Bill Ives
brought to my attention ECMHUB 2.0
“described as the world's largest mashup focusing on the ECM and KM industries
and married it to web collaboration.”
”First they created a generic Yahoo Pipe that reads Google Spreadsheet
information that lists hundreds of ECM industry RSS feeds including blogs,
news, webcasts, questions, RFPs, and videos. Then they take the feeds and
caches them into Google. Using Google App Engine they built an "on
demand" feed caching and refresh application. This means the latest
articles are instantly retrievable within only a few seconds and the individual
feeds are automatically rebuilt with a push of a button. They then built
"cloud communities" around the feeds adding comments, ratings, web
conferencing, and 3D chat. Currently, they have support for over 40 communities
with over 5,000 daily articles. Finally they wrap the entire application using
Javascript with an AJAX foundation. The site says that
"this means instead of navigating from page to page like a traditional
website, you navigate by retrieving web page data on demand. When you click on
a community, for instance, the main page area will clear and show an animated
star indicating that new data, such as the latest news, is currently
loading."
Only 12 enterprise
portal vendors remain on Gartner’s latest magic quadrant for “horizontal portal
products.”
The only
changes are the subtraction of BEA, now part of Oracle, and the addition of
Covisint and RedHat (though lest they be seen as ‘prescient’ I had included
them in my Portal
magic quadrant two years ago!). Also added to this year’s quadrant is the
one to really watch: Liferay.
Some of
Gartner’s findings include (most of which I highlighted two years ago):
Mashups, lightweight
composite applications based on Web-oriented architectures (WOAs), could
emerge as alternatives to horizontal portal frameworks for creating
enterprise Web environments
Increased interest in Web 2.0
By 2011, Gartner expects at
least 10% of new enterprise portal projects in the Global 2000 to use
open-source horizontal portal frameworks
Frankly,
I’m surprised more organizations are not using portals. The Intranet 2.0 study
reveals that only 10% of respondents (some 230 respondent organizations thus
far) use a portal product to power their intranet. However, these solutions are
complex, and pricey.
I will
not be doing an update of the Prescient Portal
magic quadrant just yet: there haven’t been enough significant changes… the
only one is to remove BEA’s label under Oracle.
I do
however note the following trends:
Gartner is spot on:
open-source will become more and more popular
Liferay is the challenger to
watch (Gartner thinks its RedHat)
Plone could well find its way
onto the quadrant but Python holds it back
IBM is the portal leader and
champion
Microsoft SharePoint (MOSS
2007) is the darling
Product consolidation is
largely over as IBM, Oracle
and Microsoft will own 95% of the total money put into portal solutions
(but Vignette won’t last much longer and will be bought)
Usability and price will be
the principal weaknesses that scare buyers
Web 2.0 functionality will
continue to grow but not be a primary consideration for buyers
Don’t
forget: you cannot get the full results of the Intranet 2.0 study without
taking the survey.Please take
10 minutes to take the Intranet 2.0 Global Survey and you’ll get a copy of
the full results including the good, bad and learned lessons – ESPECIALLY
IMPORTANT TO PARTICIPATE IF YOU DON’T
HAVE INTRANET 2.0 TOOLS.
The Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) is know for helping safeguard the health of U.S. citizens, but its also home to 14,000 staff (9,000 are federal employee + contractors).
In 1993, CDC launched their first intranet, CDC Connects.
Traffic: Monthly page views: over 1 million per day (up from 176k in 2003)
Technology: standard HTML (news published via brand name CMS)
Home page features:
Director’s corner
In a Snapshot (featured photo)
Inside Story features (3 home page features)
Calendar of Events (enterprise wide – any staff can add to)
Employee Tools links
My Links (customizable by the user)
This Week in CDC History
Connection Conversations blog
CDC in the News (including TV clips)
Story ideas (Submit news)
Key to the intranet's success are the plans that incorporate employee needs and represent a intimate understanding of employee requirements. “It’s about building a trusting relationship,” says Kay Sessions Golan, CDC’s Director, Employee Communications, who presented her intranet's case study to the Ragan Web 2.0 conference in North Carolina.
CDC employed a number of research initiatives (done in-house) to determine the nature and scope of the intranet). Among the learnings[1]:
Employees want more information:
Email announcements provided some information
Many didn’t know “what’s going on"
Wanted a formal channel for CDC communications
Comments:
"I want to know more about people here and what others are doing."
"Many times I find out things first in the newspaper."
"I would like to see the news stories about CDC."
Employees felt disconnected:
They’re connected to their group/area/program
But disconnected from the agency (enterprise)
Employee Comment:
"The fact that CDC is geographically much decentralized… speaks to the importance of having one place employees can go to get regular, detailed, up-to-date information…”
Driving the intranet are CDC's employee communication goals:
- Create a recognized and valued system of employee communication that helps improve communication… across employee groups
- Create a well informed employee public that understands CDC’s health protection goals, other public health initiatives, and business and employee services.
