thoughts, ideas, projects and musings
June 6, 2011 at 2:47 pm · Filed under digital life
I must show my love for your kindness in support of men and women that have the need for help on that content. Your real commitment to getting the solution all-around had become amazingly significant and have continually encouraged men and women like me to arrive at their endeavors. Your entire helpful facts can mean much to me and far more to my fellow workers. Many thanks; from everyone of us.
I love the phraseology in here: “entire helpful facts”, “arrive at their endeavors”. I am going to give this to my boss to support my appraisal.
May 20, 2011 at 10:56 pm · Filed under life
Ingredients (sorry, I’m not good on amounts that much! — serves 2)
Smoked haddock for two
150g of risotto rice
2 bay leaves
Veg stock cube
2 eggs
2 tsp of a great curry paste (or make your own)
1 onion
2 cloves of garlic
2tbpn of creme fraiche
A splash of white wine for the dinner; a glass for you
salt n pepper to season
parsley to serve
To cook the fish
1. Boil the kettle and pour the boiling water into a saucepan, but don’t put the pan on the heat.
2. Into the pan, dissolve the stock cube and a pinch of salt; add the bay leaves and grind or two of pepper.
3. Immerse the fish entirely. Leave for 5 minutes. After the 5 minutes, take the fish out, skin and flake.
4. Once the fish is ready, put the pan back on the heat to a gentle rolling boil, add the eggs for 10 minutes. This water will be your risotto stock and your egg-boiling water.
5. After 10 minutes, shell and quarter the eggs.
For the Risotto
1. Finely chop the onion and garlic and gently soften in a saute pan.
2. Once the onion is colourless and soft, stir in the curry paste. Cook for 5mins
3. Add a splash of white wine
4. Add the rice, stir well. Once all the rice is well covered in the onions and paste, add a ladle of the egg/fish stock
5. Stir, stir, stir. Once the rice soaks up the stock, add more stock but only a ladle full at a time.
6. Did I say stir? Mmm… yea, keep stiring this beauty, adding the stock as you go. It’ll thicken, smoothen, become utterly unctuous. About now, you’ll want to taste it for seasoning, but mostly because it looks far too good not too.
7. Keep on stockin’; keep on stiring until the rice becomes soft to the teeth. You want it to be one minute cooked past having a little bite.
8. Ok, once you’re happy with the bite of the rice, stir in the creme fraiche.
9. Gently, stir in the flakes of fish. I mean gently please. We need to see lovely flakes of fish in this dish, not tiny bits.
10. Serve up! Now! Do it! Add 4 quarters for each plate, sprinkle with parsley.
Oh. Mmm. Love that.
May 11, 2011 at 11:20 am · Filed under digital life, news
Today marks the 10th anniversary of the passing of the author and visionary, Douglas Adams. I’ve been reading a little more about him today and stumbled across these thoughts.
1) everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal;
2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;
3) anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.
I care not to remember my precise age, but I regret that I must now rule out careers in the following areas. Moreover, I am duty bound to be baffled by these until next year at the earliest.
April 27, 2011 at 5:44 pm · Filed under digital life
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March 3, 2011 at 9:35 pm · Filed under digital life, Intranet, linkedin
Every day, I have the privilege of sharing with an extensive and growing intranet community on LinkedIn and Twitter. As I share; I learn. Today I’m posting a collection of quotes from leading intranet practitioners and thought leaders worldwide that I have influenced my thinking.
On Intranets in General
An #intranet manager needs to know more than just the intranet, they need to be across the business system, external comms, HR & legal too (@bridiemarie)
Search is the central intranet resource. How else will great content, people and functionality be found?
