It’s the dirty little un-secret we all know, but don’t want to talk about. Porn is alive and well in the workplace.

A 30-year-old man was charged with possessing child pornography after images allegedly were found on a computer at his workplace at the William J. Wrigley Company. Rory Griffin was charged with one count of possession of child pornography.

According to police officials from the Wrigley Co. notified police that technicians fixing a company computer found images that appeared to be child pornography, (see Wrigley Co. Worker Charged With Child Porn).

I personally know of one major brand ‘beverage’ company where the top three most surfed websites are all porn sites. I’m certain they’re not the only one.

In 1995, Chevron Corp. paid $2.2 million to settle a sexual harassment case brought by employees who were offended by an email titled "25 reasons beer is better than women." -- Combating porn in the workplace.

In 2004, the Internet Watch Foundation, the UK’s child porn watchdog, received 17,255 reports of illegal child images, 20% of which were websites. While more and more legislation is punishing those that indulge, the IWF said some managers feared finding themselves caught up in criminal proceedings.  An IWF survey of 200 firms found 74% of managers would not report guilty staff to the police and 40% would not take steps to discipline or dismiss them.

Changes to the Sexual Offences Act in England provided a conditional defence to protect network managers who need to store potentially illegal images of children as evidence. However, it is only valid if the incident is reported within a set amount of time. The age where a picture of a child is considered illegal has also been raised from 16 to 18.

While there are network programs that can block access to certain websites, or only allow access to certain approved websites, there is really very little that an employer can do to fully block workplace porn. If employees want it, they can get it.

The best approach is to treat employees like adults. Establish acceptable use policies and have employees agree to it. If you suspect that child porn may be downloaded, phone the police. Don’t attempt to do any forensics, call the police right away.

RELATED READING:

Protecting your goods

www.WiredSafety.org

© 2006 Toby Ward - Prescient Digital Media

One can spend a lot of money on IT. One CEO of an outrageously profitable financial services firm (who shall remain nameless at the risk of losing my head or shares) is known to say, despite the climbing profit, “we spend too much on IT.”

Alas, investing in the future is seen as desirable for some companies. But can we at least control the investment?

“As if bracing for each new technological development isn’t challenging enough, the IT function is further ex­pected to manage and implement these changes in an orderly “best practices” manner to help ensure continu­ity of IT deployment in all appropriate business pro­cesses,” states the Enterprise Management Associates’ white paper Service Management Made Simple For Mid-Sized Organizations. “This approach has ushered in the era of service management, where applications are viewed by end-users as utility-grade services available to authorized users throughout the networked company, rather than as siloed, discrete applications unique to individual users and departments.

The paper, prepared for Raritan, a supplier of solutions for managing IT infrastructure equipment, highlights the key attributes of an effective IT management service strategy:

• Integration – support a breadth of functionality (e.g., security, network management, application performance) from a single management view rather than requiring multiple monitoring tools and interfaces.
• Management of changing environments and conditions – Service management processes detect changes in configurations, new devices, applications and networks, sudden shifts in traffic flow or routing, denial of service attacks and other random or unexpected threats that can create havoc within any IT infrastructure.
• Modular deployment – A modular approach provides the best of both worlds – enabling an integrated, holistic management strategy that can conform to best practices, while enabling flexibility and choice in making management investments. Well-designed modular solutions should also be easy to deploy.
• Resilience and reliability – The design objective of service management best practices is to be adaptive to change, and since they are based on defined standards of performance, functionality and management, they are also highly reliable.

Of course, one of the keys is reporting and alerts including alarms and reporting on time to repair and time between failures.

Ultimately what Raritan and others in this space are selling are command center systems (NOCs) that integrate and monitor your infrastructure (“centralize the management of more than 10,000 devices with only one IP address”).

