Intranet Blog

The power of Intranet 2.0

Toby Ward — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 18:55:00 -0700

Did you know that in the ‘guess the jellybeans’ game the average guess of all the guesses is almost always closer than the closest individual guess? It’s a wonderful example illustrating the power and wisdom of the ‘crowd’ – and why Web 2.0 and Intranet 2.0 are proving to be so powerful.

Like Web 2.0, Intranet 2.0 represents the evolving collection of social media tools that are revolutionizing the intranet, and the way organizations and employees connect and collaborate. Specifically, Intranet 2.0 tools like blogs, wikis and social networking sites promote collaboration, people connection, and ongoing dialogues that augment, but not replace the traditional top-down communications model.

Whether you’re ready or not, your organization can no longer ignore Intranet 2.0. Employees are reading blogs on the web, contributing to wikis, listening to podcasts, and networking via Facebook, MySpace, Orkut, or others. Moreover, they’re probably talking about your organization, and you’re not part of the conversation.

Before they implemented their own employee social networking site, MyBT, BT (British Telecom) discovered that 4,000 employees had voluntarily joined a BT Facebook community in their own time. Employees were connecting online, in their own time, talking about BT, and BT wasn’t part of the conversation.

“Many believe that trying to stop social media tools seeping onto intranets is a futile activity anyway, so it is better to introduce them on your terms in a managed way,” says BT’s social media chief Richard Dennison, who’s quite candidly shares this though and BT’s work on his blog Inside out.

While BT’s management was reluctant to introduce these tools to employees, they really had little choice: employees were already using them and BT was in danger of being left out, and left behind. Adds Dennison: “If you don’t think about what value you can deliver in an enterprise 2.0 environment, you are going to become irrelevant!!”

Intranet 2.0 has indeed exploded at BT. In addition to social networking, BT employees blog, podcast, collaborate in discussion forums, and they wiki too. In fact, the wikis are so popular and successful that there are more than 500,000 employee wikis – and the vast, vast majority of them are dedicated to business topics that help BT compete in the global workplace (I will share a more comprehensive case study on BT’s Intranet 2.0 tools and successes next week).

A study of Prescient Digital Media’s clients who participated in yesterday’s Intranet 2.0 webinar found:

25% have implemented a blog (in some form, somewhere in the organization)
17% have implemented wikis (again, in some form)
0% have implemented employee social networking

These numbers are very average indeed (though much, much lower in medium size, and small organizations) and echoed by many recent studies: most organizations have not introduced Intranet 2.0 tools, but want to. An additional 50% of the webinar participants (representing a couple dozen organizations) are testing, trialing, evaluating or planning to introduce such social media tools on their intranet in the next year or so.

Many, many others of course have blazed that trail and so while some organizations struggle with the ‘how’, IT and communications managers need only look to the trailblazers like BT, IBM, and many others that have shared their successes (I will link many of these case studies below).

Sabre, the company that runs most of the world’s airline flight reservation systems among many other systems, is a an impressive example of the power of Intranet 2.0. With about 9,000 employees, they are a medium-sized company that have embraced Intranet 2.0 with spectacular results. Building from scratch, Sabre launched their own intranet social networking site for employees (built on Ruby on Rails) called SabreTown.

SabreTown has all the features of most social networking sites:

Employee profiles with lots of details
Shared photos
Blogs
User commenting
Network connections & feeds
Enterprise question & answer functionality

On Sabre Town, users can post a question to the entire organization, and the site’s inference or relevance engine will automatically send the question to the 15 most relevant employees (based on what they’ve entered in their profile, blog postings and other Q&As that have been previously posted). The results have been spectacular: 60% of questions are answered within one hour (one hour!); each question receives an average of 9 responses (9 responses!). The system has already led to more than $150,000 in immediate, direct savings for the company, with much greater benefits not yet measured.

SabreTown’s success is summarized in one spectacular metric: 65% of all Sabre employees became active SabreTown members in the first 3 months! More than 90% of employees are active today.

(I’ll provide a more in-depth case study on SabreTown next week. Watch for it as it is worth the wait, and the read).

Intranet 2.0 is no longer the future, it’s now. Many organizations have embraced the new social media technologies for the benefit of both the organization and its employees. If you ignore the potential that Intranet 2.0 offers, you’re doing so at your own risk, and the perhaps to the benefit of your competitors that may have already embraced these tools, or soon will.

If you have additional questions about today’s Intranet 2.0, or a comment feel free to post them below. You can see a summarized version of the presentation on Slideshare: Intranet 2.0 webinar.

You can also join the discussion on the Intranet Global Forum (Facebook community requiring free, 30-second registration).

