“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.”

The Intranet wiki, WikiEnt, of Prescient Digital Media - © 2008

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.

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.

“When properly rolled out, social media and Enterprise 2.0 tools can help companies meet their No. 1 internal communication goal — engaging employees,” said Michael Rudnick, global intranet and portal leader at Watson Wyatt (see Social Media: The Next Frontier In Employee Communication).

“Instead of simply mass e-mailing information or posting to an intranet in hopes employees will see it, social media tools help employees actively participate in creating and sharing information. This shift to employee-generated content has resulted in employees’ becoming more engaged online.”

Michael is a pretty smart guy and he’s bang on. As he and his Watson Wyatt clients can attest employee communications (internal communications) is a synchronous or two-way street that requires active participation and dialogue between management and employees. The new Enterprise 2.0 or Intranet 2.0 tools such as blogs and wikis are excellent tools for promoting this dialogue.

And yet, the adoption rate of social media tools within the enterprise continues to be startlingly low despite all the press and fanfare of the past 3 years.

Writer Nic Patton rightly asserts, in his article the article Employers must learn to love social media (Management-Issues.com), “Instead of trying to crack down on workers' use of new social media and Web 2.0 technology, employers should be embracing it as a way of creating better workplace communities, engagement and communication.”

Rudnick says these concerns are reminiscent of the productivity fears raised, and subsequently disproved, when the Internet was introduced into the workplace in the mid-1990s. The way for employers to address these concerns is to do just as they did 10 years ago — setting clear guidelines for acceptable use while adopting social media for a productive, internal purposes.

In Your employees love to surf porn, among other things I highlighted far greater concerns and risks than those posed by social media – namely surfing porn and general goofing around by employees. If staff can find ways to do this, what makes anyone think a wiki, which is self-policing by the entire employee population, is any worse?

Verizon has hundreds of discussion forums, blogs and wikis that are entirely self-policing and they’ve never had to censor or remove any content or would-be inappropriate postings (see Verizon's Digital Workplace). Why would your organization be any different?

Prescient Digital Media has just launched a new Intranet 2.0 service for those companies looking to examine, plan and rollout new Enterprise 2.0 tools. The offer includes:

• Requirements analysis
• Intranet 2.0 plan
• Blogs and wiki policies
• 1-2 trial wikis (with several options, features and content focuses)
• 1-2 trial blogs (with several options, features and content focuses)

If you’re interested in this new Intranet 2.0 service, please contact us directly (through the website) or give me a shout at 416.926.8800. 

UPCOMING WEB 2.0 & INTRANET 2.0 EVENTS:

Southeast Asia:

If you’d like to learn more about Intranet 2.0 and Web 2.0, and you’re in the Southeast Asia area (kiwis and aussies welcome too!), then you should definitely attend my half-day workshop on Web 2.0 as part of a three-day workshop in the 2008 Deploying First-Class Web Content Management For World-Class Websites (Ad Astra) in Hanoi, Vietnam from April 23 – 25.

I’ll be repeating the workshop April 28 – 30 in Jakarta. 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

North America:

My colleague Carm Porco is chairing the 2008 Social Media Summit Canada Conference (Advanced Learning Institute) in Toronto, ON from March 31 - April 2, 2008. Three days of Web 2.0 best practices, case studies and learnings for which you can Register Online.

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(PARIS) Only one in five organizations have senior executives that think the intranet is mission-critical, according to Jane McConnell’s annual Global Intranet Trends Report. While this is embarrassingly low, and quite frankly shameful, this is up 5% from last year. Frankly, however, it’s far too little and most likely too late for far too many organizations.

At this rate a majority of corporations will treat their intranet with the importance it deserves sometime in the next decade. The remainder will follow in their footsteps sometime over the next millennia. I am wholely embarrassed for these executives who probably would rate their customer-facing website as mission-critical, but openly neglect and screw-over those employees whose job it is to serve those customers!

Some other disturbing trends:

• Only 20% of study participants ‘absolutely’ agree that the intranet’s primary purpose is to facilitate collaboration
• Only 22% absolutely agree that the intranet’s primary purpose is to facilitate productivity
• 60% absolutely agree that the intranet’s primary purpose is to distribute information
• “Help generate business opportunities” is not seen yet as an important purpose of the intranet

I guess the intranet is nothing more than a newsletter with a phone directory for most. It is sad, but true. Of course, this won’t change unless you (both intranet managers and consultants) learn to put on your sales hats and begin promoting the potential of the intranet by actively showcasing leading examples (many of which have been highlighted here on IntranetBlog.com (see the Intranet Case Studies) because these narrow-minded, old-school, windbag executives won’t learn any other way. So it is incumbent on you to ‘sell’ the intranet.

