(VANCOUVER, CANADA) Placemaking (325 employees) is the real estate development division of resort developer Intrawest (25,000 employees). Placemaking employees are all knowledge workers and located across the globe developing resort villages such as Whistler-Blackcomb (British Columbia), Mountain Creek (New Jersey), and Tremblant (Quebec).

Tracy Hutton, Director of Learning at Placemaking, wanted to leverage the company intranet to create community at the recently re-organized company. She also wanted a better way to capture Placemaking’s intellectual capital online. The previous intranet, released in May 2004, was infrequently updated and poorly used (averaging 0.5 page views per employee per day).

Without a full-time resource to commit to creating a new intranet, Placemaking chose social software engineers Chris McGrath and Darren Gibbons, creators of ThoughtFarmer, a product of One Intranets Inc. and OpenRoad Communications. ThoughtFarmer is a wiki-type technology to create a self-sustaining intranet maintained by all employees.

In April 2006, the new intranet, the Portal launched on the ThoughtFarmer social software platform.

the Portal, Placemaking's intranet home page

The wiki approach

The Portal is built on the wiki principle of open editing. All employees have the ability to add and edit

content, even on the home page.

Unlike wikis, Placemaking’s intranet has a hierarchical content structure with autogenerated navigation. It was felt that non-technical business users wouldn’t be comfortable with WikiWords and free-form page creation. Instead, clicking the “Add a page” button creates a subpage of the current page.

The first social feature of ThoughtFarmer to resonate with Placemaking employees was Employee “Places”: a personal spot for each employee to add a profile and create pages. As employees uploaded photos of themselves, added amusing anecdotes, and revealed a little more of who they are, the popularity of People Places skyrocketed. Within 3 months, virtually all employees had added their own contact information, one-third had added a personal profile, and 15% had created pages.

Placemaking's president, Drew Stotesbury, has been an active user and proponent of the collaborative intranet, posting news articles, uploading photos, and starting new forum topics.

In September, Mike Hartigan, a Placemaking project manager in Vancouver, created a page about a method of finishing concrete floors that creates an appearance better than tile at a substantially lower cost. Using the method at the entrance to a resort saved $500,000 and reduced the project timeline. Other project managers in Florida and Nevada posted comments to the page, asking further questions. In response, Hartigan posted photos of the finished job and addressed their comments. The other construction managers planned on using this valuable knowldge in future projects.

Note that in the above posting the author includes photographs and information on the particulars involved in his money-saving idea. Not only are the pictures and details helpful, but any employee in the company can respond to the posting – and also edit the article, the details and even the photos. Many other employees responded with their feedback including additional tips and photos. (Notice how each employee has their own photo that is chosen by that employee. Some have even gone so far as to choose something a little more fun such as a shot of Magnum P.I. or his adversary and foil Higgins).

Despite the open freedom to edit and post, the company reports no misuse since the new intranet launched. No content can be posted anonymously, as Placemaking’s intranet software integrates with their Windows network and Active Directory. Employees take responsibility for their own postings and this self-policing seems to be effective.

Metrics for success

Placemaking manages dozens of multi-million dollar developments a year. These construction tips, if implemented on just a handful of projects, will save the company millions of dollars. Without the everyone-is-an-editor intranet, it is doubtful that they would have been shared.

Placemaking's total investment in their intranet, including customizations and information architecture consulting, was under $100,000.

At launch, intranet use immediately increased tenfold to 5 page views per employee per day. The increased use has held steady for 6 months. The success has translated into use outside the company by parent company employees. In fact, parent company Intrawest employee users now dominate the use of the intranet.

Planned improvements

In December, Placemaking will migrate to ThoughtFarmer 2.0, which includes email-based signals when a requested page changes. In addition, Placemaking’s updated intranet will include content tagging, social bookmarking, and "related content" links. It is hoped that these system enhancements, all part of McAfee's "SLATES" formula for Enterprise 2.0 collaboration, will increase participation on Placemaking's intranet.

One new feature to be added to Placemaking’s intranet in December is a simple social bookmarking system. Users can favorite a page with one click. Their lists of favorites are visible to others, and their favorites count as “votes” that impact search results.

Key Learnings

Instituting a collaborative intranet environment can be a challenge. More than issues of integration and technology a collaborative intranet tool is more an exercise in change management.

Currently, about 50% of Placemaking employees do not edit the intranet. 44% are occasional editors, and 6% are active participants. Although participation is high compared to internet-based social systems, Intrawest is still hoping to improve and look at new ways to get the 94% of low- or non-participators more involved.

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ON A PERSONAL NOTE: Happy Thanksgiving to all those Americans celebrating (including more than half of my family)! I didn't have any turkey today but to celebrate I did have chicken and a non-alcoholic beer. I can honestly say I feel more rested than when over indulging on football, turkey and beer and/or other spirits.

It's been a big couple of days as well in Canada with Vancouver's own Justin Morneau winning the Major League Baseball American League MVP. That's three Canadian MVPs in three of the United State's four big major sports... yes, we're darned proud of that Justin, eh.

