ThoughtFarmer is a finalist for Intranet Journal’s Product of the Year in the “Document Management / Collaboration Product” category. Other finalists are:
If you’re a ThoughtFarmer fan, please put in a vote for us!
Relationships are funny things. A combination of formal and informal roles, responsibilities, and feelings, they’ve given the designers and users of social software a hard time. How do we make explicit something as subtle as friendship? How often does “friend” just not seem at all like the right term to be using in Facebook to describe an acquaintance? The result is often not very pretty.
In a business setting, enterprise 2.0 tools have a slightly easier time of things. Relationships can be formally codified within an organization. He’s my direct report. She’s my boss. That’s my department. This is my project team. These are relationships that, while they may change, don’t vary or depend on my day to day emotional state and how I feel about them (wish as you may).
So we’ve been thinking, wouldn’t it be useful to utilize those relationships to tune your notifications from the intranet?
Keeping abreast of what’s happening in your organization through monitoring the activity of your intranet is something that we’ve been working on in the design of ThoughtFarmer for a while. The current incarnation is fairly basic: we have a simple filter of recent changes on the home page that shows who’s updated their status (People), what pages have been edited (Pages), and what comments have been made (Comments). It’s enough to provide you with some signals that stuff is happening and you may or may not be interested in that stuff.
What we’re working towards in an upcoming release of ThoughtFarmer is a model that provides somewhat more fine-grained control of what’s happening. Our current model, if there’s lots of people in your organization, is a bit coarse: seemingly random noise from the knowledge repository of your company. To help us refine that concept, we’ve sought inspiration from the real world and the pioneering work of American anthropologist Edward T. Hall, to introduce a concept of proxemics to the intranet.
Proxemics was Hall’s contribution to the study of how people relate to each other interpersonally and socially through their physical proximity to each other. Hall identified four expanding zones of relation: intimate distance, personal distance, social distance, and public distance. Each of these distances represented boundaries of physical space from centimeters (intimate) to tens of meters away (public) and represented the ability to engage in certain relationship-defining acts between people across those distances.
These then represent a nice lens through which we can look at the relationships we have with each other, our company, and our content on the intranet. Intimate distance represents information all about you: your page edits, your comments, your status, etc. Personal distance represents stuff that’s been done to you or your content by others. Social distance is everything within your network, including your management relationships and group / division / regional relationships. Finally, public distance on the intranet is everyone and their activity in the organization.
Individuals, groups, their activity, and their content have a gravity to each user. Like Grover from Sesame Street, some are near, others are far. We acknowledge this model doesn’t take into account the interpersonal ties and informal social bonds that exist throughout an organization, but hope that intranet proxemics will help provide a subtle and useful mechanism for keeping aware of what’s going on within the organization.
Prior to a company-wide deployment of a new wiki intranet, many companies conduct a pilot to an initial group of users. Here are a few suggestions on making that pilot a success.
Size: Don’t make your pilot too big, or it will become as big a job as launching to the whole company. But don’t make it too small, either: You need enough people adding content to make it interesting. 20 to 50 people is probably good.
Attitude: Choose keeners — people who aren’t afraid to try new things or to use new technology. Choose people that will be enthusiastic about the potential for open collaboration at your company.
Seniority: Try to get one or more people from the senior team to actively participate in the pilot. If they set the example, the rest of the pilot group will be more likely to actively participate and view the pilot as important.
Blank slate = bad. No one knows what to do with a blank wiki. So set yours up with a basic navigation structure.
Sample top-level navigation structure:
You might also try building out the information structure underneath some of the top-level items:
Departments
- Finance
- HR
- IT
- R&D
- Sales & Marketing
Caution: Be careful not to be too granular in the way you define the initial information structure, or your wiki might seem too restrictive. It’s easy to move pages if you need to subdivide or rearrange sections in the future.
Users learn by example. If users see lots of examples of how others have populated content, they find it easy to imitate. Wikis are generally easy to use — as long as users see that something is possible, they can usually figure out how to do it on their own.
