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Filed under: social intranets

Intranet Trends in Australia: 2012 is no time to stand still

I’ve never been much of a futurist, which you might find odd since I spend a lot of time talking about new fangled ideas like ‘social business’ and ‘government 2.0’. From my perspective, none of this is futuristic – it is happening right here, right now if you look around. Reflecting on this week’s Intranets2012 conference and Dion Hinchcliffe’s visit to Australia, I thought it might be worthwhile identifying some of the ideas and trends that I see impacting intranets right now and into the immediate future.
via headshift.com.au

Cross posted from the Headshift Asia Pacific blog. I talk about three points in more detail: Social intranets, mobile and the role of design thinking.

Social intranets and the rebirth of internal comms

An example

Recently, there was a large conference at work with many senior managers in attendance. Traditionally, the internal communications staff would write up an article after the event, post it on their intranet portal, and send an email to employees with a summary and a link.

This time, though, those same communications people selected more junior staff (outside of communications) to attend the conference and serve as roaming reporters. The reporters posted live updates throughout the conference using the firm’s new collaboration platform. Communications staff also posted but they added to the conversation instead of dominating it.

Now, without email and without searching, people at all levels from around the world were following the conference by following real people (“I felt like I was there”). And, more importantly, they were able to participate.

The graduates were particularly active, asking questions and contributing content. But senior people at the event also used the social platform, soliciting ideas and feedback, adding comments to other conversations. People discovered the hot topics via their newsfeeds, added comments and likes, and interacted with people across their division (and some from other divisions).

We’d never had anything like that before.

Better for the individual and for the firm

Far from being dead, the internal communications function at that conference became much more valuable. They went from producing impersonal content with few readers and zero feedback to using social tools and practices to engage a larger audience in more meaningful ways.

Whether you’re a communications professional, a senior manager, or just someone who has something to say, that kind of transformation is available to you.

If you’re still relying on people coming to you for your message (or visiting your portal or reading your email), then you’re missing one of the biggest communications shifts in history.

via johnstepper.com

Great story about how social intranets are changing internal communications for the better. Don't keep you intranet stuck as a destination, make it a platform for employee participation.

What is the digital workplace? Mostly harmless

I think I've worked out what the "digital workplace" is:

If you think an intranet is that internal Website you browse on your PC at work, where a small number of people publish stuff for everyone else inside your company or organisation then the digital workplace is that and more - this includes mobile and remote access, but also other Web-based tools that employees use to get their work done. Wouldn't it be great if this all worked together, in a useful and usable way?

This might be considered a more polite version of my 3 intranet truths ;-)

Alternatively:

If you don't define an intranet in such a narrow way, then really the digital workplace is just a fancy word for your enterprise information system*. For those with legacy IT or technology-driven architectures (rather than being user-centred), the digital workplace is just a concept to push you towards a more progressive IT environment for your users. If you are already on that journey, well done - nothing to see here :-)

Yes, I'm a digital workplace skeptic; but if all the digital workplace idea is about is a bit of clever change management to get some intranet managers to think more broadly then its mostly harmless and may even do some good. The reason I say this is that (based on what I've read so far), the digital workplace:

  • Still lacks a business case or imperative.
  • Doesn't address the capability or place within the organisational structure of traditional intranet managers to actually deliver the digital workplace (although this could be part of a strategy to raise the status of intranet managers?).
  • Doesn't address the organisational, operational and fundamental workplace impact of what Headshift | Dachis Group describe as Social Business (Dion Hinchcliffe has been documenting trends and issues in this space for some time).

*A good introductory text to this topic is something like Information Systems Management in Practice or similar.

 

From ThoughtFarmer: How Social Intranets support better Employee Engagement

Social Intranets and Employee Engagement White Paper Cover
via thoughtfarmer.com

Thoughtfarmer's Social Intranet and Employee Engagement paper pulls together a range of statistics that add to the case for social intranets (and I would say more broadly, Social Business). Quoting research by Cornell University, Gallup, Aon Hewitt, and Aberdeen Group they point out the cost of low employee engagement and also the gains for organisations that do use social software (including blogs, wikis and social networking tools). In the rest of the paper you can explore how ThoughtFarmer's own customers have been applying their platform to support the goal of enabling greater employee engagement.

Social Intranets and Managing Remote Teams courtesy of ThoughtFarmer

via thoughtfarmer.com

If you have about an hour to spare and haven't bumped into the theory and advice around the management of virtual teams before (something I haven't written about specifically since I moved my blog off Blogger) then this is worth watching. The Webinar features Nancy White and ThoughtFarmer bring this theory up to date in the context of using a social intranet to support virtual teams. BTW see my brief guide to successful virtual teams for my take on this (written in 2008).

Why Australian companies need to become Connected Companies

The Reserve Bank of Australia has been critical this last week about the depressed attitude in industry towards the state of the Australian economy. Like the rest of the developed world, there is obviously no way Australia can entirely avoid the competition of cheap labour overseas or the impact of global financial markets. But there is also a risk that Australian businesses use this as an excuse - research published last year highlighted that only a small proportion of Australian businesses are employing progressive management practices. This wasn't some wonky marketing survey, but a piece of serious research highlighting that:

"high-performing workplaces are up to 12 per cent more productive and three times more profitable"

In a related piece of work, my Dachis Group colleague Dave Gray has been looking at what characteristics define long-lived, successful companies. He was shocked to find that the life expectancy of large companies has fallen from 75 years in the 1930s to only an average of only 15 years. Dave's conclusion is that these companies are collapsing under their only dysfunctional weight. Right now, the logical reaction in some businesses to this "weight" problem is to downsize and outsource. Others on the other hand are embracing this challenge (that 12%).

I come into contact with some of those progressive organisations primarily from a technology perspective, although some are also attacking it from a broader social business level. What is interesting for me in this process is to observe that here in Australia, unlike say the US, our issue or need for concepts like Enterprise 2.0 isn't so much about overcoming dominant command and control structures; rather we need to embrace social technologies so we can:

  • Use them as a force multiplier that allows local companies to punch well above their weight in a global economy (social technologies are fantastic levellers).
  • Enable these companies to turn ideas, insight and innovation into action more effectively (great idea, but what are you going to do with it?).
  • Engage staff so that they voluntarily maximise their own productivity and professional development (carrot, not stick).
  • Deliver better products and more personalised levels of customer service (get people to buy Australian because its simply better).

In our government too there is an opportunity that has been mostly missed to date in the Government 2.0 conversation about enabling those inside government and those involved with service delivery to use these same technologies to also work more progressively. This is a missing piece in a puzzle that has spent more time focusing only on the veneer of citizen engagement through social media.

Of course, I'm not claiming that social business tools like software for workforce collaboration and social intranets trump the global and local financial and economic factors faced by Australian businesses. I'm simply saying don't ignore the evidence about how to be more productive and profitable. When wrapped up with the right implementation approach, these tools provide a critical technology platform for helping this to happen.