We moved

We moved this blog to

http://www.themashazine.com/blog

The new feed will come from:

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.

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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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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