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Two projects we are currently working on emphasis a paradox in the world of knowledge and information. There’s a constant tension between spreading information around and locking it down. In collaboration and knowledge we have a natural inclination towards access – our focus is all about helping others find and access the information that will enable them to be more effective. But controlling access is equally important. Whether for compliance, privacy, or counter-intelligence, restricting access is a critical component of collaboration risk management.
Our current work provide practical insight on both sides of this tension. One side of our role, developing the knowledge communities for both streams, focus on finding channels to share information and knowledge. The other task, equally important in terms of risk and compliance, is how to prevent information leakages.
How information is shared or controlled is a key theme for both communities. So far, we are looking at technological tools to help them control usage. Another card maybe to increase the knowledge of community members (i.e. the stream) to the risk associated with some access. That is a harder nut to crack – and more expensive to implement. |
Intranets Live
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Really enjoyed by session co-hosting Intranets Live yesterday. I thought the quality of presenters were excellent. Some notes I made during the broadcast are below: Laurel Castiglione (PGE) talked about the first 100 days as an intranet manager. My thoughts were:
Roie Edery (IPC) talked about Yammer. My musings on Yammer were:
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Communities – the soul of our intranet
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Our intranet is focused around the services we offer our clients. Each service has a community presence on the intranet – some thriving, some not – allowing document management, communications and aspects of collaboration. Most of our musings on to intranet stakeholders focus about communities. We have a belief that people share knowledge to a far greater extent within communities – groups they know, understand, relate and engage with (rather than capture/management systems that failed in the late 90s), hence much of our work is about building online communities as the foundations of knowledge sharing. My background was in psychology and organisational development so I use work such as McMillan & Chavis (1986) with a hint of psyco babble to form a strategy for community building. We generally take the following 5 step approach when looking at building the community: 1 – Sponsorship. Ensure you have the right level of sponsorship that has the mussel and weight within the community and the organisation 2 – Governance. Ensure there is a strategy, process for escalation, management structure, workflow, risk assessment and a good business case before any build takes place 3 – Content. Look at the content available or required to be created 4 – Technology. Source the correct technology for the content requirements 5 – Training – provide publishers the tools and knowledge to sustain their community 6 – Adoption – once built and launched work with the community to ensure the sustainability of the site Within these processes come tasks such as stakeholder collaboration, user surveys, design briefs, user testing etc. One of the benefits of building a virtual presence is that the aspects of sharing knowledge in the physical space becomes more realistic to users within the community. |
Back to basics
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Just read the IBF e-newsletter regarding the hottest topics in the intranet world. Usability, maturity and ‘inside out’ all hit the right note, however, for me I think the last few months internally have been ‘going back to basics’ (d’oh! how I dislike sounding like ex-Prime Minsters) but its been a case of working with our communities to iron out issues such as good navigation, search, and listening to the user to enhance the user experience. I guess these traits will never change on the operational side of an intranet. I think from day one of my browser career the internal online offering was always about good search and a decent employee directory. 12 years on I’m not sure much has changed for the vast majority of users. |
The value is in the playground
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I always use analogies to simplified and understand the world of online. Its helps me make sense of things. At my job interview back in 2000 I used analogies for cooking and football to explain my methods.
When I first started developing websites I used the analogy of a supermarket, linking comparisons with usability, unique visitors, length of visits etc – you should have heard it, a master class if I say so myself.
The intranet world has moved on and my analogy now for intranets is a school. At a school we have formal classes, play time, assembly, registration and after school activities. The structure of an intranet is the same. We have formal document areas (class time); assembly (internal communications); registration (all the HR elements within the site); and communities (the various after school activities). Play time is where we introduce the collaborative elements of an intranet. It’s unstructured but it’s where the intranet can provide most value. Looking at our role within intranets we could see ourselves as playground assistant – monitoring what occurs in the playground, ensuring nothing dangerous is happening, and then learning, reporting and structuring around what we learn from these social collaborative gathering. By the way the intranet canteen menu is dinner time.
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You Got to Dance With Them What Brung You.
