beatnic - just wondering

Wearing my IBF hat, I’m involved in setting up and running a 24 hour online event in June this year.

It’s called IBF 24 and is being designed as an online conference focusing on intranet innovation.

Starting at 11am GMT on June 18th, the plan is to follow the sun, so there are three consecutive zones each with an eight hour timetable. This means wherever attendees are in the world they should be able to choose a zone that doesn’t require getting up in the middle of the night, unless they want to of course.

There will be live intranet demos from companies who’ve cracked people-finding and established social computing as part of their working environment. Keynote speakers will cover subjects including innovation, search, design and the future of work.

For IBF member organisations, there are 10 places available as part of the annual membership. Non-members need to pay to register.

We’re setting up a site to support the event, more on that soon.

Also we’re looking for ideas to share about how people are using the day to promote their intranet, or some aspect of it, within their company.

If you work on your company intranet this day might provide a good focus for raising awareness within your company of the intranet itself. You could host an intranet day within your company, with awards handed out for the most usable service or site.

As mentioned in a previous post, you can ask twitter to text message or instant message you whenever any term you’re interested in is mentioned in a tweet.

As well as tracking East Dulwich, I’ve been tracking a few others including “intranet”

It makes for some pretty interesting reading but was hard to share online until I came across Tweet Scan courtesy of David Sterry the other day.

It’s a twitter search tool with an RSS feed of your search results…

You can filter your search to individual people on Twitter or have it search the entire public timeline.

Also you can add the search to your browser’s dropdown list of search engines.

That’s mighty handy.

And through it I’ve found blogs by Anu Gupta and Jeremiah Owyang, which I’ve added to my intranet reading list.

Are you involved in intranet (in its broadest possible definition) content, design, management, publishing, thinking, consultancy, evaluation or strategy?

What’s on your reading list?

I’ll kick off with my blog subscriptions tagged “intranet” in google reader (view posts/subscribe to this list):

• Column Two - James Robertson in Australia, who is also behind the Intranet Innovation Awards.
• Currybetdotnet - Martin Belam, who I first met and worked with at the BBC when he helped us with our intranet search strategy back in 2002.
• Dilbert - keeps me sane.
• FastForward - stuff on so-called “Enterprise 2.0″.
• Globally local - locally global - Jane McConnell in France. Useful international and strategic perspectives. Annual global survey giving excellent insight and evidence if anyone needs to build a business case for an intranet.
• InfoDesign: Understanding by design - digest of design-related posts and articles (including interaction design, user experience design and information architecture) compiled by Peter J. Bogaards.
• Inside out - A relative newcomer to the intranet blogging scene and a must-read from Richard Dennison at BT.
• Intranet Blog - Toby Ward in Canada. Has worked with numerous companies and seen a lot of intranets - useful case studies and advice on avoiding common pitfalls.
• IBF Blog - Rotating bloggers on a monthly basis offering insight and analysis from research and evaluations of dozens of company intranets. [I wear an occasional Intranet Benchmarking Forum hat]
• Is this wisdom - Richard Hare on networking and sharing ideas.
• Learning Trends - Elliott Masie’s newsletter on the world of learning, work and technology.
• New Thinking by Gerry McGovern - killer content and the long neck.
• The Obvious? - Euan Semple, who started the BBC’s internal blogs, wikis, discussion forum, profile pages long before anyone was talking about Enterprise 2.0 or other such neologisms. Thought-provoking ideas and ruminations on social media, the internet, society and work.
• Signal vs. Noise - The blog from 37 signals makers of Basecamp and other useful, usable and desirable web apps.
• Webcredibles - Accessible writing on accessibility.

This gives me a manageable amount of info and insight and points to other conversations going on that are relevant too.

It’s difficult deciding what to tag “intranet” and what to tag “intranet-related” - as Richard Dennison asks what is an intranet after all?

I’ve tagged quite a lot, including the frequently updating news-based sources, as intranet-related to try to see the wood for the trees as it were.

Right, wrong, good, bad? Too introspective? What’s missing? What do you recommend?

Bill Ives at FastForward blog writes about how the software company Serena has adopted Facebook as its corporate intranet.

They’re using it to take their 800 global employees through a big change programme. They’ve created a few custom apps that staff can use in their private network on Facebook. Apparently it’s boosted staff morale.

This is good news. Not because Facebook is the answer, but because it’s getting people thinking about the possibilities of intranets and moving the conversation on.