If you’re looking to move to Intranet 2.0, but don’t exactly know how, then have a look at our Intranet 2.0 Blueprint service, or call me at 416.986.2226.

MORE INTRANET 2.0 CASE STUDIES & READING:

Behind Beehive’s social success @ IBM

Beehive builds buzz at IBM

Intranet case study: Intrawest Placemaking

Serena’s Facebook intranet

Could Facebook be a real intranet? IBM is onto something...

Intranet 2.0: A must-have

Enterprise 2.0 vs. Intranet 2.0

Embracing Enterprise 2.0

Intranet 2.0 on the rise, but barely

Intranet 2.0: social media adoption

Intranet portal solutions die, evolve & move to Web 2.0

Taxonomy driven folksonomy

Social bookmarking the intranet

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Behind Beehive’s social success @ IBM

Toby Ward — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 21:42:00 -0700

“Inspired by Top 10 travel guides, and Amazon’s ListMania, we thought that shared lists could be an interesting content type for an enterprise social networking site,” say Geyer, Dugan, DiMicco, Millen, Brownholtz, and Muller, IBM’s collective brain trust behind IBM’s Beehive social networking site for employees[1].

While Beehive is a social networking site that allows employees to connect, track each others’ activities, share photos, and even schedule events, a key viral ingredient of Beehive’s buzz is the ability to create shared lists – “top 5” lists called “Hive5s”.

“We hypothesized that lists in an enterprise would be used to discuss opinions and share information related to the work context, (e.g. “My favorite RSS readers,” “Best lunch places,” or “Useful web design principles.” Since lists allow users to express preferences and opinions, and put items into an order, we envisioned that they would spark controversy between users and provoke social interaction.”

To create a list a “bee” (user) enters five items related to a given topic (e.g. top 5 products) and can insert a photo or a link to any of the five items, can “tag” each list with keywords, and determine whether or not the list is viewable to any employee, or just to direct connections (friends). Additionally, bees can reuse others lists to create their own list for comparison.

“We decided to explicitly support “reuse” of lists in Beehive, i.e. based on another list, a user can create their own list on the same topic linked back to the original list,” say the Beehive creators[1]. “When we designed the shared lists, we thought that users, when reading a list, might feel compelled to create their own list about the same topic, either because they disagree and want to create a list with different items and ordering, or the topic inspired them to share something similar.”

Once a list is published it can be read by others in several places:

A collection page of recently created lists on the Beehive home page
A collection page of all the lists of a selected user within the users own profile
Within search results of a specific topic or “tag” (keywords).

Each list when viewed reveals:

The text for 5 items
Any annotated photos
Any annotated tags
A ‘reuse map” (who reused it, when, etc.)
A list of “the buzz” (user comments)
A note of how many times that list has been viewed by other bees

The adoption rate is the impressive statistic. Up until August 2007, Beehive was still in ‘trial’ mode and only had a couple of hundred invited users. In the nine months since, Beehive has exploded:

Over 35,000 registered IBM employees
Created over 280,000 social network connections to each other
Posted more than 150,000 comments
Shared more than 43,000 photos
Created over 15,000 "Hive5s” fives"
Hosted over 2000 events

If the “Hive5s” are the key viral ingredient, the “reuse” list is the secret honey. One user comment in IBM’s own internal study sums up the fantastically viral nature of list reuse: “I found it interesting and wanted to reveal and show myself within the community (a specific Beehive community of IBMers) […] and in a sense I wanted to get into this community, so I entered it reusing somebody’s Hive5 and in a friendly way, in some social gesture, reuse the Hive5 and get into the community.” For this bee, and many others, the Hive5 list reuse was an invitation to a community that he wanted to be part of, despite his geographic location.

One early list called “4 truths and a lie” sparked a lot of reuse, dozens of comments, and bubbled over into real-world and face-to-face conversations. “Several times I did it with my team. Like people writing to me and I’m writing to them, saying did you see […] that thing on Beehive, sending the link,” said one user.

In fact, people who don’t know each other are connecting through Beehive, and those that are reusing lists often don’t know each other. “The interview data (from the internal study) suggests that people need not feel any particular connection to the person whose list they reuse” say the creators[1]. “While we found that reuse in itself is not always a social act, there are some reuse trees that have sparked many conversations and have formed ad hoc interest groups”

Beehive clearly demonstrates that employees want to network socially, and that if the employer creates the hive, employees will create the buzz.

Read more about the Beehive social networking site: Beehive builds buzz at IBM.