Don’t forget the humans! (@brookcalverley)
A revolution doesn’t happen when we adopt new tools, it happens when we adopt new behaviours. (@cshirky)
If the intranet is built by your constituents, and you’ve given them what they want, you’ve increased the odds they will embrace it by tenfold, … The best thing to do is work backward from your customer
21st century employees want to be engaged and trusted. We get work done when and where it makes sense! (@Risgaard)
Employees deserve first-class tools if we’re to have first-class expectations of them
If you’re not measuring [your intranet], it’s just pretty pictures and prayers. (@ivanbager)
An intranet can also be fun (@lukemepham)
You should’t need a manual to use the intranet! (@bsandie)
On Knowledge Management
Knowledge is worth more when shared
We should each know what we all know (Brian Bawden, Bennett Jones)
If the intranet helps you find an expert, a person, then you don’t always have to find info, suggests (@wamurgis)
Email is the place knowledge goes to die (Bill French)
On Governance
Governance is a form of negotiation: control, politics, flexibility and common sense (@MarkMorrell)
Link your intranet strategy to your business strategy (@wedge)
On Social Intranets
Social Business [is about] Connecting knowledge keepers to knowledge seekers (Sarah Goodall)
Culture not technology (@lukemepham)
The very best intranets engage in a dialogue. They engage employees (@http://twitter.com/#!/@tobyward)
Good communication is based on conversations. Therefore, it is natural that internal comm encourages more dialogue. (Peter Straarup, Danske Bank CEO)
If I’ve mis-attributed, please let me know. If a quote is anonymous, it’s because I’m unsure where I’ve heard it (or it might be that they’re my quotes that other people have told me have helped their thinking)
February 25, 2011 at 8:53 am · Filed under digital life, Intranet, linkedin
Yesterday, I attended an event at Microsoft called “The Human Intranet“, hosted by Content and Code and Engage Group. Given our location, there was an understandable focus on the SharePoint 2010 solution but helpfully, the principles and ideas would be applicable to any ECM/CMS that supports social features. This post won’t focus on the benefits — many intranet commentators have covered that ground very well — but I do want to share one vital message: Going social on your intranet is not the utopian solution to all your company communication and collaboration evils. In fact, it comes with its own significant overheads.
Note:
- Silos will continue to exist
- A social intranet doesn’t mean your company is social
- You will have to control this new space
Social breaks down and creates communication silos
Many commentators on social media without or without the firewall rightly note the power of these features to breakdown traditional communication and collaboration silos. Within the enterprise, these silos commonly reflect the organisational hierarchy, with informational moats around teams, business units or countries. At The Human Intranet yesterday, we were again presented with models demonstrating that with social media, new human networks, beyond the organisation parameters, can flourish. Silos may well continue to exist: consider these and plan for them on your social intranet.
- Adding social features will not mean that your intranet instantly becomes a social hub
- Adding social features does not mean that existing silos will be removed
- Adding social features will add new silos that you will need to work on
Age Silos
Take time to reflect on your company demographic and match this against social media models. You might just be lucky enough to have a company packed full of millenials for whom social media (but not all social media) is a communication norm.
Most companies will be light on millenials and packed full of GenX and baby boomers. Whilst the latter groups are adopting Internet social media tools quickly, usage levels are still far below their younger colleagues. Be alive to the idea that you may create some age silos within your company as younger employees fly with social media and older employees take their time to adopt concepts and practices.
Style silos
The demographics also tell a story in terms of the types of social media that appeal. Note the demographics for Twitter? This social space is the firm reserve of the Gen X 40 year olds and it may well be that your intranet micro-blogging feature for a Millenial company just won’t work. A range of social tools, reflecting the different styles on the Internet is likely to be more successful but do consider that you may get some employees working solely in micro-blogging tools whereas others tag and blog to build networks.
Language silos
Ok, so this isn’t new but don’t be tempted to believe that social tools will somehow break down the barriers. Multi-lingual companies may have to accept that social collaboration could occur in isolated language pockets. Time to invest in smart translation.
Social is more than just technology
So you’ve relaunched your intranet and have included some fantastic social media capabilities and all your employees are tagging, micro-blogging and studying their activity feeds avidly. Right? No? Oh.
Introducing a social intranet is more than just the technology. Culturally, your business needs to be ready for these features. It’s more than just training sadly. Many intranet managers will already know that just because you’ve enabled comments on your intranet (the simplest and most common foothold on the social intranet ladder), it doesn’t mean that employees will grasp this opportunity and sadly, the solution is not easy.
