Kevin Kellys New Old Book

Kevin Kelly is republishing New Rules for the New Economy – Radical Strategies for a Connected World  as a blog to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the book-publication.

Reading it in 1999 was fun – there were many strategic books around, dealing with business, content, businesses. Most of them were already old when you had time to read them. And the message they delivered to beginners, scepticists or your bosses at that time was – if they liked it or not -: This internet-insanity will be over soon; it’s not going to work and it’s not worth bothering about it.

In 2000 I left the printmedia-publishing house I worked for then and joined the online business. My first job was doing contentmanagement for a big portal targeting german speaking europe (as a first step; multiple languages were von the roadmap) with every kind of content you can imagine, a big shopping mall and a big community in chats and discussion boards. That strategy survived three months…

We built the portal anyway and learned a lot about new rules, new economy and radical strategies…

Something new…

I just wanted to write a post about the three hours it took me to teach a colleague how to publish videos on the intranet (and that only covers half of the work), and about that I’m looking forward to calculating a business case for the new solution we’ve been discussing for more then a year.

This morning, I got the amazing news: My project has been approved by the management board. We will build a new intranet. I started to work on the first proposals in November 2007  – so that were really really long discussions.

Now it’s signed; the main requirements we want to meet are:

• build a portal that’s accessible for everybody from every country we’re operating in
• introduce publication processes that talk with one voice to everybody (same content, same time, all audiences)
• introduce permission management and closed usergroups where necessary
• introduce group-personalisation to create different views on the content for different audiences
• enhance the corporate directory towards an enterprise network
• carefully introduce well planned blogs and microblogs with attractive authors
• provide wikis as collaboration-, documentation and knowledgemanagement tools (knowledgemanagement projects are running in parallel)
• use tags as additional navigation- and categorisation tools, introduce rss for easier and for flexible customization
• support and train employees especially with increasing their media literacy

Detailed planning will continue now, I will keep posting and I’m looking forward to comments and discussions.

SEO self-experiment

I started an SEO self-experiment these days: How long does it take to promote a domain (without playing foul or spending money)? How long does it take search engines to react on changes (display new page titles, new meta tags)? How many new links do you get by entering web-catalogues, online-pr-distributors? How many links do you get by using social bookmarking?

The test arrangement

• registered an unusual domain (there are no other search results for this word then my own pages)
• set up around 100 pages with meaningful content
• followed the basic SEO-laws (use page titles, descriptions, keywords in decent length, use many internal links in the body text, name pictures etc.)
• creating three new web-catalog entries per day (I guess I’ll do this for about 3 weeks; it’s all manual work with individual descriptions)
• posting one article everyday on three social bookmarking services (delicious, digg, stumble upon)

What I’m checking daily is

• Number of search results for my domain name
• Number of links to my domain that search engines find

Softer facts I’m interested in are:

• which catalogues are the most efficient?
• which bookmarking services are the most efficient?
• when does it start to grow from alone, when do other users start to post links or bookmark stuff?

I’ll keep posting results on a weekly basis.

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Intrapreneurship – sounds nice…

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

I read the term “intrapreneurship” on a Xing-profile today .

Is it a way to prevent bore-out and frustration? Or is it just another term for getting the most out of your employees without having to pay for it?

I think it could describe quite precisely the attitude that is required if you want to make your internal media a success. I think of it as will and capacity to get things going, to set up something new even if you have to – partially – accept the borders of an existing organisation, and as the will to make use of the white spaces in an organisation that Tom de Marco describes in Slack. (If you really want to know what intrapreneurship is, check out the Social Camp in Vienna next week).

I want to make friends with some intrapreneurs, because they are definitely the kind of employees with whom you can create nice success stories with internal online media, collaboration tools or employee portals.

Hopefully it’s not brainwashing. This is another somewhat weird, but interesting nice piece and about intrapreneurship.

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Take this sheet of paper away or I’ll quit

This guy is called Wiki Image by Getty Images via Daylife

My boss asked me yesterday to print something I was working on and file it as a hardcopy. “So that we have it for sure.” If she does that ever again, I will have to quit.

The problem was even bigger: She was concerned about archiving, security and revision history of contents on the intranet. “How can we make sure, that we have all changes documented, that we can also add notes on why which changes were made and with whom they were agreed.”

