Though social media tools have been around for a few years now, Web 2.0 only exploded last year (2006). Not surprisingly for the poor cousin of the corporate website, the corporate intranet has been slow to adopt social media tools. A recent CIO survey found:

·         only 18% of organizations have deployed blogs

·         only 13% have deployed wikis

·         podcasting is present in an even smaller fraction

However, steam is gathering and the Intranet 2.0 snowball is beginning to gather speed.  More than 40% of the surveyed organizations are testing, piloting or evaluating blog and wiki applications.  

Read my full article Intranet 2.0: social media adoption (www.PrescientDigital.com)

The fist annual Intranet Innovation awards celebrate new ideas and innovative approaches to the enhancement and delivery of intranets. Perkins Eastman is the first Gold award winner for communication & collaboration.

Perkins Eastman is a major architectural firm with a clear need to share knowledge between staff located in widely dispersed offices. Practice Area Communities (PAC) were setup on the intranet to share staff expertise, and exchange both explicit and tacit knowledge. This in turn helps drive innovation across the organization as a whole.

Top level structure for a Practice Area Community (PAC), showing the major resources and sections.

The purpose of each Practice Area Community (PAC) is to enable knowledge sharing between individuals; across project teams, studios, offices, and practice areas; and the entire international organization. The knowledge that is transferred at each of these levels enables Perkins Eastman to evolve into an industry leader.

Each PAC contains key information on a key subject such as “Senior Living” (illustrated above) and features information such as:

• Design practices
• Insights and Lessons Learned
• Project Lists
• Presentations
• Glossary
• Strategic Analysis
• Planning
• Etc.

The PACs are recognized by staff as a key source for information and knowledge. Each PAC is structured to serve as an ongoing educational and learning resource for all staff. The resources provided in each PAC are the sum of the collective wisdom of all staff that contribute and participate – strengthening the firm’s knowledge systems.

Each PAC area is maintained by up to three “Gatekeepers” who have been recognized by the firm as industry and practice area experts with extensive experience and knowledge.

Each Gatekeeper is encouraged to share their knowledge, and to facilitate the sharing of knowledge by other staff. A Knowledge Resource Team (KRT) member serves as a liaison to the Gatekeeper group, and together they ensure each PAC section of ORCHARD (the intranet) undergoes continuous improvement.

The PACs provide a wealth of knowledge, both explicit knowledge that has been codified as well as tacit knowledge exchange in real-time. Providing staff with multiple formats for knowledge sharing and continuous learning, they are provided additional means to innovate and consistently deliver award-winning projects.

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Global in nature, the Intranet Innovation Awards have uncovered many innovative ideas. Uniquely, these awards recognize individual intranet improvements, and not intranets as a whole. Fiat, this year's platinum winner, has used their 'Avanti e Veloci' web portal to help turn around the fortunes of their whole business. Other winners include:

• The Environment Agency
• City of Casey
• SunGard AvantGard
• Nycomed
• QBE

Read the article that provides a summary for each winner:

http://www.steptwo.com.au/papers/kmc_iia2007/index.html

Obtain a copy of the full 115-page "Intranet Innovations 2007" report from Step Two:

http://www.steptwo.com.au/products/iia2007/index.html

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How many times have you said, or hear, “I can’t believe they hired that guy…” We’ve all been connected to a bad hire (or sometimes been that bad hire).

CareerBuilder.com recently asked pollsters Harris Interactive to survey hiring managers about the worst resumes they’ve seen. Some of the interview comments heard and resume statements were quite zany to say the least. Among them, some razor sharp candidates…

·         Specified that availability to work Fridays, Saturdays, or Sundays is limited because the weekends are "drinking time."

·         Drew a picture of a car on the outside of the envelope and said the car would be a gift to the hiring manager.

·         Listed hobbies that included sitting on a levee at night watching alligators.

·         Explained an arrest record by stating, "We stole a pig, but it was a really small pig.”

I suppose there are worse hires. I once had a client’s employee come to me (13 years ago) with a wad of cash that a customer used to pay (rather than a cheque or Visa) and said, “So, let’s split it.” My client was a charity.

