Hiding from the gaze of the social intranet

Gord| July 12th, 2010 1 Comment »

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

Gord| July 6th, 2010 1 Comment »

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

Chris| 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.

Video: Desktop Connector Enables Roundtrip Editing; Reduces Email File Attachments

Chris| June 22nd, 2010 4 Comments »

Last week at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston we unveiled our Desktop Connector. Read this post for the details of how it works and why it’s so significant.

For this post, I thought I’d show it visually with a 90-second demo. See below.

ThoughtFarmer 3.7 released. Key feature for IT managers: Windows password reset

Chris| June 1st, 2010 Comments Off

ThoughtFarmer 3.7 is out today! Read the complete 3.7 overview in the Product section of our web site.

For this post, I’d like to focus on a feature that is much more popular than we anticipated: the ability to change your Windows network (Active Directory) password directly from ThoughtFarmer.

I work primarily from my home office. When my OpenRoad network password expired, I had 3 ways to update it:

1. Use Windows Remote Desktop. Log on to a server I have access to, and change it from there. Issue: Lots of steps for most users, and I usually forgot which server to use.
2. Use Outlook Web Access. Go to my Outlook web mail, and change it from there. Issue: We switched to Gmail. I can’t remember how to get to Outlook Web Access.
3. Phone Lawrence. He’s at the office, he has the admin passwords, and he can hook me up. Issue: Lawrence is getting sick of my password reset requests.

None of these solutions is ideal.

ThoughtFarmer 3.7, however, warns you of expiring passwords.

Follow the link, and you’re presented with a screen like this:

No matter where you are — at home, traveling, in a satellite office — and no matter what type of computer you’re using — Mac, iPad, Linux, Windows — if you can access ThoughtFarmer, you can change your Windows network password.

We’ve spoken to many IT managers over the past few months who literally bubbled over with enthusiasm when we explained this feature. Apparently, there are expensive, dedicated web applications to handle password expiry and updates for off-network users. But now, you get it for free with ThoughtFarmer.