Nor surprisingly the top 3 “serious obstacles” according 40% of respondent organisations:

1. Intranet not seen as a priority
2. Lack of awareness of the potential role of the intranet
3. Lack of ownership at a senior level

My rant notwithstanding, and not to undermine the quality of this superlative report, Jane’s report is a very good read chalked full of excellent statistics and findings. Here are some more findings from Jane (see Highlights from the 2007 Global Intranet Survey Reports - just published) of the study of 178 company intranets (medium to large organizations with 5,000 to 100,000 employees:

• The intranet already is “the way of working” or will be in 1 or 2 years for over half the organisations in the survey population. Half say that today employees would be disturbed in their work if the intranet “went down” for 1 to 2 hours, with the figure reaching 3 out of 4 if it “went down” for 24 hours.
• 3 out of 5 organisations are “not really satisfied” or “not satisfied at all” with their intranet search.
• Well over half respondents have “less than one person” who works on supporting and optimising search. Very few have taxonomies, and not nearly enough do analysis on the search logs.
• Intranet 2.0 tools and technologies are being tested by a majority of organisations and visibly integrated into the intranet by many.
• Organisations where the intranet already is or will soon become “the way of working” are more involved in 2.0 than the others. 4 out of 5 compared to 3 out of 5 in the full survey population).   
• 1 out of 3 of these organisations have established an official 2.0 strategy. 

The Global Intranet Trends Report is a very worthwhile report and should be used as a frequent reference for building your intranet business case. You can purchase it for $525 – or even better, purchase the enhanced he Global Intranet Analysis Report at $1175.

Wikis are indeed a powerful collaboration tool for employees. However, like any tool that requires participation from people, the success of an employee wiki requires highly engaged and participatory individuals.  In other words, a successful wiki has less to do with technology, and more to do with communications and change management.

Janssen-Cilag recently replaced their intranet with a wiki. The Australian pharmaceutical subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson originally had a static HTML intranet that was delivering little value. The original intranet (launched in 2001) was static, delivering limited value, and was plagued by many of the common problems associated with many young intranets.

“While some areas were lovingly maintained to a high standard, large sections of content were out of date,” writes Janssen-Cilag CIO Nathan Wallace in his blog case study Our Intranet, the Wiki: Case Study of a Wiki changing an Enterprise. “There was no search capability. Trust in the information was very low. News was distributed via email, not the web.”

JCintra, the Janssen-Cilag intranet home page

While most organizations would worry about the risk of employees being able to change and edit all content, this risk rarely materializes as reality. The Jannsen-Cilag intranet records a complete history of all changes and additions to all content so mistakes can be quickly corrected. This history workflow also keeps employees, who cannot contribute anonymous content, accountable for their contributions.

In the first three months, despite an employee population of only 300 people, 111 people had contributed more than 5,000 changes to the intranet.

“The adoption of JCintra has been remarkable,” says Wallace. “Our contributions per month have continued to grow since launch. People are engaging and collaborating more with time, they are not losing steam as you might expect.”

“People are engaging and collaborating more with time, they are not losing steam as you might expect. To drive adoption, we’ve primarily focused on owning the flow of new information. Early on, we established a policy that all announcements must be on JCintra. When necessary, they may be sent via email in addition to posting as news on the Intranet.

While I believe a wiki-based intranet has its time and place and will not work in all organizations, particularly larger ones where application integration and user personalization are key drivers, Wallace and team have demonstrated a wiki-based intranet can be very successful in the right culture.

“In a culture full of all the typical trust, transparency, workload and security concerns common to big companies; the simplicity of this system and its content ownership model cut through,” adds Wallace. “Problems of driving collaboration and content updates remain, but they are exposed as the cultural and people problems at their heart since the technical and workload "excuses" have been stripped away.”

(Thanks to Bill Ives at Enterprise 2.0.)

RELATED READING:

Also read how Intrawest Placemaking implemented a similar wiki intranet in a slightly larger organization. See Intranet case study: Intrawest Placemaking.

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(TORONTO, ON) When last I critically mused about the value of trendy buzz words and catch phrases and the next hype, Intranet 2.0, my musing turned out to be the most read article I’ve written on IntranetBlog.com (see Intranet 2.0).

Not to be outdone, Enterprise 2.0 is a buzz pharse that’s been around longer than Intranet 2.0. There are blogs and even a conference dedicated to Enterprise 2.0 (though I’m not cool enough to be included in either). And many more people cooler than I have mused and even postulized openly about the value and coolness of Enterprise 2.0. At the risk of sounding bitter and like a kid who ‘missed-the-boat’ on the latest craze (think the comeback rage of Hush Puppies that came and went and still left me baffled and feeling extraordinarily un-cool in my Basses), enterprise 2.0 is much the same as intranet 2.0 (note how I effortlessly and carelessly alternate between capitalized and non-capitalized versions of said buzz phrase) but potentially bigger (depending on which consultant or maven’s definition).

