page for each phone, then let employees submit their bids by using ThoughtFarmer’s commenting features. The highest bid submitted before the deadline was the winner. In the words of Jonathan Funk, the intranet project manager, “In the end, we found a great new way to use our ThoughtFarmer intranet and raised $4230 for the Ronald McDonald House charity.”

Honorable Mention: Farm Bureau Bank, San Antonio, TX

Who they are: Farm Bureau Bank offers its banking services to members of the Farm Bureau, a U.S.-wide organization that strives to build strong, prosperous agricultural communities.

Why they won: Farm Bureau Bank created a “Shout-Outs” section on their ThoughtFarmer intranet. It’s a place where employees can publicly thank (or “shout-out”) a fellow employee or even a department for assisting with work-related issues. This kind of public recognition enhances employee engagement, which is a critical function of FBB’s ThoughtFarmer intranet.

Best Collaboration on an intranet

Winner: ACRONYM Games, Burnaby, BC, Canada

Who they are: ACRONYM Games in Vancouver designs popular video game titles like Family Guy Online, Wipeout The Game, and Monkey Island.

Why they won: Prior to publishing a game, ACRONYM does “smut and copyright reviews” to make sure the game’s assets comply with the appropriate standards. Prior to ThoughtFarmer, they were forced to do this via lengthy and confusing email chains. Now it’s done entirely in ThoughtFarmer using image galleries, commenting and version control.

Honorable Mention: Design Continuum, Boston, MA

Who they are: Continuum is a global design innovation firm. They design services, brand experiences and products. Some of their best-known innovations include the Reebok Pump, the Swiffer Sweeper and Pampers Pull-ups.

Why they won: Continuum has made extensive use of ThoughtFarmer’s custom profile fields to help them locate experts. Their employee profiles capture employees’ skills and attributes, from visas held to languages spoken to social style. According to Brendan Mullen, Continuum’s IT Director, “If I’m looking for a French-speaking PHP expert with a current visa for China, I can do that with a few clicks. In an organization with offices on 3 continents, that’s huge.”

Winner of the iPad Draw

All entrants were automatically entered in a draw for a new iPad 2. We were amused that the name we drew meant that our shipping charge would be almost as much as the iPad itself! Congratulations to our client DFDL Mekong in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

Look for the next ThoughtFarmer Best Intranet Competition in late 2012!

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.

Real intranet managers: Emily Staresina’s lessons learned from going social

Tweet Ephraim Freed| October 10th, 2011 4 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 previous posts on Luke Mepham of Aviva PLC,  Tanis Roadhouse of MD Physician Services/CMA, Christy Season of SCANA, William Amurgis of AEP and Dinesh Tantri from ThoughtWorks.

Emily at a glance

• Name: Emily Staresina
• Hometown: Hamilton, 45 min outside of Toronto
• Organization: Stockland Property Group, a large Australian diversified property company
• Job title: Intranet & Usability Consultant (aka jack of all trades)
• Employees: About 1400
• Based in: Sydney, Australia
• Name of intranet: stockXchange
• Date of most recent overhaul: January 24, 2011 – completely new IA & graphic design
• Technology stack: SharePoint
• Size (# of pages, documents, comments, etc.): Around 1600 pages. “We made it part of our mandate to keep this as low as possible. It’s easy to get a lot of content up that becomes out of date quite quickly.”

Intranet manager with a peculiar past

Emily Staresina doesn’t have your average intranet manager’s background (though this interview series has shown such a thing doesn’t really exist).

Before moving to Australia, Emily lived in Los Angeles and earned a Masters Degree in “Moving Image Archive Studies” at UCLA, working her way through school as a film projectionist. So how does that translate into a career in building good intranets?

Emily’s first job after her undergraduate work in History and Film Studies was as an Archivist for the National Archives of Canada, which taught her about, in her words, “organizing information and making it available to people who want to access it.”. Her Masters thesis project at UCLA focused on “home movies as historical reference points we overlook.” This gets at a key aspect of Emily’s personality that connects to her intranet work: she likes looking for things that aren’t obvious.

“Internal resources are often seen through the lens of ‘if it’s not broken, why fix it?’” Emily said that partly because they aren’t obvious she likes to “focus on internal tools and convincing people that they can get improvements in business efficiency by improving internal systems.”

So by way of early jobs in archiving, being drawn towards the non-obvious, and a previous job working for Google in Australia, Emily today finds herself working for Stockland Property Group, a large Australian diversified property company, as their Intranet and Usability Consultant. In her current role she focuses on strategic positioning of the intranet within Stockland and helping it deliver on internal communications strategies.

