Intranet Blog

Digg sucks

Toby Ward — Thu, 08 May 2008 12:53:51 -0700

I’ve given up on Digg. Now and forever more. It’s a complete waste of my time, and the World’s.

I once again went to ‘Digg’ an article (Microsoft wants Facebook) and it rejected my login twice. After finally logging in, I went through the long and horrifically unfriendly process of posting an article. It booted me from the system. I logged in again, and re-posted again. It booted me from the system again… the article was never posted. I wasted nearly 15 minutes.

This has happened to me more than one dozen times… in fact, I’ve never once – NEVER ONCE!!! – in all my attempts been able to “Digg” one damn thing! And I’ve been a member for 16 months!!!

The owners and developers of this sucky platform should be embarrassed. It looks pretty, but it’s functionally useless for far too many people like myself (and I’m not a luddite, goddam it).

Deli.co.us is far superior if far too many ways to mention. Oh sure, its not pretty like Digg, but it works!

Digg can bite me.

PS – I know there are going to be some clones that reply by saying “Oh I use Digg all the time and don’t have any problems! It must be you!”…. For those that are tempted to do so, re-read the above…. MORE THAN ONE DOZEN CONSECUTIVE TIMES this has happened, on different occasions, using different posts and links, and using different browsers. It’s not just me.

Microsoft wants Facebook... and its intranet power

Toby Ward — Thu, 08 May 2008 01:34:16 -0700

After failing in their US$47.5-billion bid for Yahoo, the giant Microsoft is looking more closely at Facebook. While the Wall Street Journal reported that Microsoft bankers have begun to look into a Facebook purchase, neither side has commented on the story (a sure sign that something is afoot).

Facebook in itself is a giant… one that could make Yahoo blush one day. With more than 70 million active users its value was pegged at US$15-billion last October when Microsoft bought a minority stake for a mere US$240-million.

What makes Facebook an even greater value than its investment price a mere 8 months ago is its growing popularity – and growing platform. There are only 7 websites on the planet that receive more monthly traffic than Facebook – and Facebook only opened to the public 18 months ago after starting as a college only niche. Of the sites that get more traffic ...

Yahoo is 1st
Google 2nd
YouTube is 3rd

Microsoft’s flagship portal sits in fifth (according to the industry benchmark, Alexa.com). Its viral power is far stronger than MySpace (notwithstanding the music scene), and its growing at a faster clip. I don’t know of anyone that uses MySpace, and yet virtually everyone I know under the age of 45 has a Facebook account. According to ZincResearch.com, 90% of Canadians between the ages of 18 and 34 are Facebook members (9 million).

Of perhaps greater interest is the ever-expanding “Facebook Platform” and its potential as a platform service inside the corporation (for example, intranet platform). Facebook Platform is the place where all of those creative nerds build and add those cute little applications that are optional add ons to your Facebook profile. Popular applications include “Fun Wall” (2.5 million active users), “Scrabulous” and that dam vampire biting ‘game’.

Read my complete article Microsoft wants Facebook.

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Enterprise intranet wikis

Toby Ward — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 17:02:36 -0700

IBM and Cisco are infested with them. Even smaller companies are finding huge value in the form of impressive cost savings, and faster time to market. But most organizations are still puzzled on how to proceed with enterprise wikis.

“Wikis often grow out of hand very quickly and consequently many employees simply ignore them. Enterprises also face the risk of an explosive information growth far beyond their capacity to manage that information”, said analyst and MD, Janus Boye, author of a report, Wiki in the Enterprise.

“If you don’t create guidelines and processes for managing the wiki, the gap between information and capacity is a risk to the enterprise as it translates into the right information not being found and the potential creation of redundant information.”

Most corporations do not have a wiki. And most aren’t planning to have them either (just yet). A recent Forrester study found that only 51% of Global 2000 companies plan to invest in Web 2.0 in the coming year. But only between 20% of small companies, and only about 30% of medium corporations plan on buying Web 2.0 tools (for a summary, see Intranet portal solutions die, evolve & move to Web 2.0).

But almost no one had a wiki three years ago. So in truth, wikis have exploded and are multiplying like rabbits. Boye, an independent analyst focusing on online media and an expert on enterprise portal solutions, has found that wikis are increasingly gaining foothold in the enterprise due to it promises of simplicity. Yet, wikis introduce complex challenges for organisations, on a strategic level as well as on the level of actual content creation.

