Dachis Social Business Summit 2010 Roundup

Gord| March 15th, 2010 3 Comments »

On March 11, 2010, I was privileged to be part of the inaugural Dachis Social Business Summit in Austin Texas. Through our ThoughtFarmer partnership with the Dachis Group, we received an invite to join a great mix of people to listen and discuss social business design, the transformation of companies into “dynamic, socially calibrated organizations that gain constant value from their ecosystem of connections.”

The roster was stellar. A single-track, one-day event, the Summit’s speakers were compelling, interesting, and challenged the 100 or so audience members with their thoughtful and passionate talks.

Here’s who presented:

Douglas Rushkoff, Author (@rushkoff)
Charlene Li, Altimeter Group (@charleneli)
Jaime Punishill, Citibank (@jpunishill)
Kate Niederhoffer, Dachis Group (@katenieder)
Jackie Huba, Ant’s Eye View (@jackiehuba)
Frank Eliason, Comcast (@comcastcares)
Dion Hinchcliffe, Hinchcliffe & Co. (@dhinchcliffe)
Sam Decker, Bazaarvoice (@samdecker)
Rick Maynard, KFC (@kfc_colonel)
Lane Becker, Get Satisfaction (@monstro)
John Hagel, Deloitte (@jhagel)
Karen McGraine, Bond Art + Science (@karenmcgrane)
Christine Morrison, Intuit (@ttaxchristine)
Lee Bryant, Headshift (@leebryant)

When asked about how the list came together, Dachis Group’s resident Haligonian Jevon Macdonald said, “We asked our favourite people to come talk and they all agreed.”

The topics varied from the historical and theoretical down to the inner workings of managing Twitter accounts inside large corporations. 13th century economics, social psychology experiments, Colonel Sanders, four letter words used but not coined by Lane Becker, productive friction, HiPPO decisions, people excited about tax software, organograms, and of course, a plethora of storytelling and authentic conversations: the Summit was as broad as it was deep.

But one thing was consistent: the quality of the speakers and the level of discourse. How many events have you attended where you managed to see 14 presentations that were top notch? In a single day all in a row? SBS2010 made up for all of the awkward panels and hour-long infomercials surely to come on the eve of SXSW Interactive.

Jeff and his team have set the bar high for SBS2011. Well done.

I’ve got a few posts building on some of the many ideas at the Summit. In the meantime, here’s a roundup of links and resources from the Summit.

Slides from SBS2010 on Slideshare (only a few so far, hopefully more soon)

Frog Design – Jon Kolko

The New Marketing – Steve Ellis

Impact Interactions – Mike Rowland

IMediaWorks – Michelle Batten

New Comm Biz – Tac Anderson

Dave Gray’s visual note-taking illustrations (I sat beside Dave and watched him sketch all day, hope to see more of the notes online)

All tweets from #SBS2010, courtesy of Twapper (WARNING: it’s a long page. Who knew 100 people could tweet so much in one day?)

Open Amplify’s Twitter list of attendees

3 Potential Benefits of a Social Intranet

Chris| March 9th, 2010 1 Comment »

1. Realize the power of the network

Metcalfe’s Law states that the value of a network is equal to the square of its number of users*.

Information shared on a social intranet increases in value as more people access it. Sharing information in this way invokes Metcalfe’s law, generating new value.

2. Create an environment where lucky foresight appears

Gary Hamel, visiting Professor of Strategic Management at London Business School, says that truly innovative strategies “are always, and I mean always, the result of lucky foresight.” The task of the entire organization then becomes communicating on as open and wide a channel as technology will permit, creating an environment where lucky foresight is more likely to make an appearance. A social intranet facilitates this wide communication channel.

3. Unleash the power of individual minds

Bob Buckman, former president of Buckman Laboratories, says:

“If the greatest database in the company is housed in the individual minds of the associates of the organization, then that is where the power of the organization resides. These individual knowledge bases are continually changing and adapting to the real world in front of them. We have to connect these individual knowledge bases together so that they can do whatever they do best in the shortest possible time.”

A social intranet becomes the Great Connector, hyperlinking these individual knowledge bases together.

*Our senior consultant Bryan Robertson reviews Metcalfe’s Law and other formulas for calculating ROI in his piece, “The New Laws of Intranet ROI.”