RELATED READING:

If it walks like a duck and sounds like a duck then it’s probably… a duck. But don’t count on a duck to deliver ROI. <Insert expletive and comment about “what the hell is he talking about?!?!>

Aflac is a big brand with a quirky following. Well, they have a quirky mascot in the form of a duck that is their figurehead and advertising spokesperson… errr, spokesduck. You’ve no doubt heard the chortle of the affable duck sounding a little like Donald Duck if he had smoked one too many Cuban cigars (Oops! Of course, I meant to say Dominican or Guatemalan cigars… the kind that don’t fill the coffers of Generalissimo Fidel).

“AFLAC!” goes the familiar bellow. Go ahead play with the duck. Download the sound bite for your own amusement. Make sure you turn it up so that your fellow employees know that you’re busily working on some mission critical project.

Getting to the point… I just read a half decent case study on the Aflac intranet portal. The case study is in fact a sales pitch by BEA Plumtree who implemented their portal product as the platform for the Aflac intranet. But as far as commonly available intranet case studies go, this is not bad. It even has a mock-up of the Aflac portal home page proudly showcasing that ubiquitous, sad, out-of-the-box Plumtree look-and-feel.

Aflac’s Best Practices for Driving Portal Adoption and ROI is the name of the case study and webinar presented by Line 56 and BEA. Sounds encouraging and right to the point – with ROI! Boy, it’s refreshing to find a case study that promotes ROI and ACTUALLY has ROI! Except this ROI case study has no ROI. Nope, no ROI.

It’s really not a bad case study. There is some good process background and a couple of screenshots. But no ROI.

What’s the point I’m trying to make? Ducks make great mascots. No, that’s not it.

ROI is good, very good… if you actually have ROI. ROI stands for return on investment and is a monetary metric based on a formula where the value of an investment is divided by the cost of the investment (value ÷ cost = ROI). It is measured and demonstrated as a percentage of the initial investment (e.g. 95%).

A case study demonstrates a best practice and proves a measure of success. It is not a sales pitch. Beware the ROI case study with no ROI. If it walks like a duck and sounds like a duck… it might actually be a sales rep for a portal vendor.

To measure and increase the value of your intranet, please dowload the free white paper, Finding ROI.

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Some good intranet case studies with ROI:

Leading intranet case study: IBM’s W3

Intranet Insider World Tour: Sodexho USA

Part II - QAS intranet case study – anatomy of a winner

QAS intranet case study – anatomy of a winner

More reading on intranet ROI (with real ROI!!):

Intranet ROI

More than ROI

Intranet ROI (Back Issue)

Measure your efforts

© 2006 Toby Ward - Prescient Digital Media

Stromberg Consulting, part of Ketchum, has issued a report on the 2006 Macro-Trends in Internal Communications.

The author, Cynthia Roy, provides some excellent insight and backs it up. Though some of the cited research raises an eyebrow (27% of adult Americans now read a blog regularly… I doubt that very much.)

Roy cites seven trends that are “shaping the communications landscape”:

1. Democratization of Information
2. Strategic Imperative
3. Employee Engagement
4. Demonstrating ROI
5. Segmentation and Globalization
6. Simplicity
7. The Emerging Trend: Personalization

A solid list and a worthwhile read. One communications trend though that I believe is understated is the advance of technology particularly the intranet/portal and social media such as blogs, wikis and podcasting. Of course, I need not go into too much detail backing up my argument… feel free to surf this site!

© 2006 Toby Ward - Prescient Digital Media

I don’t blog jokes or joke e-mails. However, this was a real letter to Dr. Laura and it was recently posted on the Internet. It is just too funny not to share with the World. Note: I didn’t write this so don’t flame me!

--

On her radio show, Dr Laura Schlesinger said that, as an observant Orthodox Jew, homosexuality is an abomination according to Leviticus 18:22, and cannot be condoned under any circumstance. The following response is an open letter to Dr. Laura, penned by a U.S. resident, which was posted on the Internet.

