Why are we afraid of employee comments?

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!

Pooped for Performance Management

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!

Wiki Works - the workhorse of any social intranet

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?

Building a better "Employee Chooser"

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!

Creating a social media strategy for your business

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.

"Avoiding the intranet dumpster" - Ragan.com

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."

• practical content
• easy to find
• interactive
• community

That's what the social intranet is all about!

Low Value Content is Destroying Your Website? I don't think so.

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.

He also mentions that the corporate intranet is a dumping ground for company information because companies have no clear standard of where to put this stuff. Well, where does he suggest it go? In my 10 years of developing intranet sites, the reason the data exists is because someone needs it. It may be a loss leader in hits, but there is still a need.

I would rather see a bunch of infrequently used pages exist on the intranet rather than some word doc sitting on someones hard-drive or worse yet, lost forever when an employee is termed.

This seems to me to be one of the best use cases for social networking, specifically the wiki. It gives employees a place to quickly and easily empty their brains and get back on with the task at hand. The other upside, is for you GTD readers, it helps make mind like water!