The culture of the organisation must be aligned to this form of communication and collaboration. As a minimum, you’ll need the following:
- Openness, trust and honesty from employees and management
- Robust policies on bullying, information sharing and equality
- Explicit, communicated management recognition that using social features is work and not work avoidance
Such cultural and policy shifts are significantly harder to achieve than installing the technology in the first place but are critical to their usage and ultimate success. Start the work on these matters early.
Control to allow the Conversation
It almost seems counter intuitive to suggest that in this new free-form multi-way communication world, that works to bridge the experiential, functional, hierarchical and geographical differences between employees, we might somehow need control and moderation. It will though and you’ll need to gear yourself up to this new reality.
Some immediate moderating examples
- Correcting spelling mistakes employee profile skills and experiences so that you can find each other. You may be an expert on ‘Chaange Mannagement’ and no one will find you.
- Remove inappropriate text from profiles
- Build a ‘black-list’ of banned tag words and maintain this constantly. (Swear words are an obvious example but there will be others. This is especially difficult on multi-lingual intranets)
- Dependent on local law, full birthdays might not be legal to share due to age discrimination. Moderating content to ensure that your intranet is legal is one of the new realities.
Context moderation is where you may need particular focus. The word ‘black’ is innocuous when used as a tag on a document describing an excellent financial performance maybe (back in the black), but wholly inappropriate if used as a racial slur.
Regrettably, you’ll need eyes on the screen and great judgement to manage moderation and ensure a fair, friendly, fun (not to mention legal) intranet.
Summary
A social intranet can be an incredible boon to your organisation, significantly improving internal collaboration and facilitate the building of important human and information networks. Stay alive to the pitfalls presented here and enjoy your successes.
February 16, 2011 at 10:43 am · Filed under digital life, Intranet, linkedin
Many intranet commentators have noted the importance of accurate employee profiles in building the enterprise human network and fostering a culture of collaboration. People are at the heart of your business and should be at the heart of your intranet.
Identifying the fields that resonate with your business is an art (and will be the subject of a future post), but encouraging your employees to complete their profile is a ubiquitous challenge for all intranet teams. Here are a few ideas that will help.
Tactics for all data
1. Reduce the data workload on the employee by sourcing as much as you can from your ERP system. Look to connect your intranet with Active Directory and your HR tool
2. Add “Your profile is x% complete” text to all profiles. This tactic seems loved and unloved in equal measure but its efficacy is never in doubt.
3. Run in-house competitions for the 50th and 500th profile to be fully completed. You’ll need to tweak the numbers to work for your company. Get them to add a tag word for easier tracking.
4. Ensure that a complete intranet profile is a pre-requisite for entering company competitions. Add this to the terms and conditions
5. Run intra-department (or location) competitions for the % of employees with a completed profile. Create a league table and publish this prominently on your intranet. This also encourages colleagues to cajole others into action.
6. Demonstrate the value! Run intranet news stories showing how the profile data connected people and lead to business success.
Tactics for Adding Photos
7. Use the employee security badge photos. Whilst these are generally awful, every employee will have one. Correspondents have noted that in some countries — United Kingdom for example — you may not be able to do this without retrospective authority from the employee themselves. For new hires, ask them to approve intranet usage when they join.
8. Take a photographer round to each desk and take a photo. These are likely to be better than the security photos. Again, don’t forget the authorisation forms. Consider sending a photographer to staff conferences or inductions.
9. Whilst unlikely to be culturally acceptable in all organisations, consider running a profile photo theme to make this process less arduous. Hats, moustaches — be inspired and your employees might be too.
10. Ask colleagues to provide photos of each other! If the employee themselves doesn’t upload one, their colleagues get to nominate a photo of their choice instead.
11. Run a competition for the 50th, 500th photo to be added.
Now, encouraging people to use the profiles
12. Run a “Where’s Wally / Waldo?” competition where one employee has a replacement photo. Employees must search to find the right one.
13. A data treasure hunt. Working with a group of employees, add clues across a series of profiles that creates a chain to an answer.
14. Publicise the best intranet connection stories on your news section.
I hope these are of some help. Please share any additions or successes you have in your business.