Dear Dr. Laura:

Thank you for doing so much to educate people regarding God's Law. I have earned a great deal from your show, and try to share that knowledge with as many people as I can. When someone tries to defend the homosexual lifestyle, for example, I simply remind them that Leviticus 8:22 clearly states it to be an abomination. ... End of debate.

I do need some advice from you, however, regarding some other elements of God's Law and how to follow them.  

1. When I burn a bull on the altar as a sacrifice, I know it creates a pleasing odor for the Lord - Lev.1:9. The problem is my neighbors. They claim the odor is not pleasing to them. Should I smite them?

2. I would like to sell my daughter into slavery, as sanctioned in Exodus 21:7. In this day and age, what do you think would be a fair price for her?

3. I know that I am allowed no contact with a woman while she is in her period of menstrual uncleanliness - Lev.15: 19-24. The problem is how do I tell? I have tried asking, but most women take offense.

4. Lev. 25:44 states that I may indeed possess slaves, both male and female, provided they are purchased from neighboring nations. A friend of mine claims that this applies to Mexicans, but not Canadians. Can you clarify? Why can't I own Canadians?

5. I have a neighbor who insists on working on the Sabbath. Exodus 35:2. The passage clearly states he should be put to death. Am I morally obligated to kill him myself?

6. A friend of mine feels that even though eating shellfish is an abomination - Lev. 11:10, it is a lesser abomination than homosexuality. I don't agree. Can you settle this? Are there 'degrees' of abomination?

7. Lev. 21:20 states that I may not approach the altar of God if I have a defect in my sight. I have to admit that I wear reading glasses. Does my vision have to be 20/20, or is there some wiggle room here?

8. Most of my male friends get their hair trimmed, including the hair around their temples, even though this is expressly forbidden by Lev.19:27. How should they die?

9. I know from Lev. 11:6-8 that touching the skin of a dead pig makes me unclean, but may I still play football if I wear gloves?

10. My uncle has a farm. He violates Lev. 19:19 by planting two different crops in the same field, as does his wife by wearing garments made of two different kinds of thread (cotton/polyester blend). He also tends to curse and blaspheme a lot. Is it really necessary that we go to all the trouble of getting the whole town together to stone them? - Lev.24:10-16. Couldn't we just burn them to death at a private family affair like we do with people who sleep with their in-laws? (Lev. 20:14)

In the past couple of days tech giants Microsoft and Google both made aggressive moves to securing more of your intranet business. Both announcements from the two avowed corporate enemies did not directly involve competitive services, but the indication is clear: the employee audience is an increasingly bigger priority for both.

The Microsoft chiefly targets the health sector – specifically health companies that are looking to bolster their communications and collaboration technology for employees.

Microsoft has launched a new healthcare offer called Knowledge Driven Health Plans, “the company’s shared vision and solutions framework for the health plan industry.”

See Microsoft targets healthcare

Under Microsoft’s vision and solutions framework, health plan employees are able to connect islands of information for improved collaboration and knowledge delivery, driving more informed decisions. The solutions based on this framework span key business areas, including care management to business intelligence, enterprise-wide project management to risk management and risk compliance, and member-centric communications. Industry customers around the world are realizing business success under the Knowledge Driven Health Plans vision and solutions framework.

Horizon Healthcare Services Inc. (Horizon) recently deployed Microsoft BizTalk Server to provide translation and orchestration services for its provider portal applications and HIPAA transactions. With Microsoft’s technology in place, Horizon has achieved improved visibility into transactions, increased first-call resolution of support requests, and it projects a 50 percent reduction in cost of ownership.

In short, Microsoft is repackaging existing business software and solutions for the healthcare sector with an eye to employee collaboration and communications tools.

Google has unveiled two new intranet services that expand on previously announced but scaled-back solutions including the new, smaller, faster Google Mini.

As the Motley Fool put it, “Google is the king of Internet search. Now, it looks like it wants to be the king of intranet search.