Intranet project started with business need

Today Emily and the intranet team at Stockland are smack dab in the middle of a major intranet project. The first phase of the project was delivered in January of this year and consisted of a completely new IA and visual design. Ever since, the team has been diligently working on the next phase which includes a major software upgrade and introduction of social intranet features. But how did it all get started?

Emily said “the project started in response to a mandate from Stockland’s leadership to break down silos.” Stockland identified a critical business need of creating greater business efficiency  and reducing duplication throughout the company. Different lines of business were replicating each others’ work, their many offices felt disconnected and the company seemed splintered.

Stockland’s executives decided to invest in helping employees, offices and business units improve knowledge flow, build and strengthen connections and increase the sense of shared purpose. The intranet’s potential to play a central role in this process has driven the project thus far and lent it strategic weight. According to Emily:

One of our key sponsors is at the executive level and is exceptionally passionate about the project. She spends time communicating with the executive team about the alignment of the intranet project with broader corporate strategy and explaining the business benefits the project can yield. We have met with several members of the executive team to discuss questions they have about how social media can benefit the Stockland team. After the proof of concept we’ll have a show and tell so they can have a real feel for the new intranet. We’ll show situational based examples and the business value of real life examples at regular intervals.

With this kind of executive support and alignment with organizational priorities in place, Emily’s team has moved forward in implementing a more social intranet. But they haven’t thrown the baby out with the bathwater and gone for a pure social networking or collaboration platform.

Social doesn’t replace traditional intranet

Stockland is shifting towards a more social intranet in steps and is still focused on providing a strong “intranet 1.0.” Their new information architecture (IA) and graphic design is an example of getting the basics right:

Our previous IA was based on corporate structure, but we found through user workshops that we are a very task based organization and we wanted the upgraded intranet to reflect that. By developing an intranet that is task based we have helped to break down silos between business units. Through the process and in using the revamped navigation, business units have gotten insights into what is happening next door.

Emily shared the example of Stockland’s three main business units that all have similar processes for property development. In the old intranet IA, which was based on corporate structure, the pages documenting each business unit’s processes were in separate locations. The new intranet IA provides simplified access to this information and shows all three businesses’ processes in one glance.

Even before “going social” Emily’s team delivered on the company’s mandate to break down silos by taking a new, task-based approach to designing the intranet’s navigation.

In addition to breaking down silos, the new IA is very simplified. During their research the Stockland team realized that there were tasks that people needed on a daily basis (“need-to-know” content) and then there was lots of “nice to know” information that wasn’t critical to daily work but had a home on the intranet. The new intranet IA has focused on dividing this content, increasing the priority and visibility of the task-based content by putting it in the global navigation and moving the “nice-to-know” content deeper down in the secondary navigation. This has reduced the competition for the user’s attention with “need-to-know” material.

This work on the traditional aspects of Stockland’s intranet highlights an important point: a social intranet is still an intranet! Companies shouldn’t just replace their traditional, very valuable information with a social networking or micro-blogging platform that has no structure. Instead, they can update their core intranet content through user-centered design approaches and also implement social software features.

Lessons learned from social pilots

Now that they’ve rebuilt their core intranet in a user-friendly way Emily’s team is setting its sights on implementing social features. But they are taking a deliberate approach that includes pilots and has yielded important lessons about how to roll out social features company-wide.

“At the moment we’re a quarter of the way in for planning a social intranet layer,” says Emily. “We’re developing a proof of concept, are holding workshops with people from business units across the company and have hired Step Two Designs to help develop an adoption strategy.”

Lesson #1: Don’t talk about social media

From the beginning of the project Emily’s team realized that talking about a “social intranet” was not a door opener:

When you talk about social media here internally, you get a lot of blank stares and people turn off. They ask, “Why would we do that internally?” or say, “We’re not a big enough company to do that internally.” The solution was simple: The second we stopped talking about social media and instead talked about better ways to communicate and collaborate internally, people listened and asked, “What do you mean by that?” We realized we had to sell the social layer’s business value rather than social media itself.

Lesson #2: Give examples people can relate to

Once they started talking about business value and got people’s attention, Emily’s team realized they needed to help people understand at a gut level what they were talking about.

Stockland conducts research for their development work and the team honed in on a useful example of collaboration that resonated with colleagues. “We told people that they may be commissioning research that someone else is commissioning,” says Emily. “Wouldn’t it be useful to have a place to ask other researchers about what they’re working on to avoid duplication?”