January 26, 2011 at 11:07 am · Filed under digital life, Intranet, linkedin
Created by Me
A few weeks ago, Yammer took hold in my organisation. From a standing start 18 months ago with just me, we gained tens of users in 2 weeks at the beginning of the year and growing quickly. (Aside: those first few years of Yammer were rather boring for me. It really was an anti-social media site).
As an intranet professional, this grow in use is both exciting and alarming. On the positive side, it clearly demonstrates a business need and desire for more informal internal communication and collaboration channels. Our employees have embraced Yammer which bodes well as intranets continue to evolve their social functionality.
There are downsides though.
Yammer does not belong to my company. The comments we add, the information we share and the ideas that we develop are not on our servers and are subject to Yammer’s rules. And whilst Yammer is free, will it always be free? Are our employees forming a habit that will become costly in due course? There are plugins which fully integrate Yammer into a corporate intranet but it remains an external tool. (Aside: I do wonder if Yammer has been popular in my company because it’s one of the few social media sites that is not routinely blocked by our firewall software).
When I asked about this on Twitter, the responses I got were very interesting. . Many saw Yammer as a complimentary service to a corporate intranet, but many would prefer such a facility to be an integral part of the offering, rather than a third-party plugin. Even Yammer themselves (@Yammer) followed the conversation judging by a subsequent email I later received!
It seems likely though that Yammer usage is part of a growing trend of heterogeneous intranets. At the recent European Portal Evolution Masters conference in Berlin, there were many examples of intranets that had a simple CMS but utilised WordPress, Yammer or Google technologies — either within or without the firewall — to provide an appropriate suite of tools for employees. It occurs that this might be another example of the intranet as a digital gateway (see NetJMC Global Trends Report) or the beginning of a new trend: Heterogeneous Intranets (simple CMS + bought in third party tools) or Homogeneous Intranets (complex, fully functional CMS such as SharePoint).
Love to hear what you think.
January 11, 2011 at 10:23 am · Filed under digital life, Intranet, linkedin
The intranet is changing. No longer a corporate internal website, the intranet is evolving into a digital workspace for your employees — a gateway to the information, functions and transactions that enable your business to function. If this doesn’t sound like your workplace yet, here are a few ideas to transform your company intranet.
Monday – Go social (because your business already is)
Take a look around your office today. What’s actually happening? What’s really going on? No doubt there is the rhythmical tapping of keyboards and a whole bunch of people pretending to be busy, but there’s also a lot of talk. Ideas are being exchanged, motivation given and projects have just been moved on a notch. Importantly, knowledge has been exchanged, rapport generated and human networks have been extended and it’s all great for business.
Great social intranets allow the serendipitous discovery of the “Unknown Unknowns” — gems of ideas that you didn’t know you didn’t know, but are now central to your operation. Social intranets facilitate this communication, collaboration and knowledge exchange and it’s completely aligned with how your business already operates. Subscribe to Twitter, Facebook, Quora, Yammer and LinkedIn – look, learn and employ the best ideas on your intranet.
Tuesday – Make your intranet easy to access Part 1
As Martin Risgaard Rasmussen’s excellent post points out, access to your intranet is critical to its success – or rather, easy, uncomplicated and fast access to the intranet is critical. In the free market of the internet, consumers of web content vote with their feet if the content isn’t easy to get at but your intranet users, your employees, are not so lucky. Don’t be complacent – employees still have a choice about their intranet usage but instead of switching to an alternate site, they will simply switch off.
Focus on the basics. Work with your development team to ensure that the page is optimised for speed and work with your network team on the same. Many organisations do not have dedicated bandwidth for their intranet so consider making that change. If your intranet pages don’t load quickly, without errors, consistently, then your employees will do all they can to avoid using it.
Wednesday – Make your intranet easy to access Part 2
Take another look at your business. How are people accessing the internet? (Are they accessing it even?) If you’re all office based, then I suspect a lot of the access will be via a laptop but in organisations that have factories, distribution networks, mobile sales teams, many will be accessing the internet via a smartphones, kiosks or from home.
