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Visual thinking our way to a social workplace

Gamestormingintranets2
Gamestormingintranets1

Today I presented at #intranets2011, on Strategies for Creating a Social Workplace with your Intranet. Rather than focusing on specific technologies or checklist approaches, I wanted to help bring a different perspective to looking at why social technologies were important in a broader context of social business (i.e. creating social workplaces to deal with real business themes). In other words, its not just about switching on comments on your intranet or replacing your intranet with CMS with a wiki because these are the latest 'must have' features.

However, after sitting and listening to the presentations and conversations during day 1, I decided to tweak my presentation to include some visual brainstorming activities (see Gamestorming and also Xplane | Dachis Group), including a variation of head, heart and hand. The idea was to help make the concepts I was describing more tangible by getting people to think about:

  • What their CxO or senior management might be thinking about 'social' (social workplace, social intranets, social media etc) right now;
  • What changes in their organisational environment they needed to deal with (to link in with the car metaphor I used in the presentation, I drew a twisting road) - this was about understanding unavoidable business drivers for change; and
  • We also captured 'buzz words' from my presentation to review at the end (due to time, I just picked a selection for the stack) - I put these on the horizon, at the end of the journey.

Luckily I have a pack of equipment ready to roll for this situation and just needed to borrow some flipchart paper from the hotel to set things up before hand! I think this approach worked, based on the feedback. And it was a lot of fun too!

BTW You can also see my slides here and Michael also captured some of the detail.

Can we bridge the divide between current thinking about intranets vs social business?

Media_httpwwwsteptwoc_juogg
via steptwo.com.au

I'm at day 1 of Intranets2011 today, what is billed as a "fully-fledged conference for intranet practitioners". Personally, I'm pleased to see a reasonable selection of social business related presentations (apart from my own of course):

  • Socialising SharePoint! 
  • Three success stories from using Yammer at DET 
  • A social intranet celebrates its second birthday 
  • Taking a user-centred approach to intranet design 
  • Customer experience and intranets in the context of service design

Strongly related topics around organisational change include:

  • Change management is paramount 
  • Tips to gain executive support 
  • Ask an executive

My first impressions this morning, primarily from listening to Jane McConnell's presentation, is that here in Australia (and NZ) there is still a big divide between 'traditional' intranet managers and those moving towards social business (what some also call "enterprise 2.0"). This is not just evident in the language and stories used, but also in the stats.

Out of 120+ people attending today, only one person admitted to being a community manager and 1 person identified themselves as being from HR. Two people had attended an "Enterprise 2.0" branded conference. This mix was also largely mirrored in Jane's stats.

This doesn't mean people aren't interested (based on my conversation over the break) and I hope the content over the next few days will help to bridge that gap between these different communities. However, there is also a view that its time for intranet managers to adapt or face the risk of the ground simply shifting from beneath them (Jane talked about an organisation where a group leading a social network initiative openly talk about trying to kill off the old intranet, and intranet team with it).

One mistake I think people here might make is to treat social media as feature. While I agree that the terminology and phrases we use around 'social' will increasingly become business-as-usual, I disagree that you can view this change simply as a technology feature to incorporate.

In this respect, James Robertson is correct that something is changing in the world of intranets. I might modify that slightly and say - it has already changed.

Lets see what happens next.

My observations from the sidelines: Gov 2.0 Conference

I've heard some mixed feedback about the recent CeBIT Government 2.0 conference, which was held in Canberra at the beginning of the month. I think part of the problem continues to be the gap between the engaged (some of whom are also more than quite immersed) and those still exploring the topic.
via headshift.com

Read the rest over on the Headshift blog.

BTW I'll add a hat tip to Craig for giving Prezi rather than PPT a go! Always good to see someone trying something a little different.

E2.0 conferences, including Mark Masterson on CSC's C3 journey

via vimeo.com

I'm only just starting to catch up on the commentary from some of the recent run of Enterprise 2.0 related conferences. I really enjoyed this recording of CSC's Mark Masterson's lively and rapid presentation at the International Forum on Enterprise 2.0 held in Milan back at the beginning of June. You can read more about C3 in Claire Flanagan's case study post, including her slides from the Enterprise 2.0 conference in the US this month.

In fact, a big hat tip to the forum's organisers as almost all of the presentations appear to be available on Vimeo and many presenters have also shared their slides online. I haven't even begun to work through all this content.

Meanwhile, over at the Enterprise 2.0 Boston 2010 conference, Dion Hinchcliffe shares his thoughts on that event and identifies his two biggest take-aways:

  • Designing Enterprises for Loss of Control; and
  • Enterprises Are Going Social.