HIRING AN INTRANET CONSULTANT OR MANAGER

In honor of these bright lights and some of our own favorites, I’ve compiled my own fictional list of those potential comments you don’t want to ever hear from a prospective intranet manager or consultant:

1.      “I’ve used the Web and that’s the same as an intranet.”

2.      “It doesn’t’ matter what management thinks, it’s users that count.”

3.      “The intranet is just a communications tool… like a newsletter.”

4.      “You don’t need Sharepoint, my cousin designed the local Hooters site for only $900."

5.      “I think it would be cool to take the Velvet Revolver website concept to the intranet.”

6.      “What’s IBM?”

7.      “What a CMS?”

8.      “Wiki…? Is that the hot receptionist in HR?”

9.      ”I write a lot better if I get a couple of crantinis in me!”

10.  “I personally believe… that U.S. Americans…. And the Iraq, and such…”

I wonder what Alberto Gonzales will say during his next job interview?

Database giant Oracle is hoping to buy smaller software portal vendor BEA Systems for $6.7 billion. The bid won’t work and BEA has already rejected Oracle, but that won’t stop the aggressive and tenacious Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and company.

Oracle has low-balled BEA with an offer of $17 a share. Today BEA is trading at well over $18 a share. Some analysts have wrongly predicted that SAP would make a bid, but SAP has publicly state it will not. Other potential suitors could include IBM and HP. HP has fanned the flames by stating, “No comment.”

This won’t deter Oracle. They’ve directed many nasty and hostile takeovers before (most recently PeopleSoft). Interestingly though, if Oracle should succeed, it will build its portal offerings stable to four portal products:

• Oracle Portal
• Oracle WebCenter
• BEA AquaLogic
• BEA WebLogic

It goes without saying that should Oracle succeed it will not maintain four Oracle products. While Oracle appeared to be putting its energy into the new Oracle WebCenter product, as of the summer, WebCenter had no intranet portal implementations that they could reference. Nor had Oracle even deployed WebCenter to manage or showcase any of their own sites.

Yesterday a BEA executive told me that if Oracle succeeds in purchasing BEA it is unlikely that Oracle would fold either AquaLogic or WebLogic portal solutions. At the same time, one of BEA’s engineers espoused the great similarities between its two portal products and said that they’re basically the same platform.

In short, Oracle is interested in BEA for more than portal solutions, but its intention to maintain its own portal products is in question at a time when BEA’s commitment to maintaining two portal products may also be wavering. Further consolidation in the portal market will continue and buyers should be cautious. 

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The SITE Institute is an organization that tracks terrorists. Since its inception in 2004 SITE has primarily used the Internet to “swiftly locates links among terrorist entities and their supporters.”

Specifically, SITE has been particularly adept at infiltrating Internet chat rooms frequented by Islamic extremists. SITE, in fact, has been particularly helpful to the U.S. military in finding terrorists and uncovering potential plots. Unfortunately however, according to a report in the Washington Post, (see Leak Severed a Link to Al-Qaeda's Secrets), a Bush administration leak has botched a campaign and unnecessarily alerted al-Qaeda.

SITE apparently was the first to uncover the latest Bin Laden video, and it accordingly notified the White House… who then allegedly acted highly inappropriately in such a manner as to tip off the terrorists:

"Within 20 minutes, a range of intelligence agencies had begun downloading it from the company's Web site. By midafternoon that day, the video and a transcript of its audio track had been leaked from within the Bush administration to cable television news and broadcast worldwide.

 

The founder of the company, the SITE Intelligence Group, says this premature disclosure tipped al-Qaeda to a security breach and destroyed a years-long surveillance operation that the company has used to intercept and pass along secret messages, videos and advance warnings of suicide bombings from the terrorist group's communications network.

 

"Techniques that took years to develop are now ineffective and worthless," said Rita Katz, the firm's 44-year-old founder, who has garnered wide attention by publicizing statements and videos from extremist chat rooms and Web sites, while attracting controversy over the secrecy of SITE's methodology. Her firm provides intelligence about terrorist groups to a wide range of paying clients, including private firms and military and intelligence agencies from the United States and several other countries.

