Today marks the first anniversary of my "new" job at YourMembership.com, a SaaS (i.e cloud based) software company that provides a product for member based organizations. This means it is also the first anniversary of my departing from the world of intranets.
YourMembership.com's product actually aligns quite well to intranet themes but I really miss the business side of managing intranets....
Happy Anniversary!
Another great presentation by the guys over at Prescient Digital Media. You can watch the video here or review the slides below:
Great article on jboye.com "Why having no intranet budget can be a great thing".
These are my pros and cons for not having an intranet budget...
Pros:
- easy to change technologies due to no monetary investments (just time)
- open source software is your friend!
- writing you own applications is more flexible and often faster that setting up high dollar software/hardware solutions
Cons:
- having to plead for a thousand dollars to buy a charting control for a project
- no training or conferences other that blogs, whitepapers, and free webinars
- no budget usually means no help...being a team of one can be a bummer some times
As seen on a recent Adaptive Path post:
Yes...I know...it has been a long time since I have posted anything in this space. Let me just start out saying that I have been really busy! I am still the sole intranet resource for my company (of 4500 employees) and I am doing the job of 2 or 3.
That being said, I have been working on revamping our "People Finder" application and finally adding some more social features such as two way connections, status updates, and activity feeds.
I have been doing quite a bit of research and found this really great article on Human 2.0 titled Design Patterns for Social Experience.
This really spoke to me:
...social experience design is about the interaction between people rather than the interface between the human and the computer – and that while you can fairly well control one person’s experience with a system, you cannot predict or control how people will choose to interact with each other.
As such, when you design a social experience, all you can really do is provide a framework. You can set the basic rules and capabilities, but the participants will finish the design for you.
Just found a very interesting podcast on what makes a successful intranet manager of Catherine Grenfell by Jane McConnell of Globally Local. Check it out here: http://www.netjmc.net/globally_local/2009/11/catherine-grenfell-on-successful-intranet-managers.html
The annual “Global Intranet Trends” survey closes in just a few days (10 to be exact).
If you run an intranet make sure you take the survey! Oh, and by the way for doing the survey (took me less than an hour) you will be send a free copy of the 2009 report!!
So don’t miss the boat!
http://www.netjmc.net/intranet-trends/how-to-sign-up-for-2009-survey.html
If you are involved in your company’s intranet and have not yet taken Net Strategy JMC’s Global Intranet Survey 2009, you should. Just head on over to http://netjmc.typepad.com/globally_local/2009/06/2009-global-lntranet-survey-goes-live-participate.html to sign up.
These days it seems like everyone is trying to save a dime and companies are obviously no different. The problem is in corporate America, employees tend to get a little sore if they loose all the little recognition perks they have been so used to getting.
At my company, we have been working hard this year on putting in a few little features into our intranet so employees and leaders can provide no-cost recognition to peers and subordinates.
P.R.O.P.S. or People Recognizing Other Peoples Success is a little tab on our employee yellow pages that allows employees to send a quick message of encouragement or congratulations. The message is posted to the employees profile page where the whole company can view the success (unless it is marked private).
Employees can send up to 10 of these little gems per month. We limited it so each time a kudos is sent, it really has some meaning behind it: “I can only send 10 of these out this month, I’d better make it count!”
The other little project completed this year was a branded eCards site. This simple site also allows employees to send a message to other employees (or out side of the company for that matter) a branded image and message.
Messages include Happy Birthday, Congratulations, Thank You, Job Well Done, and the like.
Unlike P.R.O.P.S., eCards are privately sent only to the intended recipient.
I hope you can see that it does not take too much effort to provide creative solutions to employee engagement and recognition. A few simple tools strategically added to your intranet can turn it from dull business site to socially engaging intranet!
Jane McConnell of netjmc.com is running an intranet survey through the end of August. For your effort, you will get a copy of the 2010 "Global Intranet Trends" report. That reminds me....I still need to take the survey...thanks for extending it Jane!
The 4th annual Global Intranet Strategies Survey opened at the end of June and will stay open until August 31. All participants receive a complimentary copy (pdf) of the " Global Intranet Trends for 2010" report that will be published in the second part of October.
The key themes this year are:
- The workplace: Are intranets catching up with what people need to do their jobs?
- Collaboration: How does the online workplace support virtual teams and communities of practice?
- Social media: To what extent is social media being used internally and for what purposes?
- Search: Is enterprise search still a perennial problem? What strategies and resources are being put into place to optimize it?
- Ownership, governance and strategy: Who owns the intranet and what operating models and strategies are in place to drive business value?
- Measuring value: What indicators are being used to measure the value the intranet brings to an organisation: adoption, usage, satisfaction, workforce coverage, reduction of risk, business value?
Instructions for applying:
http://netjmc.com/survey/sign-up-JMC-global-intranet-survey-2009-2010.html
More information: 2009 Global lntranet Survey goes live! Participate!
http://netjmc.typepad.com/globally_local/2009/06/2009-global-lntranet-survey-goes-live-participate.html
You can contact Jane McConnell (jane@netjmc.com) directly for more information.