Why Intranet Governance Matters

Gord| January 6th, 2010 6 Comments »

What’s going to be the big trend for intranets in 2010? Is this the year companies truly adopt social features in the enterprise? Will we finally come to an agreement on how to demonstrate ROI for enterprise 2.0 tools? What’s on the minds of intranet managers?

If you’re like the intranet managers that Jane McConnell just informally polled, then here’s your answer: Governance.

80% indicated that governance (principles, examples, and integration into “business as usual) was “very interesting and relevant for me.”

Governance. Not quite as exciting as microblogging or enterprise mashups. No, it’s not the technology topic you were probably expecting or want to be excited about. Of course, without it and without excitement for it, your intranet is destined for a bumpy ride.

Approaches to governance vary widely in organizations – historical structures and policies shape how governance is applied (or not). So to shed some light on this topic, I thought it would be useful to provide a few links and some good definitions to help intranet managers and owners to ground themselves in some governance basics.

What is governance?

Let’s start with a few good definitions:

Simply put “governance” means: the process of decision-making and the process by which decisions are implemented (or not implemented).
- Source: United Nations ESCAP: What is good governance?

Governance is the process whereby societies or organizations make important decisions, determine whom they involve and how they render account.
- Source: Institute on Governance

The take-away for both of these definitions should be clear: governance is about the decision making process.

And what does it mean to get your decision making process sorted out?

UK governance expert Graham Oakes has a great answer: “Well defined governance allows us to focus our energy on the decision, not the decision making process.”

Intranet success depends on the coordination of a wide range of people inside an organization. It is a multi-stakeholder initiative. Often there is ambiguity about the roles of the stakeholders. Who decides on what content goes onto the intranet? Who decides what technology is to be used? Who decides what the purpose of the intranet really is? Who decides who winds up paying for it?

And governance is not simply about “ownership” although turf wars between divisions also tend to characterize some of the issues that intranets face. Ownership debates about the intranet reveal the conceptualization of the intranet as a thing or material object, something that can be owned and possessed. Increasingly with social intranets, we feel this is an inadequate metaphor, where a more apt metaphor is that of a complex system, an ecology or a village or city.

While there is clear responsibility and accountability for the well being of a village or a city (someone is governing and “running” the city), its citizens share largely in the responsibility for making it what it is. The same is to be said with the social intranet, intranet 2.0. It’s the reason why Penn State Outreach named their intranet “our.outreach” instead of “my.outreach” — everyone owns their intranet, everyone is responsible for the well being of the content, the quality of the communication and collaboration amongst staff. That was a very intentional choice that the creators of the intranet made in naming it “our” — it signified a different approach, a change in thinking.

Just like the mayors and council who govern a village or city, intranet managers need to start asking themselves the question: how do I bring my intranet citizens into the larger decision making process? What does it mean to be an active participant in the ongoing decision making process of the intranet and indeed, the organization as a whole?

We’re interested in governance and the challenges faced by our clients in operating within complex multi stakeholder environments. What governance challenges have you faced? How have you succeeded? What lessons did you learn along the way?

Intranet Personalization that Works

Gord| December 3rd, 2009 2 Comments »

This article originally appeared on December 3, 2009 on the Dachis Group Collaboratory.

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ThoughtFarmer is an alliance partner of ours, and provides intranet software that fosters collaboration and communication. After many deployments, they have seen many challenges to personalizing the intranets of organizations. We asked Gordon Ross, the Vice President of ThoughtFarmer, to share his thoughts and experiences with us.

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One of the classic intranet design challenges that never seems to get any easier is the design of the homepage.  Employee Communications wants corporate messaging and CEO announcements. IT wants applications and personalization features. Employees want the cafeteria menu.

Juggling these varied interests is tough. As the intranet moves from a few-to-many internal communications tool to a hub of social activity, collaboration, and community, the homepage runs the risk of becoming even more crowded, complex, and simply irrelevant to the everyday lives of employees.

The libertarians in the organization know the answer to this dilemma and have yelled it loud and proud for years: “Personalize! Let the user choose what they want!” The paternalists know they have the answer too: “Centralize and publish! Decide for the user!” And so the tug of war continues.
 