 

The precise source of the leak remains unknown. Government officials declined to be interviewed about the circumstances on the record, but they did not challenge Katz's version of events. They also said the incident had no effect on U.S. intelligence-gathering efforts and did not diminish the government's ability to anticipate attacks.

 

But privately, some intelligence officials called the incident regrettable, and one official said SITE had been "tremendously helpful" in ferreting out al-Qaeda secrets over time. The al-Qaeda video aired on Sept. 7 attracted international attention as the first new video message from the group's leader in three years. In it, a dark-bearded bin Laden urges Americans to convert to Islam and predicts failure for the Bush administration in Iraq and Afghanistan. The video was aired on hundreds of Western news Web sites nearly a full day before its release by a distribution company linked to al-Qaeda.

 

Computer logs and records reviewed by The Washington Post support SITE's claim that it snatched the video from al-Qaeda days beforehand. Katz requested that the precise date and details of the acquisition not be made public, saying such disclosures could reveal sensitive details about the company's methods.

 

Apparently the activity triggered by the alleged White House leak has caused al-Qaeda activity “the al-Qaeda intranet” to go quite… and force security experts to go back to the drawing bored."

It is widely regarded that Al-Qaeda is largely dependent on the Internet, and its dark ‘intranets’, for co-ordinating much of their intra-cell activity. "They don't exist without the Web," says Naval Postgraduate School professor John Arquilla.

As noted by Wired magazine writer Noah Schachtman, “everything from recruiting to training to propaganda is handled online. According to the New York Sun, the video disclosure effectively shut down the window into those activities.”

"One intelligence officer who requested anonymity said in an interview last week that the intelligence community watched in real time the shutdown of the Obelisk system... [the] network of Web sites serves not only as the distribution system for the videos produced by Al Qaeda's production company, As-Sahab, but also as the equivalent of a corporate intranet, dealing with such mundane matters as expense reporting and clerical memos to mid- and lower-level Qaeda operatives throughout the world.

 

While intranets are usually based on servers in a discrete physical location, Obelisk is a series of sites all over the Web, often with fake names, in some cases sites that are not even known by their proprietors to have been hacked by Al Qaeda...

 

By Friday evening, one of the key sets of sites in the Obelisk network, the Ekhlaas forum, was back on line. The Ekhlaas forum is a password-protected message board used by Qaeda for recruitment, propaganda dissemination, and as one of the entrance ways into Obelisk for those operatives whose user names are granted permission. Many of the other Obelisk sites are now offline and presumably moved to new secret locations on the World Wide Web."

What a shame. The defense community, security intelligence community, the American public, and people of the free world deserve better.

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As we’ve learned from the new social media sites (Web 2.0), people not only like but need visual cues. The biggest social sites YouTube, Facebook, and MySpace are all very visual; chalked full of multimedia.

GlobalIncidentMap.com is mostly visual and in fact buries traditional navigation and information architecture by instead presenting a home page that is dominated by a highly interactive world map. The site is described by the creators as a tool to “give the public, law enforcement, military, and government individuals a new way to visualize, and become instantly aware of terrorism and security incidents” across the world.

For many organizations, an intranet makes a fundamental change in organizational communications, and also, business process. A change management communications program is a requisite for any intranet launch.

“Even for logical change, many people will be offside,” adds Harris, the author of Change Leadership: Inform, Involve, Ignite! “Don’t underestimate the normalcy of “resistance” and find ways to integrate that resistance into change efforts.”

In short, intranet change management becomes an exercise in “selling” or communicating not only the reason and purpose for the change, but especially anticipating and directly addressing the spoken AND unspoken fears (or apathy) of employees.

Read my complete article: Intranet change management 

Just about every Internet user has read or does read a blog on a regular basis (you’re reading this one). Do we really need proof of the value of a blog? Did you need to prove the value of the phone in your office before the company let you use one?

It's neither sad nor unfortunate, bloging is a new technology and everyone should be given the time to figure it out. Corporate bloging should not be doen half-assed based on guess work. And, whenever possible, draw upon the learnings and case studies of others.

Shel Holtz has highlighted an employee blog case study from Northwestern Mutual and their successful deployment of internal blogs at the large financial services firm:

"While the bloging initiative was designed to improve the culture of openness and honesty, the biggest benefits were seen in project and team management. About 70% of the active blogs at Northwestern Mutual focus on project management.