Much research has been done and the number one thing people want their intranet to help them with is finding other people.

What better way to help people find each other and the answers to their questions than by focusing the intranet - or rather the digital workspace - around people.

This very much fits in with my model which I call the DNA of the digital workspace - more on this soon - which places people at the centre of getting our work done.

Before the internet, dying was a simple business.

What you said, wrote, created in your lifetime lived on in people’s memories, passed down the generations and turned to myth. And sometimes these had more tangible manifestations, in letters, books, works of art, buildings and of course children.

Nowadays more and more of us have digital identities, and in many cases multiple digital identities. Every time we create a new profile on a website we’re creating another instance of ourselves, sometimes who we are, sometimes who we want to be.

What happens to all those accounts we’ve set up, frozen in virtual time?

What will your virtual legacy be? What will your last blog post say? Your final tweet on Twitter? Was it your turn in Scrabulous? Will your Flickr photographs gradually fade and curl at the edges?

Should we, as a friend of mine wondered, put all our login and password information in our will? And what then?

Yesterday about thirty Intranetters (thanks to Andrew for pointing me towards the yahoo group) got together in central London.

It was a really good event - a kind of intranets anonymous. Big thanks to Simon Hill and Rod McLean for their warts’n'all stand-up routines. It certainly seemed quite a cathartic experience for all involved. Intranutters.

This morning a text message arrived from Twitter. I’m tracking the word “intranet” - more on subject-tracking in twitter here. It was none other than Richard Hare, yesterday’s whistle-blower and one of our hosts.

We touched on Sharepoint and accessibility, or rather the lack of it. Maybe we should set up the SHarepoint Accessibility Group - a self-help sub-group of Intranetters.

Some questions from the event…

1. If you could build an intranet from scratch, what would you start with? And what would you tell people it was for?
2. What are the best prizes to offer if you’re running a competition on your global intranet?
3. Management won’t allow blogging because it might encourage cyberbullying. Where do you start?
4. Is there a precedent in UK law (or any other country for that matter) where a company has been taken to court for an intranet not meeting DDA accessibility requirements?

Just wondering…

• What the Google Intranet Looks Like
  Google inside.

  Via tracking “intranet” on Twitter.

  (tags: google intranet)

It’s time to drag the intranet in to the twenty-first century. We need to think of the intranet as the digital workspace, or “my web at work.” As a worker I need access to all the tools and information I need to do my job. It’s becoming increasingly likely that not all of that lives inside the company firewall. And I won’t always be at my desk.

Gone are the days of the intranet being a single destination, a “website”, an online publishing - or rather broadcasting - medium for the internal communication function. Sure, there’s a place for internal comms on an intranet, just as there’s a place for payroll giving, blogs and project support tools, but it’s much more. It’s my web at work.

This new definition helps to clarify the role of the central intranet team in any organisation however large or small.

As Matt Jones once put it when discussing bbc.co.uk, “We’re not building a website, we’re building part of the web” - or words to that effect.

The role is not to lock down but to open up. To make the digital workspace as navigable as possible, and to make everything within it as findable and usable as possible.

If you have web apps like travel booking systems or services like discussion forums running on your intranet you already have personalisation. Whether it’s any good is down to how well it’s designed and presented and how it feels to use.

For company intranet homepages I don’t think there’s any question that personalisation will become increasingly common. The likes of Netvibes, iGoogle, MyYahoo and even Facebook have raised people’s expectations in this area.

The risk is that companies confuse personalisation with customisation and jump on the bandwagon, rushing to provide all the latest functionality before considering what people really need.

So here are three definitions that should help when thinking about this:

Top-down content

Content that’s there because you work for Company X. Examples include share price information and company-wide announcements.

Personalised content

Content that is there because you’re you. You are in a particular role, in a particular department, at a particular level. How? Either the system knows who you are, or you’ve told it about yourself or a combination of the two.

Customised content

Content (and sometimes positioning and formatting) that you’ve chosen based on a particular set of options. You have subscribed to the latest news about design and have chosen to have the headlines appear in a list on the right hand side of the page. You’ve chosen a particular look and feel for the page.

There is absolutely no reason why the three types of content can’t share the same space. Good interaction and visual design is essential to ensure people can clearly distinguish between them.

If the content is relevant and well presented, intranet personalisation can help make the digital workspace more joined up and navigable, and it can help employees have a better understanding of their overall work environment.

