Intranet Blog

Intranet 2.0 - The Future of Intranets (A sneak peak)

Toby Ward — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 14:48:00 -0700

The Intranet 2.0 phenomenon is beginning to gather speed. More than 50% of medium-to-large organizations have implemented, or are testing, piloting or evaluating blog and wiki applications. Just about everyone wants to rollout social media, but not everyone understands how to do so most effectively.

Join Prescient CEO and intranet consultant Toby Ward and Janus Boye, Managing Director, J. Boye, for a sneak preview of the findings and analysis of the first major study on Intranet 2.0. Intranet 2.0 - The Future of Intranets webinar will also preview some of Toby's case study examples he'll present at the jboye08 conference in Denmark.

In this 60-minute information session, attendees will:
• Learn the real numbers on what is being done (and not done)
• Case study examples from IBM, Cisco, BT, Sabre and others
• Lessons learned and key recommendations for undertaking an Intranet 2.0 initiative

Date: Friday, October 17, 2008
Time: 8:30 AM - 9:30 AM EDT

Register now for Intranet 2.0 (FREE INTRANET WEBINAR).

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North Americans demand social media

Toby Ward — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 23:09:00 -0700

Americans really dig social media… but Canadians love it.

Almost 60% of Americans interact with companies on a social media Web site, and one in four interact more than once per week. These are among the findings of the 2008 Cone Business in Social Media Study (Cone LLC).

When asked about specific types of interactions, Americans believe:
• A company should have a presence in social media (93%)
• A company should not only be present but also interact with its consumers via social media (85%)
• American consumers feel both a stronger connection with and better served by companies when they can interact with them in a social media environment (56%)
• Companies should use social networks to solve my problems (43%)

Of the younger, hard-to-reach consumers (ages 18-34), one-third believe companies should actively market to them via social networks, and the same is true of the wealthiest households (household income of $75,000+). Two-thirds of the wealthiest households and the largest households (3 or more members) feel stronger connections to brands they interact with online.

Survey:
The 2008 Cone Business in Social Media Study presents the findings of an online survey conducted September 11-12, 2008 by Opinion Research Corporation among 1,092 adults comprising 525 men and 567 women 18 years of age and older. The margin of error associated with a sample of this size is ± 3%.

If you thought Americans were demanding… according to comScore Media Metrix numbers from Canada, the Great White North is more social:

• 85% of online population visit a social networking site, spending 6 hours per month per visitor*
• 63% of online population visit a blog site in a month
• Almost 24 million Canadians age 2+ online in a month, spending an average of 46 hours online per person (that’s 3/4s of the country that is older than 2-years-old!!!)
• 94% of online population perform search in a month,
conducting 33 searches per searcher
• 85% of online population stream a video, viewing an average of 120 videos per viewer per month

The comScore Media Metrix numbers are in fact from the beginning of the year and undoubtedly higher today. In fact, according to ZincResearch.com 90% of Canadians between the ages of 18 and 34 are Facebook members (9 million). Those numbers are from the beginning of the year (the participation rate is definitely higher today).

Now I know Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper knows what Facebook is... do Bush and Cheney know?

Web 2.0 is content that matters

Toby Ward — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 11:07:00 -0700

Yes, the blogosphere and ‘Web 2.0’ are filled with fluff, idle chatter, and, quite frankly, a lot of crap. However, if you learn to filter the junk, as you do with your mail, e-mail, or television, the rewards can be extremely meaningful – and valuable to business.

I live on Wikipedia (and often am driven their by Google). I do a lot of research and reading and find the quality on Wikipedia to be superlative. In fact, while it has its critics, I’ve yet to encounter a credibility gap. And yet, the reliability of more traditional, scholarly sources are not always as reliable.

For example, I recently read a biography on Stalin from a very credible source and historian. Now I know a thing or two and am a bit of a history buff, but I called into question the nature and circumstances of his death as detailed in this one biography. In fact, there are multiple versions and contradictions on how and where Stalin died...

Read my full column: Web 2.0 is content that matters (with intranet examples, on Ragan.com)

SharePoint: Square pegs in round holes

Toby Ward — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 14:41:00 -0700

Prescient's Jed Cawthorne discusses the time and place for SharePoint (MOSS):

Microsoft's SharePoint technologies have their sweet spots in that they definitely fulfill specific requirements for certain use cases within the bigger picture of varied information management scenarios.