Likewise, you can also watch recordings from Boson online too.

I'm sure there is more I've missed, but I'm still working my way through some unread feeds!

My conference workshops coming up in May & July

Just to let you know that I have a couple of conferences coming up this month and in July where I'll be running workshops:
 
 
On the second day of this conference, I'll be running a workshop on designing a simpler, smarter, social knowledge transfer and retention approach. In this workshop I will be using our Social Business Design framework to explain how to tap into collective intelligence, improve productivity through in-the-flow knowledge transfer and do more with less.
 
 
I will be running a full-day masterclass on the last day of this conference, to provide an A-Z guide to implementing a social media marketing strategy. This will be based on Gov 2.0 Taskforce Project 8 guidelines, developed by Headshift, however I'll also be providing an overview of current current Web trends and their impact on policy setting and public sector marketing.
 
As always, come along to either of these workshops ready to participate!
via headshift.com

Cross-posted from the Headshift Australasia blog.

Tweeting at a conference, not rude, just ineffective?

Learn one thing about Twitter: it is a unique medium of 140 character
or less communications. It's like the haiku of the real-time Web. If
what you have to say is often longer than those 140 characters, maybe
you're using the wrong medium.

Dig this. When you're at a large conference with (say) 20 people live
tweeting every interesting sentence from every speaker, are you
thinking about your audience? I seriously hope not, because you're
often delivering them a bundle of jumbled thoughts. And when you start
retweeting each other, and then people not at the conference start
retweeting *that* everything stops being real-time and becomes
wrong-time. We don't yet have filters and interfaces that can make
sense of this stuff.

Dig this too. There are alternatives. While celebrations of YouTube
and Twitter happen at dedicated events, you're overlooking less-used
social technologies with great features, like Viddler and Posterous.
Look at my last few Posterous posts: they were from a conference I
attended. But instead of burying my nose in my BlackBerry for two
days, I listened and took notes, and when I saw something worthy of
250 or so words, I wrote a short post for Posterous and pushed the
info to Twitter, Facebook, Blogger, Xanga, Plurk, and more. What's up.

Experiment with Web 2.0 technologies. Think about your audience. Do
what's valuable for your community. Engage.

via markdrapeau.posterous.com

This was worth quoting in full. Mark Drapeau raises some good points. There is no doubt social media is changing how with interact at conferences and other events. But now that we've had a bit of time to experiment with Twitter, which was fine, perhaps it is time to step back and look at what actually works best?

A brief recap of recent Gov 2.0 events

I'm well overdue a detailed recap of the last few weeks of Government 2.0 related event. But time is getting away from me, so I think I'll have to admit defeat and just point you at some photos and coverage elsewhere:

The LGWebNetwork conference

This was a really fantastic conference (check out some the feedback they received). Reem and Diana did a great job and I appreciated their attention to detail, even down to the event publication. I was there as a part of panel on community engagement. The conference site also has a selection of audio recordings from the event, including the opening and closing key notes. You'll find more photos on Flickr.

Public Sphere #3
(Geoff McQueen presenting at Public Sphere #3)

Check out Sen. Kate Lundy's blog for the official wrap up post - however, there is still time to participate on the wiki. There were also a couple of interesting posts here:
I spent most of the day running the live blog, but I also presented in the morning on why the Web 2.0 industry was different and what government could do to support it.

Panel at UNSW
The night before NSW Public Sphere, I was invited to participate on a panel hosted by Martin Stewart-Weeks and with Matthew Crozier as part of a lecture. It was good to step into an academic context for a moment, just to get a different view point on the hype around Government 2.0. However, these masters students engaged intelligently with the issues and ideas, not the buzz words. 

NSW Public Sphere (+ Us Now screening)

I started the day at 7.15am with a screening of the Us Now movie for a few fool hardy souls. As well as providing food for thought for the rest of the day, this also did double duty as part of the Us Now Global Screening Project initiative started by Celina Agaton. The big announcement of the day of course was the launch of the apps4nsw competition (you can read the transcript on Penny Sharpe's blog). I posted my slides from NSW Public Sphere in a previous post, which pretty much called for something just like apps4nsw as a next step. I've suggested to Penny that a great next step for NSW Public Sphere would be to run an co-design event to feed into the apps4nsw competition. Also worth reading is this wrap up post from Grant Young. If you are interested, there are also more photos on Flickr.

BTW If you are interested in the idea of Public Service (Co-)Design, there is a list of some useful links at the end of my CPD paper.

Overall, I think you'll agree things are really starting to move beyond talking to actually doing something useful with the Government 2.0 idea.