She suggested to print every document that is to be published on the intranet, put handwritten notes on it and file it. There are about 1000 new documents per year and another 1000 updates. That easily adds up to 12000 to 15000 pages per year that would have to be printed, commented and filed. And we are not even talking about retrieving something in there…

I was horrified.

I just managed to remove every piece of paper from my desk (except some post its, but I hardly used them since I use deadlineapp, netvibes or iGoogle).

I had planned to handle all workflow, versioning and archiving issues in a new cms-workflow that was supposed to come along with a generally remodeled intranet. This project was cancelled because of budget reasons.

In my horror, I now suggested to use a wiki instead.

I’m curious how far I can take that. There will be discussions with authors, editors, internal audit, IT security and of course users. There will be heavy rights management work, intense process and permission design and lots of documentation work for users.

But the most important issue to me: what can I do to build trust?

Many users think of Wikis as anything goes, laissez faire, informal stuff that is not suited for real business use.

What can you tell an internal audit colleague questioning you about how reliable the built-in usermanagement really is, and how you can prove, that the permission setting really work?

And how should you behave in a discussion with people telling you that they don’t want to store business critical information in open source software?

However, I started prototyping last night. And I’m more willing to go through these discussion marathons then to play with paper. If this does not work out, I will have to intensely reorganize something. In which direction whatsoever.

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Mash ups and the single page

It’s great to just casually collect information, bookmark something here and there, add a few tags. Highlight things in your Google Reader, add a note on Netvibes, store it on Secondbrain, read a few lines, open some more links and just continue.

That brings a lot of information, it really helps to create a big picture and it is a lot of work.

It actually meets many requirements we have in daily work (flexibility, global orientation, speed, always being ready for an alternative) and it fits to your working style if you are collecting requirements, shaping products, evaluating solution scenarios or doing other rather creative work.

Once you’re used to that style of working it gets really hard to forget the always growing always open network attitude and to focus on one idea on one piece of paper.

• First of all it is hard, because you have to exclude so many things. You can not touch on this perspective or that point of view – focus on one thread and try to make it understandable.

• The second reason why it is hard is because we also have to focus on one targetgroup. To whom are you talking, which of your many ideas and what part of that one idea is it that might be really interesting for them? You have to decide, you have to exclude the rest and you can not just start somewhere and wait for comments.

• A third source of trouble is: We have to get it done. We actually really have to finalize it. We can not start it, leave it open for discussion, add a few links and hope for people to use it as a starting point for their own thoughts. We are expected to tell a fully flavoured story, and we are expected to sell something. Most audience want to have a clear proposition and the end: what am I supposed to do now, what can I get.

A clear, compelling and competitive vision, neatly designed and written on one piece of paper – that’s what is expected in most senior management meetings.

If you can not deliver your idea in that shape – then it’s either you or your idea who is probably not worth listening to.

But are our products like that? Do we have a onedimensional linear backbone in our ideas that can be easily followed and tells everything?

Should we have that?

Is actually our reality still like that, is there anything we can describe in a distinct, not misunderstandable way?

And (here comes my alltime favourite question): Does it matter?

Does the grade of reality of what we describe as reality matter? Does it matter if everything is covered by what we say? And how do we want to know if the reallity we want to describe is also the reality that our counterpart is able and willing to understand?

We don’t know and we can’t control it; we probably only talk of the same thing when we say nothing at all. – Ok, that’s pretty philosophical.

I’m convinced that open, unclean, unfinished mashups describe way better what we are up to and what happens out there. But I’m also positive that it are the very simple stories that sell – they are the only thing you can buy; everything ellse is so undefined that you can not even attach a price tag to it.

So again: It does not matter. Don’t try to reduce complexity in your thoughts or in the way you look at things.

But find a single and simple storyline that tells a good story. That can be reused in many different ways. Tha can be understood by several audiences.

If it’s a really great story, it seems to address only a very limited part of your idea. But you can reuse it in every way you need and as often as you need it.

That’s economic, far more economic then one sheet of paper.

And it leaves enough space, spirit and energy for what you really want to care about.

Productplanner.com – an online process design facilitator

Productplanner.com is a great service. Maybe it’s not a fully flavoured design tool yet, but it does provide good support for many basic steps in interaction planning. It allows you to combine the most common steps that every online product has to perform, split into several usecases.

The visualization is nice; it allows you show overviews (that tell you how many steps are in that process) and details. Great add ons would be the possibility to attach documents to the single steps or to add more descriptions.

I plan to use it to prepare some standard processes that I need always and always again – productplanner should allow me to have them with me whereever there is an online connection, and to edit them without anything else then a browser.