However, MOSS is not a panacea. It is not the solution to every information management related business problem, and despite what others may tell you, it's certainly not a 'one size fits all' technical solution to all those annoying business issues.

Intranet 2.0 sits on the back burner

Toby Ward — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 11:00:00 -0700

As I highlighted last week in Web 2.0 not a priority for CIOs, the adoption rate of social media is surprisingly low given the adoption by every day consumers. Here’s the summary:

14% of organizations use blogs
13% use social tagging software
11% use wikis
72% of CIOs have no plans to use blogs in the next 5 years
74% no plans to use wikis

Last year’s Global Intranet Survey of 177 global intranet managers (medium to large organizations with 5,000 to 100,000 employees) found that Intranet 2.0 adoption is not much better:

Less than 20% of the respondents that have more than 50,000 employees have established 2.0 strategies
None of the respondents with employees in the 5,000 – 50,000 employees have 2.0 strategies
About 30% or less have implemented blogs
About 40% have implemented wikis

While Prescient’s Intranet 2.0 Global Survey is an important one, it is focused solely on Intranet 2.0. Jane McConnell has prepared the 2008 Global Intranet Survey and if you haven’t signed up to participate then don’t hesitate further: your organization needs this information and you need to participate so you can get a copy of the 2008 results as soon as possible (THE DEADLINE IS THIS SUNDAY, AUGUST 31). To participate, send an email to Jane specifying:

organization name
# of employees
website URL
your name
your role or title

Additionally, take the Intranet 2.0 Global Survey and you’ll get a copy of the full results including the good, bad and learned lessons.

Employee social networking (case study)

Toby Ward — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 16:22:00 -0700

We humans are social creatures. With rare exception, we strive to relate, converse and connect with others. Social networking promotes online communities of interests and activities that promote connections between users in a more open and robust manner than simple e-mail.

While best represented by the quintessential MySpace and Facebook, social networking has made significant strides into the corporate intranet where employee networking is becoming a valuable asset to leading organizations that covet the new breed of employee. This young, web savvy employee cohort desires – if not demands – a more social and dynamic work environment that uses the best possible Web 2.0 (Intranet 2.0) technology.

Though e-mail still occupies an important stronghold in the nascent world of Intranet 2.0, social and employee networking communications is best embodied by instant messaging, discussion forums, and RSS technology. While these technologies build upon the value of the archetypal killer application that is e-mail, the real value delivered by employee networking is the group communications dynamic where a single employee can communicate both actively and passively with other similar or ‘connected’ employees or the entire employee population as a whole.

Sabre Town: Sabre's employee networking intranet site

Sabre, the company that runs most of the world’s airline flight reservation systems among other systems, is an impressive leader in employee networking. With nearly 10,000 employees spread around the globe (55% work outside of the U.S. where they are headquartered), Sabre is a progressive company that has Intranet 2.0 with spectacular results.

Recognizing their own unique needs as a global, distributed workforce, Sabre embarked to build their own employee networking intranet from scratch. Using another nascent technology, Ruby on Rails, Sabre built an impressive employee networking platform called Sabre Town. Sabre Town represents the company’s need to build more meaningful connections with this geographically diverse employee population.

Want to learn more about what others are doing? Take the Intranet 2.0 Global Survey and get the full results including the good, bad and learned lessons.

Read the complete Sabre employee networking case study article

Banning Facebook

Toby Ward — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 15:39:00 -0700

Beware of Facebook! It will crush your productivity and hijack your employees!

While we’re at it, why don’t we make employees log in a little diary every phone call they make, for how long, to whom, and what they talked about. Talking with family? Friends? Or a travel agent? Let’s ban it.

Oh yeah, the bathroom. Let’s give each employee one bathroom pass per day with a time limit of no more than 5 minutes for each visit. Better yet, let’s install cameras in the bathroom to ensure they’re using that time wisely instead of gossiping or snorting coke!

I cannot believe we’re still having this conversation, but then again I can; there are a lot of incredibly stupid executives that are badly out of touch with reality. These are the same executives that spend part of their work week on the golf course, or Golf.com. It’s a tired refrain by now, but I keep seeing stories about Facebook and other website bans so it’s worth repeating: don’t ban Facebook, embrace it.

Employees prefer to be treated as adults. Judge their performance and actions instead of counting their minutes spent doing “productive work.”