Does anyone think that Michael Richards apology on Letterman was sufficient? I do. It was an unacceptable mistake -- well frankly his rant was more than a mistake. But it's tough to be in the spotlight and most of us wouldn't hold up to the scrutiny. I believe the sincerity of his apology. I'm not so certain about Mel Gibson but since I don't know him I tend to give the individual the benefit of the doubt if it doesn't show a pattern of mistakes or abuse.

How about Celtic upsetting Man United? What a goal by Nakamura!

Hey, my baby girl has learned a new word (phrase) just short of 10 months: hot dog. Get em started on the BBQ culture early I say!! My eldest daughter is preparing a new calendar with her original art that we'll distribute at Christmas... order now

For more intranet news visit www.IntranetReport.com

© 2006 Toby Ward - Prescient Digital Media

Some 2.7 trillion e-mails will have been sent by people around the world by the end of this year alone. If you feel the majority of them are ending up in your in-box, you're not the only one. E-mail fatigue has become a common business complaint. Increasingly, co-workers seem to figure there's no point in walking 10 feet to a colleague's desk and having a brief conversation when a 300-word e-mail mini-essay will do. —"Pop guide to beating e-mail fatigue," The Irish Times, December 12, 1997

E-mail is perhaps the biggest killer application in recent technology history. We all need e-mail as part of our day-to-day work lives. However, many, many organizations have come to rely too heavily on e-mail. This over reliance has come at the expense of employee productivity and intellectual property.

The Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) reports that as much as 75 percent of most companies’ intellectual property is contained in the messages and attachments they send through their e-mail systems (source: Message Therapy, CIO Magazine, January, 2005).

The problem is that far too many organizations use e-mail as the principal knowledge repository and storage system. The risks to relying too much on e-mail (and other systems such as shared drives) for information storage are well known:

Ø       Email is an inefficient document sharing system

Ø       With no metadata or search, shared drives become un-navigable

Ø       3rd party services are usually owned by the individual not the company

According to Seth Gottlieb, the Content Management and Collaboration Lead at Optaros, “a company's success in content management is inversely proportional to the amount of information that is exchanged over email.” In other words, the more e-mail an organization has, the more e-mail undermines the organization’s ability to manage content (particularly on the enterprise intranet).

A new study on e-mail suggests that e-mail has become a hindrance to many organizations. E-Mail Management: An Oxymoron? written by John Mancini, President of AIIM, the enterprise association on content management, states that a casual approach to e-mail management presents “significant risks” including major costs, significant litigation, and a drag on key processes. E-mail management including a strategy and processes for archiving, retention, and lifecycle management of enterprise e-mail.

The study culminates a great deal of analysis including a survey of more than 1000 e-mail managers (mostly IT managers and executives, and records and document management specialists).

Other study findings:

Ø       Nearly half those respondents (44%) spend more than 30% of their work activity on e-mail related activity. 

Ø       Only 25% of respondents have implemented an e-mail management strategy with most organizations leaving e-mail management up to individual employees (with little or no guidance)

Ø       23% of respondents in large size organizations (1000 employees or more) have had to turn over e-mail as part of a legal or internal investigation

E-mail management strategies and technologies can certainly help but are not the sole answers to the e-mail problem. Better knowledge management would certainly help (see The lost meaning of knowledge management). Also helping overcome e-mail fatigue at leading organizations are effective policies on e-mail use and the use of social media such as wikis and blogs.

Social media

If managed properly, the use of social media tools such as blogs and wikis can reduce e-mail volumes by as much as 30%.

While blogs, wikis and other social media such as podcasts and social networking sites have taken the intranet by storm, these tools have not found the same level of success on the intranet. A recent CIO survey found that only 18% of organizations have deployed blogs, and only 13% have deployed wikis. This is changing however. More than 40% are testing, piloting or evaluating blog and wiki applications at the time of the survey.

Furthermore, as a new generation of employees enter the workforce, more employees will begin to demand social media tools such as social networking sites. For example, MySpace grew by 609% in one year, from just under 3.5 million members in October 2004 to over 24 million in 2005.

Here are some important statistics on our future employees (fifteen- to eighteen-year-olds):

Ø       average nearly 6 1/2 hours a day watching TV, playing video games, and surfing the Net

Ø       A quarter of that time, they're multitasking.

Ø       The biggest increase: computer use for activities such as social networking, which has soared nearly threefold since 2000, to 1 hour and 22 minutes a day on average (Kaiser Family Foundation survey).

ON A PERSONAL NOTE: Many thanks to those sending notes of concern regarding the water situation in Vancouver (see Vancouverites boil water for 5th day as rain continues). We are doing fine on boiled and bottled water, thank you for asking. As I said to a friend, water problems are good for us – just as the brown-out across the continent was good for us a couple of summers ago; it helps force us to not take such advantage of a valuable resource.

I understand the Canadian Football League Championship was broadcast across the globe… did anyone watch? How about that Carl Kidd dive over the top to stop Montreal on the goal line and essentially clinch the Grey Cup for the BC Lions. A huge congratz to Vancouver’s own Paul McCallum for winning the most outstanding award!