At Cisco, the first wiki appeared a few years ago, when an engineer installed one on the server under his desk. “He told a PM, who then told other PMs and it spread like wildfire,” says Michael Lenz, Senior Manager, User Experience, at Cisco Corporate Communications. “Literally, day over day, the increase is amazing… any number I gave you today would be useless tomorrow or next week. There are tens-of-thousands of wikis… and the number of wikis about equals the number of employees (65,000).”

Read my complete article Enterprise intranet wikis.

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First intranet for international defence sector

Toby Ward — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 00:35:57 -0700

This is really more of an extranet or registration based Internet site, but interesting nonetheless given that it is for the defence (defense) industry

Bonn, April 21st 2008 (openPR) -- The first interactive online platform which focuses exclusively on the international defence and security sector has been launched. The English-language business portal offered by the Bonn/Germany based defence.professionals GmbH (i.Gr.) enterprise will set new benchmarks throughout the market, Managing Director Luca Bonsignore pointed out.

"To individuals defpro.com offers all possibilities of comfortable networking within the defence sector. Additionally, for the first time, this is now also accessible for companies, associations, trade fairs as well as publishing houses. Through their interactive profiles they have the opportunity to step into a direct and dynamic contact with their respective groups of interests."

Largest global overview of relevant fairs and conferences
With defpro.confairs, defence.professionals supplies a complete listing of all relevant events of the international defence industry. Interactive trade fair and conference profiles offer the possibility for exhibitors and visitors to connect themselves to the appropriate event and so manage and build their network before and during the event.

Free membership for individuals
The defpro.community membership is permanently free of charge. In addition to that, until May 15th, 2008 registered members will have the chance to use the full function range of a premium membership including detailed search and optimised network possibilities for free.

Visit the site yourself at: www.defpro.com.

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Intranet portal solutions die, evolve & move to Web 2.0

Toby Ward — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 00:18:49 -0700

Your portal solution is dying… or evolving into a Web 2.0 platform.

As I predicted at the start of the year (Enterprise intranet predictions for 2008), Oracle bought BEA, and has already moved to kill one of the BEA portal products: WebLogic Portal. Now BEA has three portal solutions, and will no doubt move to one or two….

According to research firm IDC, the Enterprise Portal Software market will expand by 50% in the next 3-4 years to a killer $1.4 billion in total sales.

"Web 2.0 collaboration features are finding a welcome home within the portal as business users want to take advantage of these new egalitarian methods that offer easy ways for end users to customize content, while IT can take comfort in the portal's ability to deliver them within a secure deployment environment," states an IDC report.

Read my complete article Intranet portal solutions die, evolve & move to Intranet 2.0.

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Talent Management seen as key Issue by HR professionals

Carmine Porco — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 20:15:08 -0700

As part of the leadership team for the Strategic Capability Network, I participated in developing and analyzing a survey conducted in the fall of its 500 plus senior HR practitioners to determine what they see as the top HR priorities for the next year or two.

The overriding themes to come out of the survey: talent management is a “peak” issue and the most pressing priority. More than 90% identified all areas related to talent management and acquisition as highly urgent items. When looking for new talent, many respondents stated they are attempting to solve talent problems by hiring superstars from outside the organization.

Tony Duckett, an owner of xiB/OSS Corporation, a boutique contract recruiting agency in Toronto says, “We recruit highly skilled people on a global basis, and it is becoming increasingly evident that the demand for these folks is growing dramatically”.

Personally, as a quickly growing small entrepreneurial company (Prescient Digital Media), we have experienced the same issues. Finding the right individual to fit our specific requirements is not an easy task. To deal with this issue we have instituted a few strategies.

One of those strategies is to always be looking. Although we may not be in the hiring stage this month or next, we will be soon and having a stable of good available candidates is essential.

One other tactic we have employed is to look outside of our local geography. In fact, we just recently hired a great individual from the U.K (welcome aboard Jed)!

A final tactic, and the one employed for our recent hire, is to ask for a referral. Your network is a great source of candidates and sites such as LinkedIn and Facebook are also a great way to find potential candidates.

Some of the other highlights from the survey include:

- HR professionals are feeling extremely bogged down in transacational issues.