Trust me, the threat and problems stemming from a ban far exceed the embrace option. Prescient Digital Media’s Julian Mills last week highlighted the findings of one recent survey that warned of the perils of banning Facebook:

39% of 18 to 24 year-olds would consider leaving if they were not allowed to access sites like Facebook and YouTube
A further 21% indicated that they would feel ‘annoyed’ by such a ban
The problem is less acute with 25 to 65 year-olds, of whom just 16% would consider leaving and 13% would be annoyed

Telindus conducted the survey of 1,000 European office workers. Can you imagine the results in North America? In Canada, 90% of 18-34 year-olds use Facebook – that's 9 million people! Any company or organization who wants to alienate that employee cohort has rocks for brains and should just fall on their sword now.

Sadly, a majority of big employers have already banned Facebook. In a Sophos poll of 600 workers, 43% revealed that their company was blocking access to Facebook, while an additional seven percent reported that usage of the social networking website was restricted and only those with a specific business requirement were allowed to access it. In contrast, 50% of respondents said that their company did not block access to Facebook, with 8% specifying that the reason was fear of employee backlash.

Employees want it, and you want employees. When you ban Facebook, you mostly screw yourself. So instead of banning it, embrace Facebook with caveats, rules (terms of use) and the appropriate security.

Sophos has produced a solid security guide with recommended privacy settings in Facebook, and shows you how to set more secure levels of privacy and reduce the chance of becoming a victim of online identity theft (see Facebook best practices):

“Unlike some other social networking sites, Facebook has provided some powerful options to protect you online - but it's up to you to use them! Think carefully about who you allow to become your friend once you have accepted someone as your friend they will be able to access any information about you (including photographs) that you have marked as viewable by your friends. You can remove friends at any time should you change your mind about someone.

Show "limited friends" a cut-down version of your profile - You can choose to make people 'limited friends' who only have access to a cut-down version of your profile if you wish. This can be useful if you have associates who you do not wish to give full friend status to, or feel uncomfortable sharing personal information with.

Disable options, then open them one by one - Think about how you want to use Facebook. If it's only to keep in touch with people and be able to contact them then maybe it's better to turn off the bells and whistles. It makes a lot of sense to disable an option until you have decided you do want and need it, rather than start with everything accessible.”

The Sophos guide also provides specific advice on different Facebook controls:

Profile - Controls who can see your profile
Search - Allows you to decide who can find you
News feed and mini-feed - Controls what information is published about your activities
Poke, message and friend request - Controls what information you share with people you contact
Applications - Controls what information Facebook applications can access and share about you

SPEAKING OF FACEBOOK:

Come join the discussion on Facebook on theIntranet Global Forum.

ADDITIONAL READING:

Facebook used as an ‘underground’ intranet

Speaking of Facebook as an underground intranet…

The ROI of the Facebook intranet

Serena’s Facebook intranet

Microsoft wants Facebook... and its intranet power

The Facebook Revolution

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Social software that power Intranet 2.0

Toby Ward — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 00:53:00 -0700

“Looking for greater flexibility and support for more ad hoc processes, employees have responded with a more bottom-up approach, in some cases circumventing official information systems,” say CMS Watch Founder Tony Byrne and contributing analyst Jarod Gingras, the principal authors of The Enterprise Social Software Report 2008.

CMS Watch's social media vendors matrix.

In other words, if your organization hasn’t embraced and standardized social software, your employees will begin installing it and using it without your permission. I know of what client that only found out recently that 15% of their employee base had voluntarily joined a dedicated company Facebook site. At BT, 4,000 employees formed their own “BT Facebook” site. BT took note and in response built their own social networking site called MyBT (see The power of Intranet 2.0).

If your organization hasn’t already developed an Intranet 2.0 plan (social media plan), you would do well to develop one before employees develop their own. This plan ideally contains the business case for moving to Intranet 2.0. Byrne and Gingras cite a number of business benefits to implementing enterprise social software:

Hard benefits:

Reduce expenses
Increase productivity
Increase customer retention

Soft benefits:

Improve internal communication
Improve internal collaboration
Improve employee morale and retention

I cited a number of positive ROI examples, or link to others, in Intranet 2.0: A must-have.