Nobody doubts that the blogging and RSS effort has produced business value but, not surprisingly, it isn’t easy to measure. Still, there is strong evidence that communication has improved and team and individual productivity have increased. Contrary to the concerns expressed by some that employee blogging will drain productivity, Northwestern Mutual’s experiment has shown that it helps address information overload."

I still maintain that before any company undertakes corporate blogs, they better have a solid and well-executed communications plan that includes a well-defined and planned intranet. Until your communications and intranet are up to par, the potential value and success of any employee or executive blog will be undermined.

Read Shel’s full case study summation: An insurance company benefits from employee intranet blogs.

WHAT TO KNOW ABOUT SETTING UP AN EMPLOYEE OR CORPORATE BLOG:

Blogging the intranet

Should you blog the intranet?

Case study: PNM Resources CEO blog

IBM leads corporate blogging pack

Study: Intranet blogging on the rise

McDonald’s beefs-up intranet blogs

Top 7 Tips To Write an Effective Business Blog

The Vanguard Group is one of the largest mutual fund companies in the U.S. with 12,000 employees and approximately $1.1 trillion in assets under management. Vanguard is a fairly wealthy and established company, to say the least.

Vanguard was recently honored by the annual InformationWeek 500 committee as the third best and “most innovative” company in the country. Powering this esteemed nomination was the unveiling of a new company portal with a massive $10 million price tag.  But the whopping price tag does deliver some impressive functionality as revealed by Chris Murphy in his InformationWeek article Vanguard Tests Web 2.0 On Employees And Customers Benefit):

·         Customizable and personalized home page (requires “15 minutes to customize”)

·         Federated search (powered by Autonomy) and access to the portal, Lotus Notes e-mail and databases, calendar, news feeds, and Oracle databases

·         Time-off and benefits, training and travel approvals

·         Employee workspaces (blogs and wikis to be rolled-out next year)

·         Employee directory listings show direct reports with Ajax-powered rollovers that allow the user the mouse over a listing to provide additional details and information on each person

“With no retail outlets, Vanguard's Web site is by far the largest channel for customer contact, far more than telephone and mail,” writes Chris Murphy in InformationWeek. “The company wants a site that measures up to the best of the Web, so it consciously uses its intranet as a test bed. In 2006, for example, Vanguard knew it was about a year away from wanting to use Ajax-enabled rich Internet applications for customer apps, so it experimented with them on the intranet.

Interestingly enough, like most applications and IT projects at Vanguard, much of the new portal was deployed by internal resources. Vanguard says they build about 70% of their own applications. In fact, Vanguard employs a massive IT force of 2,600 IT employees, plus approximately 300 contractors.

Vanguard says the intranet portal will save them about $10 million per year, but the business case “hinges on cutting wasted hours employees spend on tasks such as searching for information.”

That’s a pretty soft business case for a $10 million portal, but to each their own.

READ the complete article: Vanguard Tests Web 2.0 On Employees And Customers Benefit.

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ON A PERSONAL NOTE: In the 80s and early 90s I was a big baseball fan. But the lockout of ’94 soured me and I’ve not been much of a fan. In fact, this year was the first year I can remember that I did not get out to a single game, nor did I ever watch a complete game on TV. But there was something about the Colorado Rockies amazing drive to the playoffs that had me tune-in to the big tiebreaker showdown between Colorado and San Diego last night… you simply don’t have to be a big baseball fan to appreciate the drama and glory of the match last night.

I’ve seen some big games and dramatic clinchers: I sat riveted and cheering the Joe Carter clinching home run for the Blue Jays in ’93; I watched Luis Gonzalez loop the winning single for the Diamondbacks in ’01; I saw Kirk Gibson deliver the big dramatics for the Tigers in ’84 and later for the Dodgers in ‘88. Last night’s Colorado-San Diego game deserves company with all of those big games. The story line, the lead-up, the play, the extra innings, the controversial conclusion… it had it all. A remarkable, remarkable night in sports history. Even if you don’t like sports, this story is worth witnessing…