thoughts, ideas, projects and musings
Archive for April, 2009
April 28, 2009 at 10:09 am · Filed under digital life, Intranet, news
Yesterday was another auspicious day for our work intranet as at 06:00 EDT, we launched the new HR portal section bringing self-service tools to our employees.
Culturally, it’s a major change. We’ve shifted from a traditional HR model (providing local HR experts aligned to functional teams) to a centralised support model with aligned self-service intranet facilities.
The intranet aspect of this launch has been an major undertaking. It has seen us switch from a simple simple SharePoint iteration to a multi-variation model to manage the various language options across our geographies (US English, US Spanish, Canadian French, Canadian English, UK English, French, Belgian French, Belgian Dutch and Dutch).
A few facts to share:
- Switch from 1 to 9 SharePoint variations
- New menus to accommodate HR content
- 2000+ pages of multi-lingual content
- 12 Integrated SAP HR transactions
- New “MyLinks” section to enable web bookmarking
- Integrated employee benefits functions
- Integrated job search functions
- New “workbench” page
- Enhanced employee profile page
This new launch is a major piece of work and a huge step change for our intranet which, up until now, has largely been a communication and collaboration vehicle. As good as that content was, our employees had no “compulsion to visit”, meaning the site was mostly for browsing rather than for action.
Bringing transactions to the portal adds that employee “compulsion to visit” which will have knock on value for the news articles and executive communications. In the long run, I hope that our employees will that the ease of information access and flexibility of use will outweigh the negatives of not having an HR expert immediately to hand — but only time will tell.
Tomorrow I’ll share some of the initial feedback 
April 15, 2009 at 10:09 am · Filed under digital life
In the early 1980s, a Russian governmental delegation came to London to talk to their counterparts and understand more about the capitalist system. One asked “Which minister is in charge of making sure there’s enough bread for the people?” and was dumbfounded with the response that no-one was. The opportunity to make a little dough (pun intended) was the mechanism for ensuring there was sufficient bread with 1000s of unrelated but interconnected parts bringing fertiliser to field, wheat to mill, flour to baker, bread to shop. It’s remarkable that it all works really, given the lack of orchestration.
Step forward 30 years. Who is it that ensures that the right wiki pages exist, or that they are accurate? Who regulates the blogs to ensure fairness in all aspects or that each youTube video has a reply? I sincerely hope the answer is no one individual — the answer is the collective community of users.
The free market world of social computing has already created marvellous resources such as wikipedia, youTube, millions of blogs and billions of tweets – countless petabytes of information of various levels of worthiness. All this we can pass on to others. All this knowledge nucleating from the provision of social computing tools. Like the scientists at the coffee break, all that was needed was the forums and then the creativity flowed.
But what I’m really excited about is the power of social computing behind the firewall on the corporate intranet. Here, we have the same community already used to interacting digitally (after all, employees are real people too!) But added to the collaborative confusion on the internet, is a genuine common purpose and a little orchestration from management. This could give the fledging knowledge sources some direction and speed up creation and usage.
Does a little orchestration of social computing outputs kill or strengthen it’s power? Is the free and open approach to knowledge creation the best way or does it need some rules.
April 14, 2009 at 10:50 am · Filed under digital life
I’ve really got into Twitter of late and am gathering a select group of followers. I find it useful place to vent, a useful place to network, to laugh and to learn. As an aside, much of the research into a forthcoming keynote speech I’m giving was found on the internet via Twitter.
For all that eulogising, I think it’s the functionality of twitter that I like as the interface on their own website is far from fully formed. To that end, I’ve been using a bunch of applications which interface back, including Tweetdeck, Lounge, Twitterfon and others. Tweetdeck, especially with their latest 0.25 update, is the pick by some way.
But dear reader, all is not well. My Macbook is well armed with 2GB of RAM and has a spritely processor, but Tweetdeck hogs capacity. It mostly hovers around 8-10% of my CPU (still way over the odds if you ask me) but will often spike into the 90s and higher bringing everything else to its knees. Close it down, reload and all is well for a while again.
Anyone else having the same issues?
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