No, Twitter is not really strictly intranet related. But everyone is doing it right?
I have been seeing all kinds of websites talking about how to increase your business through Twitter. Some even suggesting you can get 17,000 followers in a month! So I just had to try it for my little handcrafted pen business I do on the side, The Norsk Woodshop (http://www.NorskWoodshop.com).
A lot of these methods say to follow as many people as you possibly can or at least as many as you can find that are somewhere in your target (buyers or co-artists in my case). So that's what I did. Last night, I started a dedicated Twitter account for The Norsk Woodshop. And started following my guts out. I have found 171 people to follow so far using a really neat tool http://twitseeker.com that you can search for terms and then automatically follow those people.
Out of the 171 I have followed, I so far have 6 followers. Not 17,000, but it is a start, especially considering it took me months to get that many for my personal Twitter account (I guess I am just not that interesting).
I will keep at it for at least a month and report back my progress!
You can follow The Norsk Woodshop at http://www.twitter.com/norskwoodshop.
Are you a college student working towards a 4 year degree in Computer Science or a related field? Do you live in the St Petersburg, FL area (or know someone that does)? Can you get credit from your school for an internship? Have a passion for usability, clean code, and ASP.NET?
If so, I want you!
I am currently looking for a summer intern to help work a on few intranet related projects here at HSN. Go to HSN Careers and search for job #0802182.
Patrick
I am currently working on an internal blogging package for my company. Besides the standard blog pieces, it contains some special communications features such as digest and on-demand emailing.
I have been fighting for allowing employee's to comment on items posted through the site. However, there is a great fear from our HR group. To help, I have made comments disabled by default and can be turned on by message, however right now, I am also working on a moderation option.
So why is HR, or executives for that matter, so afraid of employee's having the ability to comment on company news? What ideas do you have to help sell having open comments always turned enabled on our site?
I would love to hear from everyone!
It's a new year and time for new projects!!! We have just completed our new Performance Management system and its up, running, and doing quite well.
Our new system was all built from scratch using ASP.NET 2.0 with a Microsoft SQL Server back-end. The new site includes some cool for us but pretty industry standard features including a visual process map so it's harder to get lost during the process, a task based system that lets employees and leaders know what needs to be done and when, as well as a new spiffied up tab/wizard interface for each major process including goal planning and evaluation writing.
That being said, it is now time for some new projects!! Yippee!!! I also have grand hopes of writing a bit more in this space about what I am currently working on, big wins, and some notes/thoughts of my current research.
See you more through the new year!
Blogs are cool, social bookmarking sites are neat, but I really think wikis are the big news in the intranet 2.0 space.
At our company, we launched a wiki last fall (almost a year ago now...wow!) and it has mostly become the internal wikipedia. The wiki contains a lot of glossary terms pulled from all over the company from different business unit's websites. This has made it much simpler to find what the specialized terminology of our business means.
However I want more! I have been using the wiki for all my intranet documentation, support lists, application change logs, etc. But how do I get other people interested?
I see one problem with our setup, a slightly modified version of Screwturn Wiki, has no security. Sure it tracks who wrote what, but I would love to have a bit more partitioning, like the Workspaces concept in Socialtext's workspace concept, allowing separate work areas for projects teams, wikipedias, and onboarding, to name a few.
So what are your thoughts for wikis in the social intranet?
I have been faced with a UI design problem on our Performance Management system that I am currently building.
There is one area within the site where leaders have the ability to choose another employee within the company to request feedback for one of their direct report's performance review. This is simple stuff, except the UI bit for picking what employee to send the request to.
I have written a couple other apps in the past that needed to do this type of work, but I really did not like the solutions I came up with, namely some type of a drop down list or select list with all the names listed. Problem is, with over 4k employees...this is a really long list.
I like the idea of a type-ahead search box that could show the name, title and photo of a group of employees based on the search string entered. Something like Google's Enterprise Labs "Search as you Type" plug-in for the Google Search Appliance.
So what other ideas do you all have? Please leave me a comment!
I attended a free webinar yesterday put on by JibberJobber.com's Jason Alba and People-OnTheGo titled Social Networking in Action.
The discussion centered around building up your business by using social media sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, blogs, and Twitter. Very interesting stuff and worth checkingo out Jason's slide deck and site @ http://www.jibberjobber.com/.
I am not sure if they will offer up a recording of the webnar, but you might want to watch the People-OnTheGo site.
There is a great new video from the fine folks at ragan.com about how to keep you intranet content fresh and avoid hosting an "information dumpster."
That's what the social intranet is all about!
Is low value content the problem with intranets? I am not sure it is or not. In blog post by Gerry McGovern over at CMSwire, Low Value Content is Destroying Your Website, has some interesting information.
Most data and content that we create is next to useless. Nobody will ever be interested in looking at it again.
Check out this interesting post on twitter on the intranet...
Tapping into the Cornucopia: Twitter usage in corporate settings
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