Adding these new access points will bring new audiences to your intranet and new insights to your business but they may not be enough to make the difference on their own. In many organisations, time away from the factory shop floor for employees to use intranet kiosks is not given, working-from-home is often considered a euphemism for taking time off and surfing from a mobile is seen another work avoidance measure. Policy change and cultural shifts may also be needed to maximise the value in the technology.
Thursday – Bring the intranet to your employees, don’t expect them to come to you
Consider a few of these steps to ensure that intranet content comes to employees regardless of whether they click through to your intranet.
- As part of your standard PC setup, subscribe your employees to the main intranet content – likely news or teamsite content – within their email client. If your office is like mine, your colleagues will have Pavlov compulsion to jump straight to email as soon as their iPhone pings or the ‘You’ve got new mail’ popup appears. So if that’s where your employees are digitally, then take your intranet content there.
- Add an RSS screensaver to your PCs and again, subscribe to the intranet. Sure, it won’t help that particular employee (unless they’re in the habit of just staring at a screen!), but it will bring your content to others around
- Digital Signage is another great way of surfacing your intranet content, particularly in supply chain environments that might not have easy access to PCs
- Push notications to iPhones and BlackBerrys – will your colleagues be able to resist looking?
- Provide email digests of that week’s top intranet content
- Bring important company announcements to the sections of the intranet that your employees do visit. Sometimes, you’ve just got to accept that your colleagues will not read every page of the intranet but rather, will destination shop the content. So be it the HR pages, the canteen menu, the teamsites, or the CEO blog, consider adding the important stuff there.
Friday – People are your business, make people the heart of your intranet
When I’m looking for an answer, I have four big questions: Who knows what I want to know, where are they, when are they available and how can I contact them? If your intranet employee directory doesn’t answer at least these questions, then you’ve just identified a huge 2011 intranet opportunity.
Given that these questions are far from rare, your people finder tool should be in a prominent place. As Alex Manchester of StepTwo Designs says on his blog, “the traditional staff or corporate directory is the key to unlocking the intranet as a social, collaborative hub. It should be the starting point for any intranet overhaul, redesign, or new build, and it’s already the killer application in most organisations. If you want to design an intranet for the future, focus on the directory.”
But what information would be useful? Beyond the answers to my 4 original questions, consider this list of fields compiled by Neil Phillips. They may not all be applicable to your business, but a good selection of these will really help connect your employees and kick-start the social revolution.
Saturday – Provide compelling functionality and make your intranet business critical, shopkeeper!
If you get 100s of emails, panicked calls from your helpdesk and your phone buzzes off the hook when there’s an intranet outage, then congratulations – it appears that your intranet actually matters to your employees! In itself, having a business critical intranet is not in the slightest bit important, but to be considered as such is a clear reflection of the value of the content and functionality to your employees.
Imagine you’re a shopkeeper, running a small convenience store. Shoppers come to your store for destination items: Cigarettes, newspapers, milk and confectionery, but because these items are readily available,profit margins are weak and you want your customers to buy other items as well. Tempting to spread these destination items around the shop to encourage browsing isn’t it? Trouble is, that’s hardly convenient for the shopper who just wants to get in, make their purchase, and get out quickly. On the surface, this feels like a battle of wills: Do you block the destination items together so that the customer has the maximum convenience or do you spread them around the shop, encouraging browsing, maximising your profit and their inconvenience?
The answer, obviously, is the symbiotic sweet spot between these two. A good balance between these two scenarios is mutually beneficial since it provides you with additional income but also gives the shopper that opportunity for a serendipitous and valuable purchase.
Your intranet is just the same. Your intranet is a shop.
You need to spend time researching your employees to find out what their destinations are. Identifying these compulsions to visit and then delivering them, will ensure that people will always have a reason to visit, but they must be more efficient information or transaction shopfronts than any current option to be fully successful. HR transactions, such as updating your home address or checking your pay advice, are common examples of such intranet destinations. Careful consideration of your information architecture and navigation will ensure that your employees get to their destinations quickly as well as discover other communication and collaboration opportunities.