On Wednesday: A look at IBM’s other employee social networking tool: Fringe. If Beehive is akin to Facebook, Fringe is akin to LinkedIn. However, Fringe is more of a people-tagging tool that is significantly different than any of the above, but equally impressive.

Tomorrow’s (Tuesday) Intranet 2.0 webinar: if you’re a client of Prescient (or about to become one), then you have a free invitation to this special clients-only webinar that will showcase the latest and greatest in Intranet 2.0 including IBM’s Beehive and Fringe, BT’s employee social networking, and many other leading examples. If you’re a client or about to become one and don’t have the coordinates for this hour long webinar, then please call me right away to get the details (416.986.2226). The webinar starts at 1pmEDT (10am PDT). If you can’t make the webinar but still want to learn more, perhaps we can reprise the webinar for you and your team at a later date (call me to arrange).

[1] (Geyer, Dugan, DiMicco, Millen, Brownholtz, and Muller, (2007) “Reuse of Shared Lists as a Social Content Type. IBM T.J. Watson Research. Cambridge, MA )

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The most beautiful intranet & jumpwords

Toby Ward — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 11:19:00 -0700

IBF24 ran a contest during the 24 hour marathon webinar on intranets called “My Beautiful Intranet.” The winner: The European Space Agency.

The runners-up: RSA, CapitalOne, NATS and AMP.

William Hudson, IBF's Director of User Experience judged the competition. Congratulations to all the winners and thanks to everyone who took part.

You can see all the screenshots here (members of www.ibf24.com only), if you are a member. Some great designs for sure. For the life of me I could not locate the screenshot of the European Space Agency on that confusing site, but it must be pretty darn special to have beaten out Capital One and Schwab which both look to have outstanding intranets.

If any of the winners want to share their screenshots to a wider audience then please send them along and I’ll post them with any quotes or background you’d like, I can also do likewise to the Intranet Global Forum Facebook community.

There was lots learned by the recent IBF24 marathon. A lot of talk on innovation and leading intranet applications, etc. I believe IBF is going to sell the CD or DVD of the presentations, and I would highly recommend the ones on the IBM intranet, the Nissan intranet, and the one on Nokia (it was under the Enterprise 2.0 segment, and had absolutely zero to do with Enterprise 2.0, but it is a strong intranet and I like how they’ve integrated text messaging (like Nissan) into their intranet portal home page.

One intranet manager, Kurt (I’ll not divulge his full name nor his organization for the sake of fulfilling his confidentially obligations to his organization) informed me that one of the most popular features on his company’s intranet (a financial services organization of more than 10,000 employees) is a ‘jumpword’ application. A jumpword tool is attached to the search engine and allows people to seek out the best results which are manually coded to a specific keyword search.

“One of the areas we have issues on is our navigation and providing more service to the employee on our intranet,” says Kurt. “The jumpword application allows people to enter something like “performance” and it takes them to the performance management site, which is highly popular. It’s a good tool but has festered into over 2000 jumpwords which is a heavy indication that the navigation is not helping people get what they need.”

The jumpwords application is written in .NET with a backend SQL database. Employees fill out a request form (attached to the online application) requesting their jumpword and the URL they want it directed to. When a user types in the jumpword it does a lookup of the jumpword file and has logic that redirects them to the site associated URL. If there is no jumpword it brings them to the front search page.

This organization uses the FAST search engine – which is really quite good and highly rated so you get an idea of why manual jumpwords or ‘best bets’ should be a priority for any organization. The search engine can only do so much, and in the absence of a detailed taxonomy that requires mandatory and rigorous meta tagging, the search engine’s potential can be highly limited.

Also supporting the intranet, owned by IT, with “a lot of the content governed by Employee Communications,” is the Interwoven TeamSite CMS platform, and a separate document sharing platform built on SharePoint (WSS, though migrating to MOSS 2007). Kurt also tells me that content management is distributed or ‘decentralized’ with the respective owners responsible for updating their own content. The Employee Communications team provides guidelines on content structure but “due to not having a centralized owner and/or executive sponsor, teams opt many times to build their own sites using funding from their organizations – a major issue and has been for a while now.”

Yes, even really strong and innovative intranets have problems, and have much to improve, rework, and reinvent. It’s no surprise then that even the ‘most beautiful intranet’ is far from perfect and that the journey for most has only just begun.

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Beehive builds buzz at IBM

Toby Ward — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 21:26:00 -0700

“You cannot create a culture of innovation without creating a culture of collaboration – and at its core is creating a culture of trust with people you may never have met,” says Liam Cleaver, Program Director, IBM Jam Program Office (Office of the CIO). “And Web 2.0 tools help create trust.”