While a plan is a must, an even more difficult task may be the selection of the actual software that will power your Intranet 2.0 – there are now hundreds of solutions on the market. The Enterprise Social Software Report dissects the capabilities of 20 different social software (social media) solutions for Intranet 2.0 (or Web 2.0) including those from:

IBM (Lotus Connections)
SharePoint
Connectbeam
Facebook
Google (Blogger)
MediaWiki
Socialtext
and others

Each of these solutions are reviewed for their business service uses including:

Blog
Wiki
Social Ranking
Project Tracking & Participation
Multimedia
Info Filtering
File Sharing
Web Conferencing
Discussion Forums
Presence / Instant Messaging (IM)
People Finding (e.g. social networking)

All of this is rated according to various Administration & System Services (e.g. security, analytics, etc.) and various corporate scenarios (e.g. Enterprise Collaboration, Project Collaboration, etc.).

Some interesting notes regarding the two big solutions, SharePoint and Lotus Connections / Quickr:

Lotus Connections / Quickr: strong social networking, strong presence and IM tools, excellent integration with Notes and emerging Outlook connectors, and an innovative Blackberry application; “underwhelming blog/wiki” and requires WebSphere Portal for roles and group modules – best for Enterprise Networking; poor for Project Collaboration.
Microsoft SharePoint (MOSS 2007): broad range of third-party plug-ins, lightweight portal services including bundled applications and lightweight document and records management services into social applications, search works well in an all-SharePoint environment; almost all native services are weak compared to competitors, near complete absence of social networking, social tagging & Bookmarking, and surprisingly weak integration with Outlook – best for Project Collaboration (e.g. team sites); poor for Enterprise deployments.

In short, Lotus is a better enterprise solution; SharePoint is a better project or team solution.

Regardless, 20 different products are reviewed in detail (from 10 – 25 pages per product review) and it’s a worthwhile read if you are looking at implementing social media or Intranet 2.0 software. Buy CMS Watch’s Enterprise Social Media Report 2008 (they offer a 30-day, 100% money-back guarantee).

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.

ADDITIONAL READING:

Intranet 2.0: A must-have

Enterprise 2.0 vs. Intranet 2.0

Embracing Enterprise 2.0

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IBM Fringe: Employee social networking with a purpose

Toby Ward — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 15:45:00 -0700

Most intranet or employee directories are the most used, if not most popular, applications on the corporate intranet. Most pull key contact information directly from the HR database or ERP; others allow employees to update and maintain their own information.

For those organizations like IBM that allow employees to edit parts of their profile (but not key reporting information like title, department, reporting lines, etc.), an over-looked and under-appreciated challenge often occurs: ensuring that employees actually keep their information up-to-date.

An internal study by IBM some years ago found out that 40% of employee directory listings (called Blue Pages) had not been updated at all in the previous 9 month period. A lot of tacit knowledge and information is left unreported in employee profiles. That in itself is not a big problem if you know who you’re looking for, but in a company of 385,000 employees, finding the right employee for the right issue can be a challenge.

An employee profile page using Fringe, IBM's people tagging system

IBM’s Eric Wilcox and his colleagues came up with a solution: create a parallel system that draws in the key employee information from their directory profile (name, contact information, etc.) and add to it functionality that allows employees – any employee – to assign a keyword or ‘tag’ that helps define the expertise of an individual.

Wilcox et al (Werner Geyer, Stephen Farrell, Tessa Lau and Stefan Nusser) created a people tagging system called Fringe. “People tagging is a form of social bookmarking that enables people to organize their contacts into groups, annotate them with terms supporting future recall, and search for people by topic area,” says Wilcox.

“People-tagging has a valuable side benefit: it enables the community to collectively maintain each others interest and expertise profiles.”

Fringe profiles display contact information and automatically generated information from the Blue Pages directory including:

Communities that they belong to
Blog entries
Bookmarked pages (from their social bookmarking tool, Dogear)

The real value though is in the people tagging:

Employees can tag anyone with any keyword or tag (e.g. a doctor might have the tags “doctor,” “MD,” “surgeon,” “pediatrics,” etc.)
All tags are recorded to the tagger and the tagee (therefore no anonymous tags, and no private or hidden tags)
When you tag someone, they can tag you back (forcing extra diligence and consideration)
Authors of a tag are displayed when hovering over a tag
An outgoing tag cloud shows which tags a person has applied to another
An incoming tag cloud shows what tags has been applied to that person
All tags are linked to the creator, and their respective tags
Users can even tag someone through the corporate instant messaging tool (SameTime)

Employees find added value in being able to search for people or experts by tag (subject matter) that might help them in their day-to-day work.