See also: Gerry McGovern’s recent article Intranet personalization: does it work?

I get asked regularly - particularly by colleagues in the intranet/enterprise portal management world - how many people use the discussion forum, wikis and blogs which live on Gateway, the BBC’s intranet, which I manage.

Below are some snapshot numbers I pulled together in May.

To give some context, the monthly reach for Gateway is roughly 30,000 people.

In themselves they don’t tell a story. For some narrative we need to look at our trend data and qualitative research.

talk.gateway (discussion forum)

23,204 members have posted a total of 31,951 replies within 6,736 topics in 102 visible forums.

496 “Thanks” in the last 6 months

Gateway wiki usage

Examples: Future Media & Technology Projects overview, BBC Monitoring
staff map, Global News Division “Big Stories”

Blog usage numbers were unavailable, but they continue to thrive.

These tools were started by Euan and John in Digilab - they’re now looked after and developed by my team on behalf of our colleagues.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again… Netvibes is quite simply everything an intranet (homepage) needs to be.

As well as being a great way of managing all my stuff on the internet of course.

David Lucas and Louise Ferguson are blogging the IBF Live conference at the Barbican Centre in London today and tomorrow.

If you have an intranet check out what folk like Luke Tredinnick, James Robertson and Toby Ward are saying about where the world of intranets is at and where it’s heading…

Oh and here’s a picture I took on my phone on the way in today:

Ever since I saw them and started using them I could see that if we had Delicious, Technorati and Bloglines on our intranet it would change the way we work and our perception of what an intranet is.

It’s something I’ve been presenting on at events recently to fellow intranet professionals.

There are so many reasons why this is important and exciting. Here are three:

• it takes the intranet to the next level and beyond the “firewall” - covering the web, the stuff you can see through your browser (whether it’s hosted internally or externally)
• teams, projects, communities of interest, communities of practice have new ways to share information, including bookmarks
• potentially fascinating (and useful) insight available from the tag-clouds that start to appear, an organic topology of interests and a real-time overview of what an organisation is thinking and maybe even which way it’s going

Thanks to Chris Tubb for sending me a link to this article by David Millen, Jonathan Feinberg, and Bernard Kerr of IBM about the excellent sounding stuff they’ve been up to in this field.

It never really existed anyway.

It’s no longer useful to call it the intranet. It’s just a concept. Everyone has a different idea of what the word means. That adds complexity. That means risk.

As an idea, a construct, it’s been useful, but moving forward it’s more of a hindrance. Who does it serve to call it the “intranet”?

The three ages of the intranet:

1. Attic geeks and vanity publishers
2. Structure and order, command and control
3. The death of the intranet

1. Attic geeks and vanity publishers

No law and order

Unmanaged content, unmanaged contributors

Poor/no navigation, poor/no search

Anarchy and chaos, and some quite good stuff

And why not? Now that the internet is here, everyone’s a web designer (right?), everyone’s a publisher – why shouldn’t that be true of intranets?

2. Structure and order, command and control

Control centre, rules, policy

Consistency, branding, homogeneity

Standards (W3C, design, editorial, accessibility…)

Search, Navigation

Framework, Structure

CMS, workflow, version control, templates

Governance

3. The death of the intranet

Intranet merges with desktop to become “screen-based working environment”

Oh and it’s still a portal if you want it to be but that’s always just confused things

Helps people do their job, perform tasks

Understands context

Attempting to control everything has stifled creativity and innovation and the willingness to share information and ideas with colleagues

But some of the online applications are starting to pay dividends, provide ROI. Particularly those which conducted user research as part of the design process and didn’t simply expose the inner “buiness-system” workings leaving people flummoxed and exasperated!

CMS has worked for some people and some content, but is not the panacea

One size doesn’t fit all

New stuff is cropping up all over the place – but it’s not all inside the organisation

Social bookmarking, folksonomies, blogs, wikis, RSS feeds, conversations on discussion forums

How do we keep track of it all?

How do we keep control?

Do we want to? Do we need to?

Contextualise content. If content is king, context is god.

Make it relevant.

Combine taxonomies (local top-down to the systems they describe, controlled classification system) and folksonomies (bottom up, how people out there have described the stuff)

Stuff out there is as relevant and useful as stuff in here

The firewall is a hindrance

It’s not the intranet anymore, it’s a (mainly) screen-based extension of what I do (when I’m working, maybe)

But I still need a way in.

Well, not just one way in…

Now… what should we call these ways in?