- Engagement and leadership development show up as very strong areas of focus

- Change management, team development, compensation, governance and communication are also rank solidly, however HR metrics and work-life balance are emerging as higher priority.

- Ethics, outsourcing, diversity, globalization and employment branding emerged as being less significant

- Two other popular write-in themes consisted of 1) unrealistic workloads and 2) building greater credibility with CEOs and line managers

- A very high majority of respondents emphasized their need for both more time and more expertise on strategy work as opposed to the tactical side where they seem fairly comfortable with the time available

The respondents were evenly split between practitioners and consultants as well executives and managers at large and small organizations.

When asked what the most important issues required:

- 60% cited more time on strategy is necessary

- 60% cited more expertise on strategy is needed

- 37% cited more expertise on tactics is necessary

The full report can be downloaded at Carswell.com.

Could Facebook be a real intranet? IBM is onto something...

Toby Ward — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 14:51:44 -0700

Facebook is not an alternative to the intranet. The intranet is a business system, one to support the entire organization, not just a social networking tool.

Now Facebook is becoming more than a social networking site, and shows great potential as a platform for intranet services, but there’s much to be overcome. Facebook is being used by some businesses, including Prescient Digital Media (feel free to join us on the Intranet Global Forum), but it is not a substitute for the intranet which must feature among other things, federated search, application integration, robust security, etc.

As Phil Wainewright writes in Is Facebook a PaaS contender?, Facebook provides us food for thought, but it’s not really a legitimate intranet platform.

"After all, many individuals and some organizations do use Facebook for business purposes. Most famously, Serena Software, which last year adopted Facebook as its intranet. I was somewhat skeptical when I first heard this but the company’s SVP Rene Bonvanie assured me when we met a few weeks ago that 740 out of 820 employees are active users, which is a lot better participation than Serena’s former intranet ever managed.

The Facebook platform of course constrains applications into a social networking framework, but that’s no different from the functional constraints imposed by a lot of other PaaS (platform-as-a-service) application builders (the topmost of my five-layer categorization of PaaS).

The problem for any business considering Facebook is that it’s a determinedly consumer play, to the extent that I don’t think it can ever seriously fly in the enterprise. Facebook trades free functionality in return for attention and relationship data — and users give up a lot of their control over that data. Businesses aren’t willing to make that trade-off.

Bonvanie shrugged when I put this point to him, saying that very little of what Serena’s employees post to the Facebook intranet is proprietary to the company, but at the same time he admitted that Serena stores its company confidential documents elsewhere than Facebook, so its role as an intranet platform is more limited than you would typically look for in an enterprise setting."

Skepticism on Facebook’s value as a platform aside, it could still continue to evolve and become a platform-as-a-service (a hosted intranet platform for business). There is great value in implementing the social networking approach within the enterprise.

IBM understands the value of Facebook, and is testing an employee social networking tool on their intranet called Beehive.

“Beehive truly is an experiment in our own version of an internal 'Facebook.',” says Liam J. Cleaver, Program Director, IBM Jam Program Office. “The research goal of Beehive is to aid IBMers with various people-centric challenges within the workplace. We broadly categorize these challenges into "relationship building" and "people-sensemaking”.

Relationship-building challenges include, for example, new employees struggling with making connections that are important for their current project and professional growth, remote workers having difficulties with team building and staying in touch with their team members, or employees moving on to new assignments who are not easily able to stay touch with former colleges.

People-sensemaking includes, for example, the difficulties of discovering people with the right skills and common interests, or learning more about someone personally as well as professionally to facilitate making contact, or getting to know about ongoing projects and activities beyond your immediate team.”

IBM’s Beehive will be only one of the tools examined and showcased in the next Intranet Insider World Tour webinar on June 12th at 2pmEDT, produced by Communitelligence.com. Hosted by Liam and myself, the 90 minute webinar will look at the latest and greatest from the world’s best intranet, W3, with a close look at all its Intranet 2.0 functionality which boasts 30,000 bloggers, and thousands more podcasts (audio & video) and wikis – and an “employee directory that puts Facebook to shame.”

Honestly, you are an absolute fool if you work on an intranet and don’t attend this webinar. IBM is doing some groundbreaking stuff that you simply must know.

It’s only $199 to attend this webinar, and you can register online at Communitelligence.com.