A nice benefit besides that could be the public process library: watch and compare processes others have designed.

I’m curious if that service will take off and in which direction it will develop. And I support everything that fosters some process-oriented focus in online design and product development – everythingh else is just plain scribbling.

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How to evaluate content managementsystems for the intranet

What are the most important topics in an intranet architecture, what are the most important features for Content Managementsystems to be used in an Intranet?

I just sent out a Request for Proposal to a longlist of vendors and I am now about to prioritize all the defined requirements. What I came up with as a proposal for further discussion is

• basic technology first (if its supposed to be java it shouldnt be .net)
• compatibility, scalability, integration features (content, applications and users as well as import and export)
• support (slas, guarantees, personal skills and qualities, regional distance/availability)
• basic business requirements (multitenant, multilingual, if required)
• workflows, roles and permissions
• roadmap, strategy, partnering models with vendors
• licensing models, licensing costs
• other commercial issues
• additional business requirements

It may be a little strange that the commercial criteria are so low in the ranking. In my opinion, the licensing costs really hardly matter. Vendors will offer you discounts that they almost pay you for buying their system, they will always be cheaper than their competitor. Id they are not and there is really a difference – then you should be alarmed.
The real costs will come up with additional tools and integration efforts – thats why integration features are my number 2, and support is # 3. Support and the personal relationship determin, how fast your developers will work – this will depend on how good documentation and support are, but also on how much they like the system and its consultants.
Business requirements and workflows are # 4 and 5 because they are important, but you can still fix things that are not ok – as long as # 2 and 3 are granted.
The roadmap is nice to know – you should make sure that you and your partner are going in the same direction.
You will have to pay for it, yes. But once youve paid, its over. Thats whz licensing costs are only # 6. And if # 3, 4, 5 and 6 are ok, you will be happy to pay.

So dont worry too much about prices, dont look at the big players only, listen to your developers and do care about personal relationships on all levels. If you get along with developers, project managers and CEOs, the project will be smooth and great.

Identify Project Drivers

Online projects are still very often process-, technology- and it-driven. No wonder: everything is new and exciting, still, new technologies emerging at least every half year. Compared to this dynamic environment, the business perspective is boring: it’ still abou selling, publishing, informing – the targets remain the same they have always been for a brick and mortart company. Opposed to both these perspective, i like the approach you tend to incorporate when you deal a lot with design and usability-issues: don’t care about processes and business targets either, but just focus on the user experience:

• Tell the user a story, give him a reason to be on your pages.
• Imagine (or better research) what the users want to do in order to live this story.
• Make sure the story fits to your business targets.
• Design processes that satisfy your and your users’ needs.
• Design a system that supports these processes.

Sacrifying the user experience to the beauty of an architecture diagram or the simplicity of a process is a bad habit. Maybe it will make your system run smoothly and save some work for the 5 or 10 people who are maintaining it. But did you ever compare that to then pain of several dozens of business users or the frustration of several thousand end users?I like the user experience driven approach to projects, but be warned: it will make you look stupid in the beginning when you are starting your discussion with IT.

Design

I tried to present some designs for the new intranet in a project I’m currently working on to the boss of the communication department. I just wanted to get some feedback on colours, use of logos, the general look and feel and maybe some discussion on the top level menu.
Not even the first sentence was finished as we were in the middle of a discussion on content details, wether to put tables of content on the top or on the bottom of a page, on how to remodel the voluminous pieces of content that made up large parts of the intranet and on about which new interaction schemes should be designed and how that would influence the organisation.
As regarding the look and feel, she just made an ugly face at the beginning, but at the end of our discussion she said something like “Well, the longer, I look at it, the better I like it, somehow.”

We think we’re focused clear and precise when we go into a presentation. “I want to discuss our new designs with you, just to give you an overall impression of what it could feel like.” – But even artifical terms like design allow such a wide variety of understanding.
Two me, we need two things to cope with that:
1) More definitions, which means more artificial terms. Concerning design, that could be Information Design, Interaction Design, Identity Design, Graphic Design
2) Nobodx will listen while we are trying to explain that stuff. we should have explanations ready and we should be prepared to discuss it with everybody, but it is even more important that we are prepared to understnd who is talking to us about what, to categorie the inputs todeal with everything at it’s time, but to stay focused enough to get now the decisions we want now.
This could be something like agile presentation mode.