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For more intranet news visit www.IntranetReport.com

© 2006 Toby Ward - Prescient Digital Media

(DETROIT, MI) Open source software is developed by communities of developers and users. These software solutions include portals, content management systems, e-mail systems, browsers, social media applications, operating systems, and just about any kind of software you can think of. This collective of volunteer programmers also build communities and communal tools to improve upon existing solutions.

Delloite Research believes open source is one of the hottest trends unfolding in all of technology. In it’s annual TMT Trends: Technology Predictions 2006 Delloite states that “open source will pose an ever-greater challenge to the established software model, impacting both providers and end users.”

Users of open source freebie browser Firefox have already drunk this Kool-Aid downloading more than 200 million versions of the emerging browser. Firefox now poses the first serious threat to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer since the collapse of Netscape. In fact, in Germany, nearly 50% of web users use Firefox.

Dave Gynn is a convert to the open source revolution – a revolution that even IBM and Novell have bought into. At Optaros Gynn preaches the value of open source to their growing list of clients who engage the company to implement open source solutions. In a recent Optaros study of 512 U.S. companies, government agencies and other organizations found that 87% of the organizations were using open source systems, software often available for free and built by communities of software developers.

“Open source allows a company to start simple and grow: no license fees reduce costs of experimentation; many open source solutions employ a modular architecture,” says Gynn.  “Open source software is leagues ahead of most commercial products in terms of innovation. Expect to learn through the lifecycle of the application.”

One of Gynn’s favorite open source solutions is Plone; a leading open source platform and CMS valued as a general purpose web platform. Plone benefits include:

Ø       Easy, in-site editing modules

Ø       Storage for a variety of content

Ø       Compliance with many standars

Ø       A huge user base

Ø       A vast community and network of users and adopters

Ø       Hundreds of add-on products and plug-ins

Plone operated websites include ours at Prescient Digital Mediaand the Boston.com portal.

Plone CMS and editor used to power www.PrescientDigital.com

Other leading open source platforms include:

Ø       Alfresco

Ø       CPS

Ø       Knowledge Tree

Ø       Magnolia

Ø       Joomla

Ø       Trac

Ø       Roller

Ø       Drupal

Business intelligence

Open source solutions are also being used to drive business decisions and financial success. Business intelligence (BI) allows organizations to track and report mission-critical data – from customer and product tracking to sales and inventory data.

BI is big business and some corporations spend a fortune. Legacy BI is expensive, complex and proprietary. JasperSoft is making it more affordable without the killer investment.

JasperIntelligence is the world’s most popular BI solution with 1.7 million downloads and growing at a rate of 100,000+ downloads per month. JasperSoft uses a “Dual License” revenue model: “Pure” open source and commercial licensing. With offices in the US, Ireland, Australia, Italy and Romania, The company already has 4000+ paying customers and has partnered with many leading organizations including Novell, Salesforce.com, and JBOSS among others to deliver open source solutions.

Successful BI is digs deep into and analyzes all of an organization’s various repositories and databases of information and metrics. But the intranet is the gateway to those treasure troves of data. JasperSoft allows a company to leverage structured data thru the intranet via reports, dashboards and KPIs.

“Bringing useful data proactively to the right user is what business intelligence is all about,” says JasperSoft’s Barry Klawans. “Users can be alerted to information or be given the information proactively that allows them to act accordingly. Business Intelligence on the intranet allows organizations to make faster decisions.”

Barriers

Open source isn’t for every organization. It’s not the safe, brand name purchase of an IBM or Microsoft. The Optaros study found that most companies were confronted by four primary barriers to achieving even greater benefits from open source:

·         Uncertainties about open source software that often relegate the software to the IT function

·         Lack of understanding of licensing and legal issues around open source software

·         Software cost allocation policies that discourage business functions from reducing the cost of commercial software

·         The difficulty of identifying, evaluating, purchasing and maintaining open source software

Open source can save a lot of money and provide a level of flexibility not always present with off-the-shelf solutions, but an outside hand to implement and trouble-shoot is highly recommended.

RELATED READING:

The growing popularity of open source intranets

Open source solutions for Lotus intranets

Open source intranets

Sex, Lies, and CMS Vendors

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Verizon is a big, big communications company. In fact, about 140,000 employees spread mostly across the continental United States. If the challenge of communicating with all those people is not enough, most of those employees, about 80,000, are what you would call traditional “offline” staff including call center staff (online but not connected to all tools) and field workers such as service, repair and central office staff.

Verizon’s biggest challenge therefore is bridging the ‘digital divide’ of those with access and those without. The answer: break down the digital divide by creating the ‘digital workplace.’

More than just the intranet or home page, the digital workplace is the new place to meet and do business. The Digital Workplace is Verizon’s “umbrella” term for all online systems, tools, information channels regardless of geographic location for “anytime, anywhere access to the information and tools employees need to get their jobs done.”

eWeb, the Verizon intranet portal home page

At the heart of the digital workplace of course is the intranet portal, eWeb. But the key to success that is driving much of the visible added value are some of Verizon’s cutting edge communications tools -- including a voice portal, wikis, blogs, message forums, and much more.

Read the entire Intranet Insider case study Verizon's Digital Workplace (Communitelligence.com)