- Enhance trust and community between and among CDC leadership and employees.
- Prepare and encourage employees to serve as ambassadors for CDC among external audiences.
CDC’s macro approach was to combine the models of the online newspaper with intranet home page (traditional):
Intranet best practices:
Alerts & notifications
Most useful links
Employee connections
Newspapers
Fresh content (2 feature articles per day (4x per week)
Interesting photos
Feature stories
Despite the fact that their business is health, wellness and public safety – and they’re a federal government agency – CDC encourages employee blogging. In fact, the employee blog has been live for two years:
Launched October 2006
Evolved from infancy to a 14 or 15-year-old… and growing
Conversations are happening anyway
Blog allows respectful, open conversations
Safe forum for tackling controversial issues or bad news quickly and openly
Blog can lead to problem-solving across the agency
Great employers demonstrate trust in employees (Fortune magazine’s 2006 100 best companies)
Blogs self-policing (the occasional post has to be cleaned)
Governed by “rules” that allows for instantaneous posting if its attributed by person’s name (anonymous postings are allowed but moderated and reviewed)
Powered by WordPress
“People were blogging anyways on the Internet… people were airing dirty laundry anyways so lets give them a channel to do so internally,” says Golan. “It’s not a CEO blog, its for employees (occasionally its contributed by executives and guests).
Blog learnings (51 posts, 2400 comments later):
Most active discussions: on topics that affect daily work life
Least active discussions: on scientific or programmatic topics
Many managers are reluctant participants
Discussions easily wander off topic
Appreciated by bloggers
Let it evolve and mature
Challenges:
Governance
Content Mgt.
Further Branding
Templates and standards
Budget……ROI
Parting thoughts from Golan:
A key challenge continues to be security: “The more we open with communications… the more security wants to close down. (e.g. There’s not enough bandwidth to open YouTube to all employees).”
[1]Adapted from the presentation “CDC Connects: CDC’s On-Line Newspaper and Intranet Portal” by Kay Sessions Golan, CDC’s Director, Employee Communications, at Ragan’s “Corporate Communications in a Web 2.0 World” conference)
It’s not
a virus, Trojan, or a denial of service attack. The latest threat to your
browser, computer, and network is click-jacking. Click-jacking is the result of
a visit to a malicious web page that allows the attacker to take control of
your browser. Specifically, it can force your browser to click on any link it
wants.
THE
THREAT
According
to the latest Wikipedia definition:
“Clickjacking
is a malicious
technique of tricking webusers into revealing confidential
information or taking control of their computer while clicking on seemingly
innocuous web
pages. A vulnerability across a variety of browsers
and platforms, a clickjacking takes the form of
embedded code or
script that can execute without the user's knowledge, such as clicking on a button that appears to perform another
function.”
Here are some of the questions, with corresponding answers, for those that time did not allow for:
Q—What’s the best approach in implementing 2.0 functionality internally for a large audience?
A—Plan, plan, plan. Determine what needs a blog, a wiki and/or social networking fulfills, secure executive buy-in with a solid business case, and test and trial one or two tools first before deploying enterprise-wide. Baby steps; our approach to working with our clients is to build a plan, develop the governance, and pilot one or two small tools. See Intranet 2.0 Blueprint.
Q—Can you recommend training courses for information professionals and business analysts?
A—I’ve not researched any training courses, however I’ve not come across a single course or e-learning module on Intranet 2.0. My strong recommendations is to follow the approach outlined above (also see the Best Practices slide near the end of the Intranet 2.0 presentation deck on www.Slideshare.net): assess, plan, governance, and test (pilot). As well, learn from others that have gone before you (read Richard Dennison’s blog from his work at BT, and the many case studies I’ve documented on IntranetBlog.com)
Q—How do companies integrate the internal 2.0 tools with the external networks?
A—Well each “external network” is unique. However, beyond putting up simple links to external sites (with the appropriate caveats and disclaimers) I suspect this relates to sites such as Facebook. One company, WorkLight, serves employees application data from various applications via services and technologies such as RSS, Ajax, desktop and web-based gadget/widgets, social bookmarks, application mashups, and more.
WorkBook, a new product from WorkLight, combines “all the capabilities of Facebook with all the controls of a corporate environment, including integration with existing enterprise security services…”
In other words, WorkBook allows employees to use Facebook while the company can protect its confidential data. For example, employees can monitor other employee activities such as postings and status update, and “publish and receive company-related news and create bookmarks to enterprise application data and securely share these bookmarks with authorized colleagues.”
Q—What is the average cost for web 2.0 implementation?