Blogging, wikiing, podcasting, social bookmarking – all within the confines of the enterprise, and usually on the intranet, possesses the power to make everyone’s life a little better, a little more empowered and informed, and a little cooler. Throw out your Sketchers and burn your tickets to the next MTV ‘unplugged’ show, there’s a new fashion sweeping the corporate world. Strip away my outwardly facetious tone and awkward outsider approach and you do have a trend, a means, a collaborative ecosystem and set of tools that could transform a poor or average enterprise into something that is good or possibly exceptional.

...

Read my complete article Enterprise 2.0 vs. Intranet 2.0 on www.PrescientDigital.com

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I really hate all of these 2.0 labels. And I frankly don’t understand why O’Reilly media gets so much credit for the Web 2.0 label in 2004 when I’m not sure it’s deserved. The magazine Business 2.0 was around for years before this label took hold, and I was a subscriber back in the 90s.

But what the hell, we have a lazy technology media that loves to jump on new, trendy labels like a wolf pack on a caribou… so if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.

Motorola has drunk deeply from the 2.0 Kool-aid pitcher, but it has done more than just drink. It’s walking the walk, and proving to be a leader in what it calls “Intranet 2.0”, as reported in Information Week (see Motorola’s IT Department Takes On Enterprise 2.0).

“Motorola's initiative, which it calls "Intranet 2.0," has been wildly successful, with 70,000 people using it every day, including partners. The company now has 4,400 blogs and 4,200 wiki pages and uses, among other technologies, social bookmarking and tagging by Scuttle and social networkingby Visible Path.

"It actually does work," said Toby Redshaw, Motorola's VP in charge of Enterprise 2.0 technologies. "It's beyond the wisdom of the hive, it actually lets people see new relationships, to see maps of what smart people and like people have done. For any specific problem or opportunity area, there's a community that you can go and find that has the collective knowledge of the company."

At Motorola, Intranet 2.0 started fairly quietly and grew organically by word of mouth and through the use of 250 "knowledge champions" strategically placed throughout the company to evangelize the new technologies. Redshaw made it a point to keep the technology simple to use so that the evangelism would turn into actual use. E-mail used to have a lock on the company, and Redshaw said he's now seeing less e-mail use and more use of technologies like wikis and blogs to share information to wider audiences. "It has to be so easy to use so people vote with their clicks," he said.

As a former journalist, I really hate wolf-pack journalism. But the Motorola story is a good one and worth telling. IBM and Verizon also have good Intranet 2.0 stories too.

RELATED READING:

IBM leads corporate blogging pack

The digital workplace (Verizon intranet case study)

Case study: PNM Resources CEO blog

Blogging the intranet

Should you blog the intranet?

How pervasive are social media tools (such as blogs and podcasts) becoming? Here are some of the numbers (taken from my CNW seminar series Social media (Web 2.0): are you in?):

·         There are approximately 55 million English language blogs – 45,000 new blogs created every day

·         44% of web users in the U.S. read political blogs

·         20% of Canadians say they read blogs on a regular basis

·         Three of the top 8 most trafficked sites on the Internet are social media sites that didn’t exist a couple of years ago (e.g. YouTube.com)

·         13% use RSS (real simple syndication ) for reading

·         29% of U.S. adults who own MP3 players have downloaded podcasts (The Pew Internet & American Life Project)

Read the complete article or listen to the complete webcast of Social media (Web 2.0): are you in? (www.GetStrat.com)

I’m not a big fan of predictions and soothsaying, but I still read those that are well thought.

Tony Byrne has developed his Predictions for 2007 which include:

• Google de-googles its appliance
• AJAX UI backlash
• Web managers embracing the delete key
• Falling seat prices
• Rediscovery of workflow
• Portal platforms will diversify

I agree with most of Tony’s predictions, but I think there are bigger ones at play. I know I said I don’t do these predictions but since my company is called ‘Prescient’ I feel compelled to become a hypocrite.

The year 2007 will see:

• Microsoft crank-up the marketing of Sharepoint leading to more and more customers buying without seriously examining alternative solutions
• Standalone portal products will continue to be considerably out-done by CMS solutions
• More vendors delivering a complete all-in-one solution that includes robust content management, search and portal functionality
• Continued market consolidation with many more CMS vendors being bought, merged or disappearing
• Dramatic growth in open source implementation and increased profile and functionality for bigger name solutions such as Zope, Alfresco, OpenCMS, and Plone
• More and more organizations will convert PDF and MS-Word forms to online submission forms with a mixture of in-house and outsourced solutions
• The search engine market will experience less growth than previous years as more organizations realize their current engine suffices and instead focus on content tagging, categorizing, process and policies
• Discussion and focus on Knowledge Management (KM) will continue to decline as more organizations instead narrow their attention to specific tools such as Web 2.0 applications
• More organizat