That simple example didn’t use the words “social media” but instead spoke about solving a real business problem with a more effective way to connect and communicate.

Lesson #3: Specific purpose & daily value

One of the first internal social media experiments at Stockland was the “Purpose Portal.” The company needed to capture employees’ ideas and feelings about their corporate purpose statement, so they set up a blogging site. In this social media space employees could craft short responses to questions such as ”what animal does Stockland most represent?” Emily said that “people really responded to those short, sharp activities.”

Following the “Purpose Portal” the Stockland team launched a response blog called “The Better Way Blog”, which didn’t go over as well. People were hesitant to post comments on Executives’ blog posts and the intranet team struggled to get adoption.

“During the interview and workshop phase we asked a lot of questions around social media,” says Emily. “The results of our research showed that people will need a reason to use the social stuff, that we need to understand cultural expectations, and that technical challenges can create barriers to use. Don’t just launch the social tech to everyone, but instead have it available and then let people come to you with real needs and offer them a solution that uses the social features.”

Lesson #4: A second tier of stakeholders

Emily and her team also learned a key lesson about the difference between official stakeholders and the employees who will use the software the most. “You have known stakeholders with whom you communicate about the project, but there is a secondary layer of stakeholders who are quite powerful in the business,” says Emily. “They are heavy users of the intranet and when you change the complete structure it’s important to identify secondary stakeholders and give them opportunities to provide feedback and to explain why we’re making the changes.”

While it is crucial to involve the standard stakeholders in an intranet project, it may be just as important to engage with the employees whose daily tasks are more directly at stake. If the actual power users are not happy, the path to intranet adoption may be riddled with bumps and bruises.

Social intranet strategy: Communities & enhancing daily work

Through their pilot efforts the intranet team recognized that employees were willing to use social intranet tools, but not for just anything. In order to mitigate the risks they discovered during their pilots, the Stockland intranet team will focus on creating communities so they can, according to Emily, “provide social media tools in targeted ways that can be valuable on a daily basis.” Emily continues:

We just had a workshop about what communities to get started with and a few have become really clear. We have offices in four states across Australia. One particular team that’s based across all four states came to us and said they need a place to communicate better and a place to push out messages. We realized they are perfect for piloting communities. They have a keen interest and a need to collaborate and communicate across geographies.

Emily thinks this approach could be successful and expects to end up with a large variety of communities.

The grand experiment continues

Stockland’s intranet team has done its due diligence and moved forward thoughtfully, but their success is not guaranteed. Emily told me, “We may need a role around community management and in terms of governance for communities we’re still in the early days of planning. But it’s all very exciting!”

There is no guarantee that the social aspects of Stockland’s intranet will work out. Many companies struggle to get the full value out of their social intranets. But Emily and her team have taken a very strategic approach thus far and have built a foundation of strong traditional intranet content that is helping staff already.

Often the difference between success and failure with a social intranet comes down to whether or not a team has a strong roll-out strategy and supportive executive leadership. Since The Stockland project has both, I’m betting on success.

15 ways to engage users in building a new social intranet

Tweet Ephraim Freed| September 12th, 2011 2 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.

Social intranets have changed the rules of successfully launching an intranet. While in the past it was quite helpful to involve employees throughout the process, today it’s a virtual necessity.

A social intranet becomes an online community space and employees need to feel a sense of involvement and ownership starting early in the project so they feel it really is their community.

While many of the opportunities for engagement listed below are standard practice for building a good 1.0 intranet, each one represents an opportunity to build a sense of shared ownership and create a shared sense of excitment over the coming change.

15 ways to engage users

1: Send out evaluation survey for old intranet.

If you’re building a new intranet, chances are the current/old one is no good. But you need a baseline of data to prove it. Try creating a simple survey about satisfcation with the current intranet. If you word questions carefully, you can re-apply the survey six months after you launch the new intranet and compare it to the baseline data about the old intranet. You can then continue to send out that same survey every 6-12 month to monitor satisfaction with the new intranet. Keep in mind that self-reported satisfaction surveys are not a complete approach to measuring the value of an intranet.

2: Hold focus groups about intranet problems.

Focus groups are a useful way to capture gripes about the current intranet and gather information about employee needs. Focus groups, as opposed to individual interviews or surveys, create shared experiences (“social” experiences, if you will) that help create a sense of connectedness among colleagues. This can start to lay the foundation for the sense of connectedness a social intranet will instill.