We’ve been of the mind that you can have the best of both worlds. Through implicit personalization you can turn facts that you know about an employee into a powerful filtering tool to provide them with relevant information. But before we tackle how exactly we’ve gone about doing that, let’s dive a bit deeper into what it means to be relevant in the first place.

Signal to Noise

As good, responsible information designers, we take seriously the issue of trying to reduce the signal to noise ratio on the intranet.

We have our work cut out for us: the highest possible ratio of signal to noise is desirable. But what is relevant? What is not? Relevance is a thorny word, one that’s used and abused constantly. But what does it really mean? I’m fond of this functionally oriented definition:

Relevance: something (A) is relevant to a task (T) if it increases the 
likelihood of accomplishing the goal (G), which is implied by T.

So what’s the likelihood that you, as an intranet manager or interaction designer, are going to be able to reliably predict which pieces of information will be required for the task an employee is currently working on in their quest to achieve a particular goal?

Getting Things Done

When employees visit the intranet, they are engaged in productive inquiry – an activity where they are deliberately seeking what they need in order to do what they want to do. Said another way, it’s not inquiry in the form of general curiosity, but inquiry in the service of wanting to get things done.

Getting things done in the modern organization increasingly entails the creation of information. Productive inquiry (embodied through the act of searching the intranet, for example) begets collecting or communicating or creating information. Getting things done creates relationship between people and information. And when the action happens in the context of a social intranet, one which has the capability of storing the actions of any given user, we suddenly know a whole lot more about that person and what may be relevant to them.

We have a couple of ways on how we relate people to information in ThoughtFarmer. Our recent homepage redesign is a reflection of our thinking on this subject in action.

The Proxemics of the Intranet

To understand how we relate to information and each other on the intranet, we sought inspiration from the “real world” of material objects and physical space 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.

Hall’s expanding zones of relation represent a nice metaphor through which we can look at the relationships employees have with each other, with their company, and their 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.

We’ve adapted this approach to the homepage to create a useful filter through which we can enhance the relevance of information, all the while maintaining a middle ground between user need and organizational need.

News items can be published throughout ThoughtFarmer as a default content type within the system. Users have the ability to publish news on the homepage directly, within their departments and divisions, for their project groups or as “informal news” via a blog post. Our first step towards implicit personalization was to merge these news sources together, providing users with a mix of “global corporate” material and “local departmental” material.
 
Instead of just broadcasting them public news (the corporation, its initiatives, news from HQ) let’s throw in a mix of social, personal, and intimate content as well. City newspapers have known this model works for years to capture the attention of their audience. International, national, regional, and local current events all wind up sharing space on the front page of your typical daily city broadsheet.

The second design intervention was the redesign of Recent Activity or our “workstream” feature. The signal to noise ratio of this feature was previously way too noisy. On installs of significant size and activity, there was simply too much content to comprehend for the majority of users and the filtering wasn’t intuitive.
 
In version 3.6 of ThoughtFarmer, we’ve organized activity into Your Groups, Status Updates, and All Site Activity. Your Groups aggregates activity that is happening in the groups you belong to. That might be a formal project or an informal community on the intranet (i.e.: Digital Photographers). Users have further control (explicit personalization) by being able to filter which groups they want to show/hide on the homepage.

Status Updates are Twitter or Facebook like user updates, answering the question, “What are you doing?” This feature is now a familiar design pattern within Enterprise 2.0 software suites, enabling phatic communication throughout the organization.
 
And finally, should you want to drink from the proverbial information firehose, you can browse All Site Activity, an aggregation of high priority activities merged from every user across the site. We’ve recently spoken with a few intranet administrators and managers that find this feed quite useful and fascinating. They observe it flow by in real-time throughout the day, occasionally intervening or helping users out in different areas throughout the site where activity is occurring.

The Power of Defaults

The debate about personalization vs. segmentation on the intranet has been much discussed and researched by many pioneering intranet designers and consultants. As keen observers of user behaviour in the real world, we believe that well chosen default options are a sound design strategy. Adoption rates of personalization features are low, driven by a lack of understanding of the business benefit from the user and the inertia of human nature to simply be lazy and accept defaults. By placing the user at the centre of the information universe and using their relationships to information and each other as the default filter, we can provide them with an intuitive view of their world, making significant progress towards our goal of a more relevant and valuable intranet.