Sunday – Create personalised digital destinations for every one of your employees
Creating these digital destinations adds obvious value to your intranet, but surely not every employee wants the same things? Bluntly, your idea of a destination may be very different from mine. So how can this be accommodated on your intranet? Allow personalisation: allow your employees to decide what’s important to them and allow them to create their own homepage. Whilst this seems a very egalitarian approach, it’s important to consider the fact that only 20% of your employees (via NetJMC Global Intranet Trends 2011 survey) will actually take the time to do this. Consider too that many of those who will customise their intranet, will customise it in a very similar way. This remains an excellent initiative but care should be taken with your approach.
- The Fixed Page Option – recognise that 80% of your employees are unlikely to customise their page at all and thus spend all your efforts on designing a fixed page, with no customise options, that will suit the vast majority.
- The Profile-Generated Option — using your employee profile information as a data source, you generate a range of pages for your employees. Let’s say you’re in London, you work in Sales and you’re a Director, you would see the same as every other London-based Sales Director, but London-based marketeers might see something different. It’s a smart personalisation option since it provides a range of options without the intranet team having to think them all out.
- Fully Customised – just provide a library of webparts/applets and allow the user to choose.
What do you mean ‘you don’t work weekends’ ? Ok, maybe it’s a little disingenuous to suggest you could do all this in a week, but start the thinking today and you’ll soon have a better intranet.
December 6, 2010 at 3:14 pm · Filed under digital life, Intranet, linkedin
At the recent Employee Portal Evolution Masters conference (#epem) in Berlin last month, I must have seen 20 different intranet presentations, showcasing some genuinely excellent innovation.
But with huge diversity in the companies attending — from the heavy industrial energy company Wartsila (Finland) to Abbotts Laboratories (Pharma), I was struck by the incredible similarity in designs. Strip out the corporate colouring and nearly all intranets presented had a top-left logo with a top navigation of drop down menus (TLLTN). Is this convergent thinking, best practice in evidence, convention or just lazy design?
When I returned, I flicked back through James Robertson’s excellent book “Designing Intranets: Creating intranets that work” and saw this phenomenon repeated. James himself calls it “the all-to-familiar landing page”.
Convergent Thinking?
If we all use the same agencies, the same CMS, I guess it’s likely that we converge on similar design. If you’ve user tested your design, I suspect the TLLTN configuration wins through hands-down. After all, your end users have not seen any other alternatives.. have they?
Best Practice?
Well, nearly everyone does it, that’s for sure. The very best intranets in the world have TLLTN configuration — they can’t be wrong! Reader, so do the worst. These designs are certainly functional and require little thinking on behalf of the employee which is an undoubted bonus.
Convention?
Certainly, intranets conventionally have this design. Websites too. But as we’re learning, intranets are not websites so why should they naturally borrow from the internet? Indeed, at #epem, we were shown a couple of example intranets that heavily borrowed the internet design of the parent company and as the tweets show, it provoked much discussion. Intranets are task driven, collaboration minded, functional digital workspaces, increasingly more complex than their internet brethren so maybe the convention of TLLTN needs to change.
Lazy?
Intranet managers are tremendously hardworking — I’d never level this accusation.
Ok – so, now what?
Since the launch in April 2010, Apple has sold 4 million iPads. In addition, there are over 65million iPhones out there, over 20million Android smartphones, a good few million touch BlackBerry, 250k Windows 7 devices and I dare say Android tablets will be very popular this Christmas too.
These devices are creating a new convention for users. A convention that a few elements are fixed, but that the rest of the device homepage is configurable and is entirely the users choice. These device users are utterly at home with the idea of an app store to make their device work the way they want it — make it do what they want it to do.
Could the intranet be like an iPad homepage? Think of this:
- A few fixed features akin to a dock with an internal app store so that employees can create their perfect mix of news, transactions and collaboration?
- A fun and engaging interface – no harm in having a fun intranet.
- Have multiple pages of space that the user can flick through
- Have it sync with your iPad so it’s the same set up whereever you use your intranet
I don’t think we’re at this tipping point now, but I do think the use of smartphones, particularly Android and iOS, will change conventions on intranet design.
Have you done this already? Share a screenshot!
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