3: Interview key stakeholders early on.

Stakeholder interviews have been a key ingredient in intranet planning as long as intranets have been around. They are an opportunity to listen to leaders throughout the company and build relationships you’ll need throughout the project. Be sure to follow up with all interviewees on an ongoing basis to maintain their sense of involvement.

4: Observe employees in their daily workplace.

This technique is a secret of some of the best intranet managers in the world, but is standard practice for usability experts. Workplace observation gives the intranet team very real-world insights into how people work on a daily basis and the information and tools they use to do their jobs. It can provide much more realistic information than approaches that require participants to self-report.

5: Ask employees to post ideas for the new intranet.

James Robertson famously said “don’t ask users what they need on the intranet” (see James’ blog post on the topic). While that’s a good motto for intranet managers, it can’t hurt to ask people for ideas for the new intranet. Be clear that no idea is gauranteed to make it into the final product, but give people the chance to share their thoughts. You may discover brilliant and innovative ideas the intranet team wouldn’t have come up with.

It is important to set clear expectations about a process like this. Up front, explain how ideas will be vetted and what rewards or prizes will be given, if any. Try to hold this process in an open online space where employees can see and comment on or contribute to colleagues’ ideas.

6: Create a group for content owners.

As soon as you start the project to build a new intranet, get cozy with your content owners. Even on a social intranet, good content is critical for success. Intranet manager Tanis Roadhouse highlighted the need to “treat content owners like royalty” in her blueprint for building a social intranet.

7: Involve key employees in product evaluation.

Finding the right social intranet software is as much art as it is science. As important as meeting business and technical requirements is the need to find a good cultural fit. Strategically select employees to involve in the product evaluation process. Don’t make them scour complex requirements spreadsheets, but do give them demo access if it’s an option and let them get their hands dirty. Consider involving content owners in this process and listen very closely to their feedback.

8: Run a contest to name the new intranet.

Holding a contest to name the new intranet can build excitement and build the brand of the new intranet. You’ll want a structured process that’s timed right to fit into the rest of the intranet project. See our case study of crowdsourcing the name for a new social intranet for specific ideas on how to implement a naming contest.

A naming committee can either be the governing group that oversees the naming contest or an alterntative to the naming process. A company’s culture, the project timeline, or other factors may make a naming committee a better way to select a name for the new intranet than a naming contest. The naming committee could include stakeholders, content owners, and even an executive.

9: Hold voting on graphic design alternatives.

If your intranet project includes the time and budget to compare several design alternatives, this can be a great opportunity to involve employees. Create a simple system for people to vote or comment on two or three different design concepts and be clear from the start about how employee voices will be weighed.

10: Inventory content on old intranet.

This may be the least glamorous way to involve users, but it’s one of the most critical for building an effective new intranet. Usually the content owners conduct the content inventories, guided by the intranet team. This can be a time consuming process, so be sure to start it early and provide plenty of support and cupcakes to the content owners who’ll be doing it.

Alternatively, the intranet project team members can conduct the content inventories themselves, but then work closely with content owners to review the results.

11: Run online card sorting.

Card sorting is a tried and true tool for building user-friendly intranet navigations. Our Senior User Experience Designer, Selma Zafar, prefers to use Optimal Sort for online card sorting – an online tool that lets you gather results quickly and from far-flung locations in a way paper card sorting can’t.

Card sorting can be an opportunity to involve a very large group of employees in a substantive way. You can read about intranet manager Luke Mepham and how he involved 1,200 global employees in card sorting for an intranet redesign project.

If you’re new to card sorting, check out Donna Spencer’s blog post Card sorting: a definitive guide for oodles of concrete tips and hints.

12: Run online task testing.

Task testing is another standard tool in the User Experience Designer’s toolbox and can follow a card sorting effort. While card sorting helps you understand how employees group content in their minds, task testing lets you test how well a draft intranet navigation helps employees complete actual daily work tasks. We like to use Treejack for online task testing. This can allow you to engage large numbers of users, including those in remote locations.

13: Run user testing on mockups or pilot site.

User testing is similar to task testing, but happens on a live site or mockups that include page layouts and some graphic design elements. User testing provides a third round of validation for the navigation structure you are creating for your new intranet and can inform the layout of pages. It involves a smaller group than task testing and card sorting and is a little harder to do remotely.

14: Create pilot groups on new intranet.