A—Total cost varies from free for open-source licensed solutions such as MediaWiki or WordPress (not including internal “brown dollars” for internal IT hours and support), to potentially millions of dollars. Some social networking platforms can be implemented for less than $100,000 (e.g. Cubeless), platforms like SharePoint (MOSS 2007) can cost in the hundreds of thousands of dollars; enterprise deployments of WebSphere Portal with Lotus Connections in large organizations could cost millions of dollars. I strongly suggest however securing a budget of $10,000 - $50,000 to develop the appropriate plan (Intranet 2.0 blueprint) and roll-out and pilot one to three different tools and to analyze and adjust accordingly.
According to the first half of the Intranet 2.0 study (170 respondents):
• 48% of organizations have spent $10,000 or less
• 25% of organizations have spent $50,000 or more
• 11% have spent more than $150,000 on Intranet 2.0 tools
Q—Are there any good examples of general Intranet governance policies available?
A—Yes, from both IBM and Sun (Google search “blogging policy” and you’ll find what you need).
Q—Is there any open source intranet 2.0 products or templates available?
A—Tons of open source tools. MediaWiki (wiki), WordPress (blog), Audacity (podcasting), Liferay (Portal), Drupal (CMS / community platform) are just some examples.
Q—How are federal government bodies faring in intranet 2.0 technologies use?
A—Governments are far behind the corporate sector, but they shouldn’t be. There is no reason to treat government employees any differently than corporate employees. In fact, governments have far deeper pockets, and need to work harder to find skilled employees. If anything, governments should be jumping to embrace intranet 2.0 more widely than the private sector (unfortunately the political and bureaucratic barriers and red tape have to be removed… easier said than done). Finally, the technology, governance, and planning should be no different either (subject to labor and union contracts that also exist in the private sector) and so the best practices and case studies from the private sector equally apply to government.
Q—How would you suggest organizations retrain existing staff to be become more familiar with (Intranet 2.0 technologies)?
A—Let me be perfectly blunt: training is not needed. Did you need training to use YouTube, Flickr, MySpace, Facebook, or Digg?! No. Those of us that have gone to those sites figured them out in minutes if not seconds. If you have an intranet or a website, then employees won’t need training; if they require training then you’ve not implemented properly. Technical staff may require back end programming and support skills, but frontline employees won’t require training for intuitive tools and interfaces (if they’re not intuitive, you’ve screwed it up). A few minutes of reading, playing and online instruction / documentation (e.g. FAQs and Tips) are all that is needed).
Q—How do you think we’ll mix corporate homepage and 2.0 personal homepage?
A—There’s no simple way to answer this question but to say that employees will determine how best to do it. It depends on the culture of the organization, and the web-savvy skills / nature of employees. Ask your employees: undertake the necessary employee research and build your plan accordingly. Personally, I feel that the majority of organizations should have a standard, global home page with only small components of the home page that are “personalized” to the individual or corporate ‘role’. Social networking, blogs and wikis should be limited to surface-level integration (with some exceptions). RSS feeds, content commenting, bookmarking and tagging should be integrated however into most content templates (e.g. a news story from the home pages provides the employee the ability to comment, rate the story, subscribe to the RSS feed, tag and bookmark the story).
--
Don’t forget: you cannot get the full results of the Intranet 2.0 study without taking the survey. Please take 10 minutes to take the Intranet 2.0 Global Survey and you’ll get a copy of the full results including the good, bad and learned lessons – ESPECIALLY IMPORTANT TO PARTICIPATE IF YOU DON’T HAVE INTRANET 2.0 TOOLS. We need to learn why organizations are not using them, what are the barriers, and how best to overcome those barriers (plus there will be a couple of prize draws including a cheque for $400!).
(Live blog entry from Cary, North Carolina) “So many intranets such because its being used as a storage bin,” says Jim Ylisela is president of Ragan Consulting. “The storage bin is the lowest common value.”
Intranet problems:
• People go there to do something, not to learn something
• Glorified print publications
• Electronic filing cabinets
• Not interactive or multimedia
• Content poorly written for the web
Solution:
“We need to model after the Internet,” says Jim. “Make the intranet interactive… add employee commenting, blogs, wikis, etc. The blog from a CEO is such a powerful thing; and people can comment and engage in a dialogue."
Role of the intranet:
• Research: put information where people can easily find it
• Social: give people a place to submit ideas, opinions… and ask questions
• Multimedia: educate and entertain using audio and video
Jim cites some good intranet examples from:
• H&R block
• Government of Kansas
• SAS
• Government of BC
• RBC (Royal Bank)
Editor’s note: I like Jim’s presentation style… funny, folksy, and informative (I almost nailed the alliteration on that). Lots of good examples… I’ll see if he will share his presentation on Slideshare.net so that more people can see it.
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