chieftech’s blog

I usually dodge questions about specific vendors and their offerings, and instead answer how I'd look at any particular deployment of collaboration software to see if it met my definition of Enterprise 2.0.

I find this pretty easy to do. I check to see if the environment meets three criteria: Is it freeform? How frictionless is contribution? And is it emergent?

It worth considering Andew McAfee's criteria for Enterprise 2.0 software - particularly as we get excited about the potential for Sharepoint 2010 for example. However, we actually need to apply this criteria twice. Once to determine if the software's architecture is able to support an Enterprise 2.0 use case, the second to determine if the organisation will actually deploy it in a way that allows those capabilities to be utilised.

Hat tip to Martin Koser.

Dates – January 28th, February 4th, February 11th, February 18th at 12:00 p.m. ET

January 28th: Webinar #1: Social Computing Adoption in the Enterprise “the Before” – learn how to best develop the business case, gain buy-in, select technology and establish the team

February 4th: Webinar #2: Social Computing Adoption in the Enterprise “the After” –gather best practices on implementation, policy formation, training, and community management

February 11th: Webinar #3: EMC Enterprise 2.0 Case Study

February 18th: Webinar #4: Raytheon Enterprise 2.0 Case Study

Unfortunately 12pm E(S)T is something like 4am in the morning here on Australia's east coast, however they will be posting the deck from each Webinar on slideshare.

If you work at a medium-to-large company, you probably spend more time on your company's intranet site than on its external customer Website. Employees share content there that's too sensitive and secret for outsiders to see.

But the internal/external wall is breaking down, as companies need to share more and more content with freelancers, external sales reps, business partners, and so many other people who can't get inside the firewall but still need internal information.

Fortunately, today's Web technology allows you to solve these dilemmas, and might even save you some money you're spending on your intranet site.

I don't have time to blog much about this particular point right now - I'm just saving this for future reference. However, I do think we are long overdue revisiting the meaning and differences between the related concepts of intranets, extranets and even the Web more generally so we can understand how certain long held assumptions might be hindering us.

The debate about personalization vs. segmentation on the intranet has been much discussed and researched by many pioneering intranet designers and consultants. As keen observers of user behaviour in the real world, we believe that well chosen default options are a sound design strategy. Adoption rates of personalization features are low, driven by a lack of understanding of the business benefit from the user and the inertia of human nature to simply be lazy and accept defaults. By placing the user at the centre of the information universe and using their relationships to information and each other as the default filter, we can provide them with an intuitive view of their world, making significant progress towards our goal of a more relevant and valuable intranet.

The team at ThoughtFarmer often have interesting things to say about intranets - in this case, Gordon Ross' guest post on the Dachis Collaboratory describes the benefits of implicit personlisation on intranets. This is an important idea that is reflected conceptually in both McAfee's Enterprise 2.0 SLATES model and Dachis/Headshift's Social Business Design archetypes.

Personally I wouldn't say users are lazy as such, but it is true that people take the path of least resistance. Until relatively recently we also didn't have mainstream access to the technologies that support implicit personalisation plus we lacked the organisational maturity to actually place the user at the centre. However, this is now changing.

The Tube is IDEO’s intranet, a stylised, innovative online space designed purely around IDEO employees.

Every employee has a personal page that’s linked dynamically to their location, projects, project team members, skills, personal blogs and more. It’s a perfect intranet, directory, skill finder, blogging platform and social network, all wrapped up into one, seamless user experience.

Alex kindly shared a review copy of Step Two's 2009 Intranet Innovation Awards report with me. We've been talking on and off about it in advance of its publication and he assured me I would be very interested in some of the winners this year. Its a long report (nearly 200 pages) so I haven't had a chance read it in full! However, some highlights for me so far:

• IDEO's 'The Tube' people-centred intranet.
• Sabre Town - an in-house-developed internal social networking site.
• NYK News Room - while it could look better, this is a good example of using an enterprise wiki (in this case Confluence) as a platform to develop a solution.

Sabre Town in particular offers a great success story because their social networking site has apparently reported "Demonstrable saving of up to $500,000 in 2008 alone". So much for the Enterprise 2.0 doubters? Well, yes and no - these appear to be savings achieved through reduced wastage or significant time saving. Of course, unless you implement something like Sabre Town you aren't going to know what you are missing out on until you do.

While I don't think they were particularly strong winners, it was interesting to see the inclusion of companies that were looking beyond the browser screen and integrating toolbar gadgets and SMS as part of their intranet solution. These are all good signs, although I'm hopefully of more innovation in this space in coming years.

I'll try to post up some more thoughts about these examples in the next week or so. In the meantime, Step Two are publishing more excepts, further insights and screenshots on their blog - or just buy the full report for yourself.

Robin's post has grabbed a lot of people's attention over the last 24 hours, and its not surprising. When Paolo from eVectors demo'd their technology to me I was really impressed too - in fact, the front end of the Climate Pulse example gives only a few clues about the engine that enables the curating process that Robin describes to happen.

However, my immediate thought when I saw Climate Pulse was, wouldn't this also make a good concept for an intranet?

Could it in fact be possible to shift from the idea of managing content on intranets and instead think about curating it instead? Its an interesting idea that could make intranets more relevant - just like dashboards for metrics have become popular, can we also imagine dashboards for content and activity that are curated by people, not dumb algorithms?

I have my own views and I'm writing them up at the moment. They've been greatly informed and developed in the past few weeks and months. The one clue I'll give is that I'm deeply inclined to think it's about people. People, people, people. 100%. Not just people in the Web 2.0 sense of 'better communication, conversation, collaboration wah wah wah....' but, literally, about the fact that everything your organisation's intranet does and the way it thinks, behaves and interacts should begin with the people who are doing what your organisation does.

I've been a little dubious about the 'innovation' in Step Two's Intranet Innovation Awards in the past, although there is no doubt they highlight good practice (of which I have some other views as you may know). However, Alex is seeing evidence of some interesting trends this year that have caught my attention - it certainly reflects the focus area for intranets that Headshift has been working in for some time. If you are curious to learn more, Step Two are running some briefings in Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra during November to help promote the Innovation Awards report.