See Google on the Inside

Google Mini integrated hardware/software search appliance now searches multiple sites and can help businesses create an instant intranet by searching the contents of shared Windows file systems.

Starting at just $1995, new features for the Mini include:

Access to more, fresher content

• Search across multiple web sites with the ability to create an almost unlimited number of document collections and user interfaces
• Create an instant intranet by directly indexing shared file systems
• Choose between automated continuous crawling to maximize freshness and minimize network traffic, or crawl the entire site on a set schedule
• Faster crawling and query serving, with support for up to 25 queries per second (a 25X increase) for growing websites

The hardware itself is event smaller than the original and now can fit under the desk of your intranet administrator.

What is refreshing is that both companies have spent recent years focusing most of their energy on the Internet, customer-facing space. There appears to be a reinvigorated focus towards the ever-improving and increasingly vital intranet space.

Intranets don’t solve problems. However, if used effectively by capable people working from a thorough plan and supported by management and well-documented processes, an intranet or portal can help transform a business.

World-class intranets: proven practices for success (en Francais Intranet d'entreprise : Évolution et tendances), the Prescient Digital Media two-day seminar tour of Montreal and Quebec, highlighted a number of key trends driving the evolution of the market:

• Rapid growth
• 58% of Canadian companies have an Intranet, Business in the Information Age – International Benchmarking Study.
• Increased focus from CMS vendors
• Low-cost solutions ($25K to $40K) proliferating
• More growth opportunity than Web
• Dissatisfaction with performance
• $1 trillion dollar problem (Jakob Nielsen)
• # people using daily x # minutes they waste

Usability and speed of information access and retrieval are huge contributors and drivers for intranet redesign and evolution into high performance portals. (Note that I’ve given credit to Jakob Nielsen for estimating the dollar value of intranet usability. While the actual figure is ludicrous and has no scientific value or basis it does underscore the depth of the problem with intranet performance and usability that Dr. Nielsen was the first to trumpet.)

A couple of other key trends worth noting that I highlighted at the outset of the year:

• Ajax hugely influences the intranet interface
• Social media (RSS, blogs, wikis, podcasts, etc.) remains hot and will be adopted at a great pace (but the impact to the enterprise will be negligible in the short-term)
• The best intranets and portals have solid business cases with measured performance and metrics including, most importantly, ROI

Led by VP Carmine Porco and our Quebec-based senior consultant Claude Malaisonthe World-class intranets seminar (comment les entreprises et organisations des secteurs privé et public peuvent maximiser leur investissement dans un intranet super performant) also highlighted a number of challenges for intranet managers. Among the biggest problems is intranet sprawl and “taming the monster”…

Signs your intranet resembles Frankenstein’s monster:

1. Its parts are bolted together from various sources, some of which aren’t quite official
2. Some of its parts are missing and some expired a long time ago
3. It lacks a brain and has taken on a life of its own
4. Your audience runs screaming when told to interact with it
5. It frightens its creator.

Damn - that picture is downright scary!!! I won’t be showing my five-year-old this presentation at bedtime (though she might actually fall asleep four slides in…).

How do you fight off the monster and tame intranet sprawl? Well, garlic and silver bullets help. But the key to success is planning. Specifically…

1-     Secure executive support

2-     Develop a through plan

3-     Secure necessary resources

4-     Create and enforce detailed policies for content and development

5-     Deliver a centralized publishing platform with decentralized access and content control

6-     Demonstrate and measure value

7-     Motivate employees through marketing and education

For more on the optimal model for success, see Nexus of Intranet Success.

Cited as leaders and world-class examples of delivering high-octane intranet value were case study examples including:

• IBM’s intranet, W3
• Atomic Energy of Canada’s intranet, myAECL

This free seminar series will be held later this spring in Toronto (TBA). In September, watch for seminar dates (TBA) in Regina, Fort McMurray, Edmonton, Calgary, Vancouver, Victoria and Seattle.