If your project timeline allows it, include a period for pilot groups to test out your new social intranet. Most social intranet software includes features for groups (communities, teams, etc) to work together online. Carefully select groups for the pilot phase. Try starting with teams or employee communities that are either tech savvy already or that are most in need of online collaboration tools. Be sure to listen carefully to your pilot users and treat them as partners. The pilot effort can provide critical insights into how to launch and manage group pages and pilot users may become active champions who help with adoption after launch.

15: Identify community managers for early adopter groups.

A key component of social intranets is community spaces and a key success factor for online communities is having effective community managers. A community manager is like a content gardener, an online facilitator and a sherpa. By building a community management strategy into your intranet plan you can increase the chances of adoption of the new social intranet and ensure employees get real value out of it.

As you identify communities that could benefit from your new social intranet, reach out to staff members whom you think would make good community managers and provide them plenty of guidance and resources. If community management is a critical part of your adoption strategy, check out the Community Roundtable, a group of community managers who share best practice stories and hear from experts in the field.

The means ARE the ends

The end results most people seek from their social intranets are high levels of connection, knowledge sharing, and employee engagement. The best way to achieve this is to take a truly collaborative approach to planning and launching your social intranet. The means you use to implement the project from the beginning will be reflected in the ends you achieve.

Information Management: “ThoughtFarmer Social Intranet Connects with Staff”

Tweet Ephraim Freed| August 18th, 2011 No Comments »

Information Management interviewed ThoughtFarmer client Mountain Equipment Co-op (MEC) about their successful social intranet in a new article “Social Intranet Connects with Staff.” From the article:

By fostering employee use and making certain communications more efficient, management at outdoor gear retailer Mountain Equipment Co-op finds that workers are engaged as never before and using a system that caught on and took off in a way the company never imagined.

MEC is based in Vancouver. The retail co-op started in 1971 selling climbing equipment and has since expanded to all kinds of adventure supplies. It now has more than 1,500 employees in 14 retail locations. In what was first seen as a way to centralize information for employees, MEC adopted a social intranet.

Intranets have traditionally struggled as hotbeds of social activity, so practicality comes first. MEC employees use a platform from ThoughtFarmer called Mondo for checking schedules, requesting time off and reordering items. But once employee needs and behavior were understood, it also became a home to popular forums and interest groups. Mondo, administrators say, was functional out of the box, but more success came with customization for MEC staff.

In the six-month period from October to March 2011, users created 9451 pages, made 7932 comments and attached 3198 documents. MEC is now experiencing average usage levels of 85 percent of employees logging in on a regular basis.

Read the complete article.

What is a social intranet? The definitive explanation.

Tweet Chris McGrath| August 10th, 2011 21 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.

First, what is an intranet?

Definition: An internal website that helps employees get stuff done.

See our full blog post defining “intranet” for a detailed explanation and a fun bit of controversy in the comments.

Next, what is “social”?

“Social” may be the most overused word in technology today. I think you’d find, though, that the average businessperson would struggle to define “social software” and “social media”, resorting to feeble references to Twitter and Facebook.

Social is really just about people interacting with each other. “Social software” is software that enables users to interact with each other. “Social media” is content (“media”) published by a bunch of people who can interact with each other and the content. An “ice cream social” is a party where people interact with each other while eating ice cream. (Given the choice, I’d pick an ice cream social over any other kind of social, any day.)

Definition of “social intranet”

So, to the point of this post. The definitive explanation of a “social intranet”:

An intranet where all employees can author content and connect easily

It takes two things to make an intranet social:

1. Authorship: The ability for everyone to create content
2. Connections: The ability to see the people behind the content and to connect with them in some meaningful way

Traditional intranets have very narrow authorship, restricted to a small handful with official “editor” permission. Traditional intranets also lack connections. Content is basically anonymous and shows no social context, no connection between pages and specific people.

A social intranet allows all employees to author rich content, connects every piece of content to a specific, living and breathing person, and helps people connect with each other. On a social intranet the “people layer” permeates the entire site and makes every page more personal and more human.

Origin of the term “social intranet”

I’m proud to say that I coined the term “social intranet” back in early 2009. Well, it might have been Darren (our CEO). Or maybe we both cried out the term in unison during a moment of epiphany in a meeting. We can’t quite remember which one of us it was, except that we both erupted in enthusiasm when we realized we had captured the term that explained what ThoughtFarmer was (and is). I suppose we should have recorded the event and ran to the trademark office. In any event, we’re pleased the term has taken off.

Not about specific tech tools

We’ve seen some interesting definitions of “social intranet”, some that are too complex and others that define the term based on the specific software tools that have thus far been popular on social intranets (such as blogs, wikis, activity streams, etc.).