Users. User profiles are a central part of any intranet. Populate them with an initial import from your directory system, importing as much data as you have available.
Barnraising. You can populate a whack of content in a single day. Try getting 4 or 5 people together for an all-day barnraising.
Give users a reason to return. In the early stages of the pilot, make sure there’s something new on the home page every single day. News items, polls or the cafeteria lunch menu work well for this.
Email notifications: Many wiki systems can send you an email when someone responds to your comment or edits a page you’ve created. Make sure these notifications are enabled — they keep online conversations flowing and drive repeat traffic to the wiki.
Alternatively, you can rely on RSS feeds for these notifications. But RSS may still be poorly used or understood by many people in your pilot group.
Give your pilot group something specific to accomplish with your wiki. Ideas:
Promote. Prior to the pilot, send several email communications to your pilot group to get them excited about participating.
Launch. Have an event to launch the pilot. If you’re in a single office, reserve a boardroom, do a short demo, assign tasks, and eat some doughnuts. If you’re in several offices, launch via a web conference.
Follow up. Schedule group or individual follow-up meetings for the week following the pilot launch. See how users are doing with their tasks, and answer their questions. A weekly or biweekly group meeting to review progress will help keep things moving along.
WikiPatterns is full of great suggestions on helping a wiki succeed in a corporate environment.
In his seminal article on Enterprise 2.0, professor Andrew McAfee lays out the six components of next-generation enterprise collaboration platforms:
S - Search
L - Links
A - Authoring
T - Tags
E - Extensions
S - Signals
How does ThoughtFarmer stack up?
“Users are increasingly bypassing [navigation] in favor of keyword searches.”
ThoughtFarmer has a fast, accurate, configurable search engine.
“Links are an excellent guide to what’s important… Many people have to be given the ability to build links.”
All ThoughtFarmer users can easily embed links in text, or even create directories of links.
“When authoring tools are deployed… the intranet shifts from being the creation of a few to being the constantly updated, interlinked work of many.”
All ThoughtFarmer users can create and edit content with a few clicks.
“[Folksonomies] reflect the information structures and relationships that people actually use, instead of the ones that were planned for them in advance.”
All ThoughtFarmer users can apply tags to pages and documents.
“Moderately ’smart’ computers take tagging one step further by automating some of the work of categorization and pattern matching.”
ThoughtFarmer tagging enables faceted browsing — quickly mine through lists of thousands of pages by progressively applying tags.
“The final element of the SLATES infrastructure is technology to signal users when new content of interest appears.”
ThoughtFarmer alerts you to new content via RSS or email notifications.
ThoughtFarmer is 100% SLATES-compliant.
But is it FLATNESSES-compliant? I’ll address this in a future blog post.
Hosted software, cloud computing, SaaS. They get so much press you’d think that no one installs software on their private network anymore.
The reality, of course, is that behind-the-firewall software is a much, much larger portion of the market than SaaS — maybe 1000 times larger. It’s just not growing as fast.
ThoughtFarmer, as a web 2.0 wiki social software solution, is contrarian. Unlike most solutions in this space, we install behind the firewall. Why? Four reasons:
Speed. Applications on your network travel at full throttle. They’re not affected by internet congestion. And because they’re dedicated to you, they’re not affected by what the vendor’s other customers are doing.
Stability. When the software is on your servers, you don’t have to upgrade if you don’t want to. And there are never any surprise changes.
Security. Do you trust some 23-year-old in Palo Alto with your data? Me neither. I mean, he can have my email address and Flickr photos, but not my trade secrets. Behind the firewall is the safest place for your intellectual capital to live.
Single Sign-On. Software on your private network can integrate with your Windows log on. You get a secure, personalized view without ever entering a password.
(Hmm… they all start with an S.)
The main disadvantage? Software behind the firewall is usually more expensive. It takes more manpower to maintain the servers and to install and upgrade the application. But for most companies with more than a few dozen employees, the peace of mind is worth it.
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:
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:
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…