If you’d like to partner with Prescient to bring this free seminar series to your city in the United States, United Kingdom, Belgium, France, and Canada, please contact us directly or post a comment below.

© 2006 Toby Ward - Prescient Digital Media

A business case requires more than estimated or proven return on investment (ROI). A true business case requires a cost-benefit analysis that not only underscores the dollar value of the intended investment but also iterates solutions and outcomes to current problems.

I was recently cited and paraphrased by someone writing about ROI who suggested I place too much emphasis on ROI. Well, believe it or not folks, your senior executive likely does not see much value in the intranet. Yes, there are exceptions. Most, however, view the intranet as a cost center. ROI sells.

Nonetheless, ROI is just one tool and I have never advocated it as the sole weapon in your arsenal when lobbying for a redesign, a CMS or portal, or new application. Many of you have seen my white paper Finding ROI: Appraising the Value of Intranet Investment and may know the chapter, “More Than Money” (Download a free copy of the Finding ROI (Intranet ROI) white paper).

While appraising the return on investment of an organization’s intranet or portal is critical for most executive leaders, there exists a great deal of untapped, intangible ROI that is perhaps even more critical than the measured dollars and cents.

David Upton, a professor at the Harvard Business School, believes that it is foolhardy to measure only the value of either an intranet or Internet site merely in terms of cost savings and cost avoidance. "The Internet has the potential to lead to new business models that managers may not currently be aware of," explains Upton in a CIO Web Business Magazine article. Upton believes that the best means for measuring an intranet’s value is to treat it as a financial investment.

Upton encourages organizations to experiment with technology while basing decisions on lessons learned from their experimenting. "It's like an option-value in the future," he says. "The value of investing in the Web comes from the options it will create for an organization in the future." 

Mitre Corp executives agree. "Our most important gain can't be as easily measured – the quality and innovation in our solutions that become realizable when you have all this information at your fingertips," says Mitre CIO Al Grasso in an interview with CIO Web Business Magazine.

"Our high-level (priority)…is to make it easier for people to give information to others and to use information from others to solve the next problem that comes along," adds Mark Maybury, Mitre’s director of artificial intelligence and executive director of the IT division.

A well-planned and executed intranet or portal can enhance many, many more non-savings benefits including:

• improved customers service
• increased employee productivity
• enhanced collaboration
• faster time to market
• better employee retention
• and the list goes on….

“The Employee Portal may help your sales team respond quicker to customer queries,” write Tan Shong Ye and Thyag Venkatesan in Going Beyond ROI (CIO Asia). “The customer perception of quick and reliable service may lead to increased sales. However, it may not be possible to attribute the exact increase in sales as a result of this initiative. Yet again, this may be an initiative that helps provide your firm a competitive advantage over other firms that lack a similar portal. Another possibility is that your competitors may already have introduced such a portal. In that case, the initiative will not help you gain new customers or increased sales but it may be essential to retain your existing customers.”

If you’re looking for a great story to help prove the point or sell your executive team, Shong Ye and Venkatesan cite the now famous GM OnStar story…

“Chet Huber, OnStar’s President, must feel justified in persisting with this initiative through its long, challenging and doubt-ridden journey since 1997. There were times over the last 10 years when questions were raised on continuing support for the project. Had GM decided to use ROI as a measure to evaluate the value of the OnStar initiative, the answer would have been clear—discontinue support for the project. This stems from the difficulty of measuring the direct financial benefit of the OnStar system. Chet Huber decided to gain support for the application on the basis of the ability of GM to gain competitive advantage through improved customer service. Today, the OnStar service helps improve GM sales because of the safety features and has nearly 4 million subscribers.”

Great stories are also great sales tools. Your business case should weave a complete story that not only includes ROI but sells the story of how the intranet or portal will improve your whole organization.