Those definitions can be helpful, but limit themselves with reliance on specific technology and formats. Just because you don’t have a blog on your intranet doesn’t mean it’s not social. And the specific tools available next year may not be on this year’s list.

Who knows what new enterprise technology will be common on the intranet of the future? We’re not sure. But we’re pretty sure wide authorship and the formation of connections will be at the core. What really matters is that social intranets humanize the workplace and give every employee a face and a voice.

Real intranet managers: Luke Mepham is “Mr. Intranet”

Tweet Ephraim Freed| August 2nd, 2011 13 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 previous posts on Emily Staresina of Stockland Property Group, Tanis Roadhouse of MD Physician Services/CMA, Christy Season of SCANA, William Amurgis of AEP and Dinesh Tantri from ThoughtWorks.

Luke at a glance

Luke Mepham, Global Intranet Strategy & User Experience Manager at Aviva PLC

• Name: Luke Mepham
• On Twitter: @LukeMepham
• Age: 33
• Hometown: Born in Yorkshire; grew up in Norwich
• Job title: Global Intranet Strategy & User Experience Manager (GISUEM for short)
• Company: Aviva PLC (Insurance)
• Employees: 45,000
• Headquarters: London, England
• Name of intranet: Aviva World
• Last intranet overhaul: April 2010
• Technology stack: SharePoint 2010

Humble beginnings in the Help Desk

“Hello there, Mr. Intranet.”

People actually call Luke Mepham “Mr. Intranet.” It may have something to do with his decade or more of working on intranets at the same company. Luke got into intranets without much pomp and circumstance. “Back in 1999 while working on the IT Helpdesk I took on responsibility for putting self-service content up on the company’s first, very primitive intranet,” he told me.

Luke has always been the kind of guy people come to for help with technical things, from printer settings to Excel spreadsheets. He’s friendly, tech savvy, and loves to fix things. So it made perfect sense for him to start working on the help desk content for the intranet. Little did his colleagues know the love affair that basic task would ignite.

It’s one of the great mysteries of the universe, why some of us find intranets fascinating and become drawn in by the gravitational pull of employee communications, user centered design, collecting requirements, getting the most out of web technology, and making work a better place to be. But mystery aside, Luke is definitely one of us passionate intranet nerds.

Career trajectory pushed off course

After his humble beginnings on the help desk, Luke became part of the intranet team. Over the years the team transformed, grew, shrank, switched departments, outsourced technical development, and went through many changes, but all along Luke was there, working on the intranet.

At a certain point, though, Luke’s supervisors started shifting him slowly away from the intranet and towards supply chain management and application development. He managed software development projects and a team of Indian developers, but didn’t feel the same sense of fulfillment he’d felt working on intranets. Luke said that “while grateful for the broader experience I was able to gain, I felt I’d strayed away from what I really enjoyed and was good at.” As he came to realize this, his thoughts and heart returned to the intranet world.

In 2007 as Aviva started consolidating its acquired and merged companies into a single global brand, an opportunity came up to manage the UK intranet team. Luke applied for and won the job and happily returned to the intranet realm.

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.

A series of fortunate intranet events

As part of the company’s push towards globalization, the group CEO called for a new single intranet, available to employees everywhere in the organization. This gave Luke the chance to work on a new intranet for a 45,000-person employee base and he took on the project with a fresh gusto. The first phase was simply to create a global intranet that reflected a consistent brand. This happened in 2008 with the launch of “Aviva World.” In 2009, once employees had become familiar with the new global intranet, Luke led a huge project to build out the functional content - the type of stuff that falls under “Work & Office” and “HR & Career” headings in the global navigation - for what they discovered would be a total of 6,000 operational tasks.

Originally the Aviva World intranet team had a clear picture of what they wanted from this functional content and how to organize it. “I had a little trouble getting folks on the team to buy in to a user centered design approach, so I ran a card sorting exercise in the London office. The results came back and showed that users had very different ideas about how to organize content than the intranet team.” The simple card sorting exercise convinced the team to follow Luke’s lead and employ some key practices of user-centric intranet design.

Over the following three months Luke’s team conducted card sorting exercises in offices around the globe and online, involving a total of 1,200 employees. Through many iterations of card sorting and with help from a consultant and software to analyze the results, Luke’s team came up with a new and beautiful information architecture for the functional content. The new IA went five levels deep, but represented hundreds of perspectives and many hours of gathering and analyzing data.