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Just finishing off an article for our monthly intranet newsletter. Its part of our adoption approach to ensure we have an active, engaged group of intranet stakeholders – those that run and drive the strategy and activity within our knowledge communities on our intranet. Apart from the monthly e-newsletter we also produce a blog, a feature area on our intranet and, where resource permits both physical and virtual meetings with key stakeholders. Our strategy is to inform, guide and motivate through a mixture of internal news, technical updates and an drop of external best practice. Like most organisations we have a mixture of eager participants and those that go through the motion. We produce a ‘recommended’ profile of someone who would make a good stakeholder to lead an online community area. In some cases this is considered, in many cases ignored. So goes the fate of an online community. But as they say in Texas..You Got to Dance With Them What Brung You. |
Knowledge sharing on a shoestring
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Here is my methodology of doing Knowledge sharing on a shoestring. The focus has shifted from ???collection??? to ???connection???. No known resource is now given to any firmwide ‘capture/collection’ systems we have (employee directory, project workspaces etc) therefore we have a decentralised approach. The emphasis has been on creating a informal structure within our business units, based around a ‘KS supporting team’, business unit Knowledge Champions with a core team behind them. Stream Knowledge Champions have strong business knowledge and advanced social competencies. The core stream teams have substantial technical competencies The KS supporting team provide support for initiatives and projects in the start-up phase and implementation responsibilities are then generally transferred to the business unit champions and core team. A key advantage of the decentralised structure is that the KS ‘ supporting team’ can be flexible/fluid to meet the needs of the business units??? structure “Embedded within business units, the Knowledge champions can immerse themselves in the business of the business and deliver greater value A second benefit of the decentralised structure is that the KS supporting team can objectively audit and measure the performance of the knowledge champions. By uncovering strengths and weaknesses in the KS implementation within individual business units, the core team provides the required checks, balances and governance framework”. A ‘knowledge positioning statement has been created, revised and agreed with key business units. From this statement each stream are adopting their own knowledge sharing strategies. I have learned not to invest large amounts of resources or make sweeping changes across the organization in a short period of time to get quick returns from knowledge sharing. KS is a slow and incremental process. Economy in all aspects of deploying a KS solution, leads to a greater acceptance of KS and yields better results over time. That’s the plan anyway! |
Troops on the ground with passion
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On 1st October my firm completed a rebranding programme. The visible effects on the intranet were colour scheme and the switch from illustrations to photo imagery. A number of weeks prior to the switch we looked at the most efficient way this could be done. Schemes were devised and then dropped (i.e. an agent to find/replace jpegs, gifs etc – not all image files could be dropped such as photos of events and individuals). Eventually we fell back on the fail-safe position of manual updates. Leading up to the brand change we spent many nights removing illustrations. On the night of the rebrand we then loaded photos to a number of key pages. We’ve learnt some lessons, particularly becoming stricter on who, how and where photos can be used. A number of intranet stakeholders worked with great passion to ensure their areas complied to the new branding.
It did get me thinking, even after all these years of improved content management systems, some tasks still need the troops on the ground deleting, copying, replacing and uploading. Just confirms to me that one of the main mantras for running an intranet is that its ‘run by people, for people, who need connecting to people’. Technology is useful but passion is key |
Back to the survey
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Been spending the morning putting together an annual survey (using Surveymonley) for one of our top community sites. It’s nearly one year old and usage has been far greater than anticipated. When a community launches we work on adoption programme with the relevant community to ensure we avoid the ‘launch and leave’ approach that are so common. Good sponsorship, governance and adoption ensures sustainable sites. Generally we produce, in collaboration with the community, a survey 3 months after launch, followed up by yearly surveys (would recommend every 6 months by we don’t have the resource for this). Also find some face-to-face and telephone interviews ensure we have a good idea of how the site is meeting the community needs. All the material, although prepared by the intranet team, is sent by the community stakeholders to ensure maximum participation. Generally we get between 35%-45% of the community responding which I believe is fairly high. We target the whole community and individual groups (through key influencers) to ensure high response rates. |
Hassle free sharing
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Always been a fan of Twitter since I first came acros it 2 years back. Why? Because it fits into our way of life. The spare moment on the bus or tube, the mobile to hand allows us to share quite easily. Never been a fan of audioboo. It just doesn’t fit into our pattern of behaviour. I’ll tweet on a bus but wouldn’t start ‘booing’ (is that what its called). The way we share needs to fit into our behavior pattern. Yammer is so easy, email is easy. Too many of our internal systems make us work to collaborate. If I have to do that the battle is already lost. ps – Posterous is soooo easy I love it |
Mark Tilbury - digital workplace specialist 