Web 2.0 and Intranet 2.0 will be the subject of several hours of instruction and discussion in my upcoming workshops Deploying First-Class Web Content Management For World-Class Websites (Ad Astra) in Hanoi, Vietnam (Interncontinental Hotel) from April 23 – 25. I’ll be repeating the workshop April 28 – 30 in Bali (Hard Rock Hotel).

These workshops will be three full-days and promise a lot of learning, examples and hands-on work. To register for either please phone (65) 6334-9828 or email sales@adastra.com.sg

If you'd like to learn more about Facebook and its potential value to the business, then please do join us on the Intranet Global Forum.

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One Laptop Per Child abuses donors

Toby Ward — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 11:24:58 -0700

I have a profound respect for charities with great vision and execution. However, I possess a monstrous disdain for those that manipulate the disadvantaged, use them as a platform to further their own personal goals, and take for granted, or even abuse their patrons.

When I heard about One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), I immediately stepped-up and supported it. I immediately wrote about and promoted the campaign to encourage the world to buy one of their computers, so that a like computer could be donated to a child or classroom in a third world country.

In fact, the Internet and its denizen of bloggers have helped turn this charity into a massive darling that has received heaps of wonderful, international praise. I encouraged friends, colleagues and readers to support it, and instructed my company, Prescient Digital Media, to spend thousands of dollars on the program.

In fact, we were a relatively early contributor during the Christmas campaign of 2007. At the time, OLPC promised the delivery of their computers before Christmas. Four months later, and five months after they took our money, no computers have been delivered.

Now as far as I’m concerned, OLPC does not owe me a thanks, special notes or consideration, or promises about making the world better. In fact, I don’t care if the computers are cheap pieces of crap. Some have been very vocal about the computer’s lack of performance and power (a group of patrons that have had the good fortune to actually see and use one of the mystical laptops).

I could give a damn. I don’t need a high-powered laptop, neither do my children, nor do most others in the Western world. These whiners deserve our scorn for the nobility of such a fantastic intention as to build a low-cost computer that so aims to improve the quality of life for third world children is far above and beyond the trifling and sniveling of spoiled, self-consumed computer addicts.

My praise for OLPC ends here. OLPC has promised millions of computers to the third world, and has failed miserably. If you’re to use the disadvantaged children of the third world as a platform, a platform that has so richly bolstered the fortunes and reputations of OLPC and its founders, you better dam well deliver on the promises made. It is grossly unacceptable for any charity to use children to promote the collection of funds, and to break the promises based on the disadvantaged use to promote the campaign. I don’t care who donated $400 for a computer for third-world children, that computer must be delivered as promised.

OLPC has failed to deliver computers, broken their promises, and in my opinion, violated a sacred trust. For when you use poor children as a subject matter for raising funds, there is ZERO MARGIN FOR ERROR.

For all of my adult life, I have been a supporter of UNICEF. My wife and I have sponsored programs and individual children through World Vision and UNICEF for as long as I can remember. I put these charities, and the individuals that make them work, above everyone else – in my opinion, none can compare nor come close to those noble souls that dedicate their time, and often their lives, to improving the lives of those that deserve the most care.

While the computers have not been delivered, I continue to clutch to a sliver of faith that OLPC will find some competence and deliver sometime soon. For this reason, I have not demanded the thousands of dollars we have spent, despite the pathetic communications (or lack thereof) and assurances OLPC. Yes, we’re told that OLPC is fixing the problems… the computers are already made, there are warehouse problems, blah, blah, blah. We’ve been given the same vague and ambiguous reassurances for months – months. My blind faith reassures me… for now.

In the meantime, the founders and chiefs at OLPC have received international praise, kudos and promotion, and are fleeing with the good PR in their pockets. Co-founder and former technology officer, Mary Lou Jepson, left to start her own company. All that goodwill and PR will no doubt be very profitable! Co-founder and Chairman Nicholas Negroponte is looking to distance himself too and has begun a search for a CEO. Ah well, the charity has proven to be a very profitable PR machine, but since it’s not delivering on those promises, he better get out while the going is good.

Performance issues are acceptable. Lack of communications and gratitude are expected. Delays in production and delivery are expected and acceptable. No delivery, and broken promises made on the backs of third-world children are not acceptable.

Shame on you, OLPC. Shame on you, Nicholas Negroponte.

If you disagree, feel free to phone me directly at 416.986.2226 but I will not respond to anonymous posts or flame mail.

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