Once the section was completed, the functional content area saw a 96% success rate for task completion and an 80% accuracy rate. That means that four out of five employees could find the right content for a task on the very first try. These rates are what every intranet manager strives for; Luke’s team was able to achieve these results through their significant efforts and investment in card sorting, analysis, and testing.

It was this work that landed Luke the Global User Experience role in London.

Open, transparent, & engaging intranet planning

Luke credits the success of the content project to broad employee engagement and input. This represents one of Luke’s wonderful traits, and a trait shared by many successful intranet managers: he loves ideas and doesn’t have to come up with all the good ones himself. This perspective took center stage the following year (2010) when Luke and his team started planning for an upgrade from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010.

“While many intranet upgrades are seen as an opportunity to surprise employees with a cool new treat, we wanted to lead a very open process. I got approval to seek extensive employee contributions to the upgrade planning process and to run a very transparent project.”

Luke and his team created forums on the intranet and asked employees for input on intranet design improvements. Employee comments poured in and the intranet team used the feedback to plan for the upgrade. This high level of openness and employee involvement led to an intranet upgrade that avoided catching people by surprise and instead received rave reviews.

Luke wears sunglasses at night

Today, the latest company discussion forum posts show up on the homepage of the upgraded Aviva intranet, which gets 10 million pageviews per month and has 35,000 discussions in forums. Discussion topics range greatly, from employees helping other employees in need to gathering important corporate insights. Luke elaborates:

“Recently an employee had his iPod stolen. Through forum posts on the intranet, employees around the world organized and raised enough money to buy him a new iPod.”

“When Aviva employees are invited to speak to the UK government, they gather other employees’ questions and comments beforehand via discussion forums on the intranet.”

Employees are actively using and benefiting from the intranet and Luke had a critical role to play in that success. Today he is setting his sites on the new horizons of a fully enabled mobile intranet. But it’s not exactly Luke’s inspiring vision that has made him a great intranet manager. Instead it’s his focus on employees and his role as a facilitator. “The intranet is really about what it allows people to do. I get turned on by ideas much more than the kudos of having good ideas myself,” Luke told me.

It’s that ability to see and hear his colleagues, truly value them, and find ways to support their needs that has made Luke a wonderful intranet manager. While his career moved away from intranets for a bit, Luke’s passion for helping colleagues do their work brought him back to the intranet world and today he’s living the dream.

InformationWeek: “ThoughtFarmer Turns Businesses Into Thriving Communities”

Tweet Chris McGrath| July 12th, 2011 No Comments »

InformationWeek interviewed ThoughtFarmer clients Farm Bureau Bank and Continuum in a new article, “How SMBs Can Embrace the Social Intranet.” From the article:

At Farm Bureau Bank in San Antonio, Texas, [Richard] Hamlin was looking for a way to make the financial institution’s 100-plus staffers feel more involved in their jobs and the workplace. “I wanted to tie all of us together and make everyone feel like part of a community,” he said. “So far, it’s been a huge success.”

On one hand, ThoughtFarmer is a platform for structured knowledge exchange, with each department maintaining its own data repository. The accounting department stores expense reports, for example; HR posts job openings and W9s. Having all of this data available to employees company-wide has dramatically boosted Farm Bureau Bank’s efficiency and productivity, Hamlin said.

On the other hand, the software’s social media-type features provide a virtual town square of sorts, allowing employees to get to know their colleagues and find out what’s happening in different departments both inside and outside the office. Staffers can visit the “Barnyard,” a subsite of the intranet, to post items for sale at the online General Store (baby carriages, gently used furniture, bicycles, whatever); read the Employee Spotlight profiles; scan the company calendar to find out when and where the Farm Bureau softball team’s next game is; and view photos taken at the company picnic.

Read the complete article here.

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.

4 simple questions for governing collaborative content

Tweet Ephraim Freed| June 29th, 2011 3 Comments »

Whether you’re using a real social intranet like ThoughtFarmer or using something more akin to SharePoint team sites, managing the explosion of user-generated content is becoming the intranet manager’s Moby Dick. But you can tackle this beast early and create a strong governance framework for collaborative content by addressing 4 simple questions.

Governance is about people, not just an HR policy

Before jumping into the fray, remember the true nature of good governance. While a company should have smart HR policies in place, that’s only the beginning. The array of official policies on your books won’t magically solve your governance problems.

The real challenges of governance spring up around issues of responsibility and communication. A little while back our man Gord wrote about governance as the decision making process and helped define the issue. Here we’ve whittled governance of collaborative content down to 4 simple questions. Address these and the untamed beast will seem a lot more friendly.