“People tag other people as a form of contact management, and they confirm in subsequent interviews, that the tags they have been given are accurate descriptions of their interest and expertise,” says Wilcox. “Moreover, none of the people reported offensive or inappropriate tags.”

A link on a Fringe profile page, called Zeigeist, takes the user to a page that consists of a tag cloud containing the most recent 100 people tags across all IBM. It also contains a list of recently active taggers as well as recently targeted taggees (those that have been tagged).

“The goal for this page was to try and characterize or draw out trends in the people tagging space,” adds Wilcox. “For example, let's say a researcher gives a great talk on how IBM is turning scrapped silicon wafers into solar panels. There might a surge in the use of the tags "solar" and "wafer-reuse" which should bubble up in the zeitgeist cloud. The researcher who gave the talk might also drift to the top of the taggee list.”

Man, these IBMers are smart.

While IBM’s Beehive social networking site (see Behind Beehive’s social success @ IBM) has proven more ‘viral’ in a shorter period of time, Fringe has enjoyed a modicum of success of its own:

Number of connections: 206,000
Number of profiles tagged: 55,000
Average tags per profile: 3.21
Number of people tagging: 8,500
Average tags per tagger: 20.73
Total number of tags: 178,000
Self-tags: 31,569

“I think the biggest take home here is that the greater IBM population is able to benefit from a relatively smaller population of taggers,” says Wilcox. “This plays very well into the power law distribution of many social systems. By making tags social in Fringe, not only does the tagger benefit but the community and taggee all benefit as well.”

More directly, says Wilcox, tag benefits 3 users:

The tagger (helps him/her describe a person),
The taggee (profile gets populated by others), and
The general public (tags are aggregated to add context and improve expertise search).

So some might ask the question, how does Fringe relate to Beehive, their employee social networking site?

”Fringe started from a very different place,” says Wilcox. “Fringe's main goal is to create a better - more representative - corporate directory.”

Wilcox highlights some of the differences between Beehive’s social networking, and Fringe’s people tagging:

Everyone at IBM has a Fringe page by default where as in Beehive users must opt in and join Beehive explicitly.
Content in Beehive such as photos, Hive-5's, and events must all be entered manually. Fringe grabs existing corporate data automatically for the user (except the people tags).
Connecting in Fringe requires confirmation while connecting in Beehive does not.
Beehive is meant to be more of a place to go and socialize; Fringe is primarily still a corporate directory and expertise search system.

“It has been asked more than once why wouldn't Beehive and Fringe eventually merge...? I find this to be a very interesting prospect and may be the ultimately desirable state,” adds Wilcox. “However, both teams are still investigating really interesting problems from different perspectives.”

But Wilcox et al are not resting on their laurels: the next iteration of Fringe is already underway. “We are continuing to aggregate from even more exotic sources than before!”

There are of course many different ways to ‘socially network’ as represented by both Fringe and Beehive, My Space and Facebook. Regardless of the approach, each serves distinct needs and purposes. Your organization might benefit from one approach, all of the approaches, or perhaps none. Regardless of the view, one conclusion cuts through all the social chatter and business networking: employee social networking fulfills a great need and desire of many employees who are already networking on the public Internet (see The power of Intranet 2.0).

Next week I’ll examine two other employee social networking sites: BT (MyBT) and Sabre (SabreTown).

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ON A PERSONAL NOTE: Some of you have gathered by now that I haven’t been writing a whole heck of a lot lately – and it’s not just the good weather that’s kept me from the proverbial typewriter! Actually, things are quite busy and clients and staff of a growing company do require significant attention! I won’t suggest that the demands on my time will slacken in the next few months, but you can count on me to do at least 2 articles / postings per week (sometimes 3-4).

On another note I’d like to welcome to the Prescient Digital Media team: Susana Hsu, and Jed Cawthorne, and a welcome back to Meredith Mcknight who has rejoined our team as a consultant after a year of maternity leave – congratulations! Welcome!

Additionally, I’d like to welcome the following new clients to Prescient: Arconas, BC Transmission Corporation, Nintendo, CCS, CDHA, CSI, IronMountain, Toshiba, and Texas Instruments. I’d also like to welcome back Atomic Energy, Computer Associates (CA), Heart & Stroke Foundation, and the Toronto Rehabilitation Institute. Many thanks for your business!