Innovation and collaboration takes many forms at ‘Big Blue’ including countless Intranet 2.0 tools such as thousands of wikis, blogs and the increasing popular Beehive. Beehive is akin to Facebook, but slightly different, and perhaps more viral employee social networking site.

Like Facebook, Beehive users (appropriately called bees) can:

create a profile
post pictures
updates
comments
organize events
tag others’ photos

Bees can also create top 5 lists (e.g. favorite books) called High5s. According to IBM, bees can “add a “hive five” list that outlines their ideas about their project, and then invite their team members to “reuse” the list and voice their opinions. Hive fives cover a lot of territory, from clearly work-related subjects to the kinds of personal exchanges that might only happen among collocated team members at the water cooler.”

Bees can also host events and create an event page that invites others to attend (think Evite.com). “The page can be a place to spread the buzz about the event and get people talking about it through the comments feature,” says the IBM website. “It's also a handy place to keep track of who is invited and who's RSVPed, and to share photos and reminisce about the event afterward.”

Beehive enables IBMers to track friends and share social activities. When an IBMer becomes a bee they get a profile page and at any time can update their status. New users are called ‘new bees’ and accumulate points for activity including posts, comments, and photos. As you accumulate points IBMers grow from a new bee into a working bee, to busy bee, and finally a super bee.

“One of our goals is to create a ‘smaller’ company in spite of our size,” said Cleaver during the Communitelligence.com Intranet Insider Word Tour. “Beehive has done more than anything than create a sense of community at IBM.”

Over 30,000 people have opted-in, sharing over 40,000 photos in less than a year since Beehive issued its first honey. And it’s still being enhanced.

To learn more about the IBM intranet and to see the Intranet Insider case study webinar, purchase the CD online.

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World’s best intranet: IBM (webinar)

Toby Ward — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 17:49:00 -0700

I’ve had the pleasure to work on or help create dozens of intranets in the past few years, and seen and learned about many dozens of others. I can say with some confidence that IBM has the best intranet in the world. Some like Cisco and Microsoft come close, but not close enough (although the latter two are still fairly secretive about all the workings of their respective intranets, and IBM is quick to show it all).

Two years ago, Intranet Insider World Tour made a stop at IBM's w3. That was before Web 2.0 tools started changing the way organizations communicate and collaborate. Now see the new Web 2.0 IBM intranet with 30,000 bloggers, podcasts (audio & video), wikis, and Beehive, an internal version of Facebook. This highly informative webinar with a look at the IBM intranet and its tools is hosted by myself and Liam Cleaver, Program Director, Collaborative Innovation at IBM.

IBM's employee social networking site (alla Facebook), Beehive

This insider’s look at the IBM intranet is this Thursday, June 12 (see Intranet Insider World Tour Webinar: IBM's w3 - Transforming The Total Workplace Experience or register or purchase the CD here). This is a must attend for any intranet manager or consultant.

"We see the future workplace as ubiquitous; totally integrated; and senses work activity and responds with resources," says Cleaver. The goal of the IBM intranet is to increase productivity, collaboration and innovation of its 380,000 employees worldwide, 45% of whom work remotely in all global time zones.

Here is a sneak preview:

Blue Pages: One universal employee directory, 50+ applications access & use the directory data, More than 1.5 million hits per day, 65% of employees use BluePages once a day.
Beehive: Opt-in social networking site from IBM Research, Create a personal page to share interests, thoughts, photos and/or what you do in IBM, over 33,000+ registered members and 41,000+ photos uploaded
Fringe: Experimental directory and networking site from IBM Research, Find colleagues based on skills, interests or other shared connections,
see what's going on with the news in your social network through aggregated feeds
BlogCentral: Opens up collaboration and creates connections across IBM through use of Web 2.0 technologies, 50,000+ users, 1,600+ active blogs
WikiCentral: Provides easy and effective ways of collaboration in any size group. In April 2008, 3M+ page views, 1.3M+ total visitors
Jams and ThinkPlace: Open, collaborative and on-going global forum, surfaces solutions to specific challenges, 16,000 ideas submitted since launch, 350+ ideas adopted, facilitates exchange of smaller ideas
TAP @ work: SmallBlue: within intranet search retrieves experts based on tags and employee profiles recommending best path to connect, gives analysis of social network visually depicts people networks and geographic clusters.

"Google is often portrayed as the technology hipster, rolling out Web applications almost at whim. But unseen to the public, IBM is rolling out Web 2.0 technologies such as blogs, wikis, mashups and virtual reality technologies to help its employees be more productive. Inside its firewall, Big Blue looks pretty hip." Clint Boulton, eWeek.

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