Q1: Who can create groups?

First you need to decide who can create new groups (“team sites” in SharePoint lingo; also “Rooms”, “Spaces”, “Communities”, etc.), which may not be simple because they come in several different flavors.

Common types of groups

• Office
• Department / Division
• Project team
• Community of practice
• Community of interest
• Social group

If any employee can create a new group, before you know it there may be three different groups devoted to a single project. Duplication like this can cause confusion and create new information silos.

But if only IT staff can create new groups, you may find employees reticent to jump through the necessary hoops. The key is to work with your intranet team and find something that makes sense in your company, with your intranet software.

No matter what route you take, explicitly state who will be responsible for tracking creation of new groups and how people will resolve issues that arise. On a social intranet it’s better to make group creation easy, but you need a process to keep tabs on it.

Q2: Who is responsible for each group?

When I lived in Boston I organized weekly after-work soccer games from April through October. After five summers of organizing these games, we had developed a fun and diverse group of players and everyone knew where and when the games would take place. Whenever new folks showed up I’d explain the basic rules and add them to the email list. These games never would have happened if someone (me, in this case) hadn’t consistently looked after the email list, sent out reminders, welcomed new members and helped them acclimate.

A group page on the intranet is like this — it’s an online community that needs an explicit leader looking after it. This leadership role is more like that of a facilitator than a captain. Without someone with explicit responsibility for looking after the online collaborative space, it’s sure to fall into disarray. This role is often considered a “Community Manager” and can happen on both the micro level for each team and a macro level for your entire social intranet.

To address the question of group responsibility, be sure to create a specific role for group managers and come up with a plan for orienting new group managers and providing ongoing support.

Q3: How do you deal with old content?

If it’s ridiculously easy to add new blog posts and upload documents on your social intranet, people will do it. They’ll do it, and do it, and do it until the collaborative content is overflowing.

Many companies have document-heavy processes, which leads to oodles of collaborative content. Even worse, companies with unclear processes and a lack of standards can have even more documents as people reinvent the wheel on every project. Either way, you’ll find working documents will lose relevance very quickly and you’ll soon have a huge collection of content that nobody needs any longer.

To deal with this problem, teams need to communicate about it and agree on a plan ahead of time. Each group manager should continually work with the team to identify the most important types of information to share and establish clear methods for posting and editing that material. You may need to set aside a Friday afternoon every six months for a “purge party” – a time for all the team members to review old content and get rid of or archive what’s no longer needed.

Just like any aspect of a social intranet, dealing with old content is a people issue as much as a technology issue. That’s why it’s so important for each group page to have a responsible group manager.

Postcard from Intranet Secrets

Q4: How do groups build relevant IAs?

If your team’s Shared Drive was a jungle, your collaborative content on the social intranet won’t fare much better.

Even in the world of social computing, information management is still important. In order for team members to find collaborative content quickly and easily, there must be shared expectations about the navigation structure on the group page. The best approach is to move your collaborative processes one-by-one from email and shared drives to your group page and build a categorization scheme as a team.

For example, start writing meeting agendas and notes as wiki-style pages on your group page and email around the links. This can reduce the number of emails team members receive and make it easy for everyone to find the latest copy. Discuss this new approach with the team ahead of time, though, so everyone knows how this specific process is moving from the old workflow to a new one. Make sure all the team members can find the meeting agendas on the group page and know how to edit and comment on them.

A group manager can lead the effort to move collaborative work flows to the group page, but it needs to be a team effort to succeed. As you move workflows, the team can build a consistent navigation for the group page that all members are familiar with. If just one person is responsible for setting up a group page, she’ll likely try to set up a complete categorization scheme that makes sense in her own mind. But that will make it harder for other team members to get comfortable and adapt to the new ways of working.

It will be important for the team to review and revamp their growing group page structure occasionally. Make this a social, collaborative process that involves group members. Again, it’s about people, not technology.

Related: Sign up for our free webinar on July 20th, 2011, “Information Architecture 101: Task Testing“. Use discount code I-SAW-THE-BLOG.

Intranet team’s role: Collaboration consultants

When it comes to governing collaborative content, the central intranet team becomes like an internal consultant. They can provide a simple framework, help teams assign responsibilities and plan for success, and provide ongoing guidance.

Final suggestion: Work with stakeholders and social intranet champions to define these governance approaches. Take a collaborative approach to governing collaborative content.