We moved

We moved this blog to

http://www.themashazine.com/blog

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http://www.themashazine.com/blog/1/feed

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.

ROI Dashboard – User Experience Indicator 2

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

We need to measure what we do – that’s what we agreed on in part 1. What do we need to measure? Let’s assume we’re introducing a small state of the art 2.zeroey employee-portal in a not not small company.

The company does already run an intranet, it’s almost ten years old. People are used to it, they always complain but there’s nothing special about it.

What can be improved?

• With the new solution, it’s easier to create content, so editors can work faster.
• They have a better flow in their work, so they make less mistakes.
• The new portal offers a better navigation, so people should find content easier.
• Tags are introduced, so that should also increase findability.
• Search is improved.
• Some basic content features have been introduced, so now it is possible to create slideshows, embed videos, audios and other media – that improves the user experience and saves the editors worktime.
• Basic statistics are part of the tool (tracking the backend and the frontend).
• Wiki functionalities allow fast editing for a bigger and not so skilled audience – that saves training, editor time and user time and reduces errors.
• Blog functionalities introduce new possibilities and enhance communication.
• RSS is used for feeds – in the portal, in blogs, wikis, the other way round; they optimize the use and reuse of content.
• Comments are introduced and are a simple feedback tool for users.
• Tags, clouds, categories in the fronted are just some next generation tools in the frontend, they enhance and train the employee’s media literacy.

These are just words… They have to be transformed into measurable numbers, the numbers have to be interpretable so that they relate to values, and finally the complete package has to be transformed somewhere into money.

The desired improvements have to be transformed into trackable metrics: What are the indicators, can they be found in the cms/portal?

The metrics need to be clustered into rememorable topics, and they need a visualisation: create charts, get sample data, build words and their stories.

Finally, an obvious connection between the indicators, their behaviour and the financial development of the project has to be made visible.

Visualization: Key Values based on easily trackable indicators.

But step by step.

• In the current project, four main values could be identified: Effiency, Satisfaction, Quality, Impact. Each of these values is based on several metrics, these metrics can be combined to several graphs that indicate trends and development.
• This leads to a balanced-scorecard-like environment, where small changes on a basic level are aggregated to effects on a visible level, on a level that can be communicated on a senior management level: You don’t have to say “We are having less usercomments than last month”, but you can say “Our portal is loosing on impact”; you don’t have to talk about painful cms editor-tools, but you can talk about efficience in the work of editors or about increasing or decreasing cost per content or cost per user.
• Changes on the value level finally have to be translated into financial dynamics: where do changes in the techy metrics in the underground make you loose money, where do they make you win some?

Relations and data are quite complex by now, but it is really important to keep the dynamic parts really simple and related to as little data sources as possible – preferrably only one: Everything that comes out of the portal can be measured in the portal; everything else should have to be defined only once.

This is what we will cover in the next part.

Part 1: ROI – social media metrics based on investments in the future

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Applied blogging – why the hell should we blog pt 2

Image via Wikipedia

I talked to a friend yesterday about presenting and spreading new ideas among and audience that is interested, but not yet really ready for it. They are not into the topic , they want something new but they are rather sceptic.

“You should not think about something new, something original”, said my friend. “That challenges people too much – and it’s too much work to shape your idea in a clean and neat way, make it bulletproof and let others try do destroy it.” Is that just lazyness and too much recycling? On the other hand: if your idea is good enough to be made bulletproof, if you spend all that work and time on it – then you should try to sell it.

“I think it is way smarter”, said my friend, “to summarize and comment what others did. There are so many ideas around, famous ideas, and professional thinkers – there is enough to build on. And most people did not get it anyway, the more you repeat it and the more examples and relations you build – the higher the chance that they get excited about what you are telling.”

I think that 98 % of blogs do the same. They tell about what others told, they summarize, they report. So here’s another reason for blogging: It’s a legitimate way to recycle the work of others, to use external knowledge to build your own authority. I think you can go even further: Because blogs usually report things that have been there before, they are a good means to also push new ideas: They are written, they are published, they are usually part of an already ongoing discussion – so the ideas should have some authority…

Is it again vanity? I call it strategy… Know the patterns that rule the world and deal with them.

Applied Blogging: why the hell should we blog?

Why should it be useful to collect personal or teamwide thoughts, ideas, feelings, experiences in an online diary? Why should we do that, why should anybody care about that?
I showed twitter, where I’m following around 30 people (so I’m really modest) to a colleague a few days ago. “These guys must be really lonesome”, she said, “And quite vain.”

So threat #1 could be: Blogging does pretty soon feel like a competition. Who has more, smarter and sexier posts, more comments or followers, gets more subscriptions. So blogging in the company could turn you into the idiot who desperately wants to be mama’s darling.

Another day, I talked to a colleague about a project wiki I’m running where I’m documenting everything that may be important for this project, where I develop requirements and ask users and programmers for their feedback, and where I also run a blog-type news section. “Wow”, he said, “You are not afraid that they steal your ideas and use them somewhere else?” His second concern was about confidentiality: “Are you allowed to talk about all this, is there not a lot of confidential information in your writings, and is anything of that approved?”.
Threat #2 hiding in here is a fear of saying too much: either because you can not fully control the use of your ideas once they are published, or because you have to stand up without management backup. As a publisher, you’re on your own, you don’t have anyone to strengthen your back. That’s actually threat #3; to some it’s challenging in a positive way, to some it’s a very negative scenario.

So what are the pro’s, why am I running my blog?

Reason #1: Blogs are a perfect tool not only to take down notes, but also to find them again. They are well stored in a chronological way, you have a convenient search, you can use tags  or categories and you can use rss not only to syndicate your content (maybe you are not that famous), but also to produce different views on your content: Send people a link to all your writing on tag xy, and you don’t have to bother them with searching or browsing in your blog. To me, that’s efficient communication.
That takes me quite directly to reason #2: Blogging forces you to structure your thoughts. Once you’ve written something down, you can get it out of your head. But it will only stop to haunt you, if you’ve made more of it than just some ambigous keywords – in a few weeks, you will only understand it, if somebody else can also understand it. So blogging is a way of talking to yourself. That’s maybe why threat #1 is sometimes quite a strong one…
(to be continued)