RELATED READING:

Intranet ROI

Measure your efforts

Intranet kingdom remains an unknown quantity

WHITE PAPER:

Finding ROI: Appraising the Value of Intranet Investments

© 2006 Toby Ward - Prescient Digital Media

“The search engine sucks!” is one of the most common complaints I come across. Naturally, most organizations immediately blame the search engine. They should point the finger at themselves.

Five years ago I wrote the article The search isn't broken, we're broken  (Part I : Search success depends on people and rules). Five years later, not much has changed.

While the search technology itself sometimes is the problem, this is rarely the issue. Search technology has advanced impressively in recent years and yet inaccurate and irrelevant search results continually defeat users performing search queries.

Though some search engines may be sub-par, the more likely problem is an absence of people processes and rules for managing information.  “People are lazy,” Cory Doctorow, a   technologist who maintains the popular weblog Boing Boing, told me when I first talked to him 5 years ago. “People are remarkably cavalier about their information and how it is stored. This laziness is bottomless…”

One way of capitalizing on the potential of the search function to insert keywords as meta tags within the actual content pages. But this requires rules and a rulebook, otherwise known as the corporate taxonomy. A taxonomy is a set of rules, or dictionary, for classifying or cataloguing information – whether on the Internet, intranet or shared drives via a LAN or WAN (see Don’t forget to add the tax(onomy).

Meta tags, simply put, are the tags or data that describe the information contained on a page or site. Think of a meta tag as the tag on your shirt collar – it identifies the type of shirt and describes it with information about the materials and the manufacturer. Meta tags can be used to describe the type of data in terms of keywords, description, department, date, author, etc.

However, searching the intranet is fundamentally different than searching the Web:

·         Employee intranet queries are generally far more precise in nature than the average consumer Web search

·         Employees have to find information quickly to do their jobs – not finding the right information is not an option

·         The Internet doesn’t have a taxonomy; the intranet requires one

Autonomy has released an interesting ‘white paper’ (brochure) on 5 Differences Between Business Search and Consumer Search. Most of the paper is designed to get you to buy the Autonomy engine (Ultraseek) and therefore this paper requires a ‘grain of salt.’ Nonetheless, the Autonomy list of 5 differences underlines some important points:

1)     Return Role-based Results - The tasks for which employees use information vary widely, depending on their department and their role within their company.

2)     Provide Multiple Methods of Searching - Standards for search relevance is higher in business. Employees want a single, correct answer to their information request.

3)     Search All Corporate Information Repositories - Corporate information is spread across a host of specialized secure business applications, databases, content management repositories, email systems and Web servers—all of which require special interfaces.

4)     Support Multiple Languages and File Formats - Employees need to access business documents in any language and from a dizzying array of word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, graphic, multimedia, compression and encoding formats.

5)     Enforce Corporate Security Models and Compliance Policies - Access to corporate content must be securely managed in the face of a new matrix of government regulatory mandates and privacy concerns.

The last time I saw Autonomy at work I was impressed; but its expensive and not the answer to every organization’s problems. To underscore my earlier point, search is more than technology. Effective information retrieval and knowledge management principally requires:

• rules and defined processes (taxonomy and meta tagging)
• employees who are not only willing to follow the rules but actively participate in sharing information and knowledge
• effective supporting technology (search, content management, etc.)

Therefore, like most enterprise challenges, there is no silver bullet – and it certainly doesn’t come off the shelf.

--

One thing I do like about Autonomy (no I don’t own any shares) and other similar products is their relevance ‘tuning’…. “Ultraseek’s search results can be tuned to match information structure and end-user needs with relevance tuning options that deliver comprehensive control over the relative weighting of metadata fields. In addition, Ultraseek’s exclusive Quick Links feature provides editorial control over search results, allowing keywords to be manually associated with specific URLs that are returned above normal search results.” Cool.

RELATED READING:

Intranet vs Internet Search  

The search isn't broken, we're broken - Part II : Intranet Search & Taxonomy

Well Beyond the Search Box

Next generation inference engines

The lost meaning of knowledge management

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