The Intranet Identity Crisis

Gord| November 10th, 2009 4 Comments »

In my last ThoughtFarmer blog post, I put forward the notion that the Intranet suffers from an identity crisis. Many companies and institutions we speak with understand that their Intranet is a tricky problem, but depending upon their professional background and point of view, they’ll define that problem differently, either from a technical, information design, productivity, or social capital/engagement perspective. And in doing so, they frame the discussion for how the “problem” of the Intranet is to be approached, considered, and ultimately “solved.”

I witnessed this over and over again at the recent Enterprise 2.0 conference in both presentations and in discussions with participants. Executives, IT managers, communications directors, and HR leaders tend to focus on what they know best and how they relate to the Intranet, through the four lenses mentioned above.

Of course, what makes the Intranet a fascinating design task for people like us, the developers of Intranet systems, is that it’s the perfect collision of all of these things.

What other corporate asset has the responsibility of improving service delivery, retaining organizational knowledge, reducing travel, encouraging culture and employee engagement all at once?

I’d argue there is nothing like it in the enterprise. This is the challenge of the Intranet.

We have come to conclude that the most successful model of the intranet exhibits a high degree of sociality. Or said another way, it’s a human-centred intranet, focused just as much on the people interacting in the system as the content stored there. We believe the intranet articulated in this fashion exhibits behaviours remarkably similar to a complex adaptive system. And in my last post, I stated I’d elaborate more on the characteristics of dynamic systems, information ecologies, and intranets, which I will in good time.

But first, we need to talk a bit more about the intranet’s identity crisis.

The Four Purposes of the Intranet

The purpose of the intranet is rarely questioned by companies – and that’s really a shame. What’s it good for anyways?

If you’ve worked with us for any period of time, you’ll have heard us use one of our favourite questions to challenge the assumptions of our clients, “To what problem is the X (in this case where X = the Intranet) the solution?”

James Robertson, a leading intranet consultant and content management expert with Step Two Designs in Australia, presented his 4 Purposes of the Intranet in a presentation at the IA Summit in Miami in April 2008.

Robertson outlines four basic purposes:

• Content
• Communication
• Collaboration
• Activity

Content is defined as the publishing and storage of information on the intranet (corporate policies, forms, procedures, project information, etc.). Communication is traditionally seen as the broadcast model of employee communications, the sending of corporate messages from headquarters to staff. Collaboration is defined as the still-maturing field of web-based project collaboration tools, allowing teams to work together, share documents, and produce project artifacts. Finally, Activity describes the self-service applications that use the web browser as a delivery mechanism to connect staff to mission critical business systems (payroll, timesheets, issue-tracking systems, financial, HR, and ERP applications).

Set against this four-purpose framework, the traditional Intranet’s focus has clearly been delivering a Content and Communications platform for employees. It is not uncommon to find organizations with distributed publishing models and centralized content management systems that allows for employees to publish content into a centrally defined information architecture utilizing standardized templates and visual design. Internal communications staff use the intranet to publicize internal news items and corporate initiatives to staff, in a few-to-many broadcast model. Activity can also feature prominently on the intranet with links to various line-of-business applications launching from the intranet and connecting to employees’ desktops through the internal web channel: payroll, benefits, ERP, expense reporting, and timesheet systems being a few examples.

Collaboration is still an emerging area where internal websites are being used in modern enterprises. Mini-project sites and document repositories are increasingly popular, while communities of practice cluster around intranet-hosted discussion forums.

In analyzing the four purposes of the intranet, Robertson argues that while traditional investment has been made in the intranet as a Content and Communication platform, the real benefits that drive business value reside in its ability to be a Collaboration and Activity platform. Increasingly, organizations around the world are recognizing this and are re-framing the purpose of their intranet, enhancing its design and functionality to drive business transformation, affect change, and generate value.

Robertson’s Four Purposes, originally presented as a brief 13-minute PowerPoint presentation at the 2008 IA Summit, is the result of more than 15 years of thought and active practice in the domain of intranet, content management, and knowledge management consulting. It is a great starting place, but does not provide adequate depth in understanding for charting an effective intranet strategy. The concepts outlined by Robertson, in particular those of Communication and Collaboration, require further attention to be better understood and put into context.

In my next post, I’ll tackle some of the issues we have at ThoughtFarmer with the traditional ideas of Communication on the Intranet.