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.

Blackberry addicted? Or just curious for life?

I heard two colleagues talk about blackberries on Friday; they talked about addiction, changes they bring into our lives and the stress you have checking for mail even in the evening or on weekend.

I think this is not something imposed on us by Blackberry or other mobile email technologies, this is an expression of how we look at life: Are there a lot of dangerous, bothersome, annoying things out there? Are we afraid of what is waiting for us?

Or are we curious for life, are we looking foreward to the things to come? A lot of my life is happening digitally that’s the way to stay in touch, to share something. And looking at work: I want to get things done, getting information earlier leaves me more time to handle things. So I want to get information…

I can’t know everything, I can’t care for everything and I can’t do everything at a time. But it makes me more comfortable to know that I should do something – even if I can’t or don’t want to do it right now. True relaxation is not excluding information, it’s ignoring it…

And efficiency, as we shold know, is not doing as many things as possible, but doing the right things at the right time (this is, once again, why we need information…).

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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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Applied collaboration – dont always blame me

Image by Pirkka2 via Flickr

I just came back from vacation and there are not so many but still far too many emails asking for things that should not have waited for me. “Could you fix this, do you know how to do that, what’s the name of the guy who works with…” – I’m not the only person around who knows this, but I’m probably the one whom others suppose to know this. There are a lot of colleagues whom you could ask, and I bet you can find a lot of the requested information in the blogs, wikis and other information sharing services I’m running.
I like the idea of collaborating not only in dedicated collaboration environments, but also – or rather way more – in environments that strongly support networking. Yes, information should be tailored to a certain audience – but everybody should have the possibility to be part of that audience.
Public information provides better accessibility, not only of the information itself, but also of the possibilities and responsibilities: Who did what? Who can fix what? Who knows what? I don’t want to skip hierarchies or substitute managers, I’m mainly thinking about intra-team collaboration: Some colleagues have a sense for what’s going on, others simply don’t. They always need help and guidance, especially if they are supposed to get in touch with people they don’t have to deal with every day.
And that quickly leads to fear, prejudice, stubbornness – which again reduces the quality of information. Actually it even reduces the readiness to look for any information at all.

We know the consequences: Colleagues start to blame each other, questions are understood to be suspicions and wrong information becomes harder and harder to fix – you start to believe in things you know just because you know them, and because it seems to be more comfortable than questioning them.

And maybe the colleagues who asked so many questions during my vacation did not want to blame me… , but they really just needed to know something.

What’s the end of it: Collaboration does also stand for networking and documentation; collaboration tools should also provide information on who did what. Or the other way round: every tool that is of value for the community or is used by a community should provide collaborative features that

• provide public information
• show who did what and who can be addressed for what
• are easily accessible and not just an administrator’s secret.

Then we can clearly say that collaboration adds tremendous value to media.

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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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Does all this new media stuff take us ten years back?

Sometimes I feel like ten years ago: We are creating directories again, portals are as much distibution services as they are integration layers and there are a lot of newbies around, who think that all that is quite interesting, but don’t really get it.

There is also an ugly side in this nostalgia: The veruy old ROI-discussions are coming back, not in terms of “How can we make this more efficient?”, but in terms of “Do we need this at all?”

When I was asked to justify why I recommended this or that media or if I really believed that wikis were something useful a few months ago, I just took it as business as usually: nobody bus anything at first glance, you always have to add some extra spice or – actually more often – you have to give the customers the feeling they are adding some spice, so that it fits their taste.

Now there is more to it: People want to see measurable ROI again, they want to count short term successes in money. Up to how, we had been used to the fact that online media, ecommerce and email are business basics that don’t have to be justified anymore. Now, as short term efficiency rules and social media are complex, diffuse and not easy to understand anymore, I feel more scepticism in companies. They wont tell you that online is crap (actually, some people did already, #anlorenz), but they do already tell that they have to focus on the important stuff now

That’s one of the reasons that gives me the feeling of ten years ago.

The other side is that I’m convinced we have a vast lot of opportunities in corporate media and ebusiness, but also in consumer media. The high amount of communication and media options we have now ask for orientation and moderations – at least for the high number of newbies we have. Where do they come from? In fact, everybody is a newbie. We all can learn everyday, we will always find a lot of new things – and we can easily admit that, because it does not make us look uninformed, but actually very smart.

So I hope to see the rise of some new online magazines soon also in Europe, covering the area of media, their social and theoretical implications, the lifestyle and the business.

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Interaction Audit – test your page and create an objective diagnosis

Josh Williams from Hot Studio had a great speech at Web2Expo on reshaping ebay.

The two outstanding feature were:
he gave a definition of “feel” in “look & feel”
he introduced a well shaped method called Interaction Audit

The feel is an interaction groove – “It can be click-click-click oder clickp-hover-type or click-scroll-type – it does not matter, as long as you don’t start to turn a telephone in an airplane cockpit.”
The target of controlling feel is not only to attract the user, but also to make him feel comfortable, so that he can reserve bigger parts of his mental bandwidth for the content of a site instead of it’s technology.

In the interaction audit (which aims to check and harmonize the feel), they started with
* defining some example workflows: what do users do, what tasks do they perform on the way.
* that led to a task-activities matrix to find out similar activities in different tasks.
* Detailed descriptions of both were collected in a database
* The number and the number of variations in the interactions are now a criteria o quality (links, tabs, forms, mouseovers etc. – 16 different types of reactions/behaviours after you click on a link, 5 different types of forms ertc.)
* in addition to interaction inconsistencies, also task inconsistencies were analysed
* object inconsistencies as well.

This was a base that could be used to define targets, go through the enterprise universe and clean up.

What makes this so great?

It’s all about structuring – shaping and describing a problem is maybe not solving it, but it’s a good start to avoid it in the future.
There is no common taxonomy or reusable usecase for that – it’s up to us to create the best practices and to find innovative ways and solutions.
As long as you don’t forget your goals, there are never to many details – all those small pieces (if kept in a clear structure) will help you understand new problems that will keep arising every day.

Communication and Organization

It is great that intranets are developing into something way bigger than “just” a communication media. They are supposed to be collaboration and cooperation platforms, interactive tools and an interface to legacy systems and business processes.
The last one makes a really big difference: this is were you get from talking to acting. That sounds as if communication was nothing (well, it’s my job, so dont get me wrong), but what I’m trying to tell is that usually communication sets the agenda and makes the decisions (things are determined a lot by the way they are told; think about new products, organizational changes, new managers) but in the case of representing business processes through the intranet, you learn a lot about the limited power of communication:

• you have to understand the processes
• you have to convince the process owners that they bother to explain the processes to you
• you have to represent the processes in a way that others can also understand them
• you have to create the communicative processes that surround the business processes; thats actually some kind of marketing activity
• you have to question yourself if all this is actually worth it or if the world would not be much simpler and clearer if business processes stay where they are and intranets are communication media.

To keep it short: I definitely think that it is way smarter to combine things and make them visible via one source. The intranet should be something like a trademark – brought to you by your Intranet. It’s the first and single access point, and it provides all the information you need. Maybe not in all available depths, but it tells you were to go.