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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. |
Tag: intranetmanagement
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. |
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. |
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. |
Governance bootcamp
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We are currently building the requirements for a new community area on our intranet, including created a ‘trusted source’ for consultants, administrators etc. Having conducted both stakeholder and user research we find ourselves with uncontrolled content repositories, outdated and risky records stores and enormously complicated discovery challenges. This can cause great costs and distraction to the stream???and can be fatal. Part of the solution we hope to introduce is an information governance structure which will deal with the current model and create strategic value???looking ahead for the next move. This can be achieved through… strong governance process Good gatekeeping logical navigation structure improved taxonomy structure enhanced search When the site launches, towards the end of 2009, we will garner feedback from the stream to judge the success and value this has provided. |
Intranet ‘powering up’
| In the summer I gave an internal presentation on our intranet and asked what’s great about the intranet and should be retained, what’s broken and needs fixing and what needs delivering to keep Insite current and valuable.
My responses were
What’s Great
Retained
What’s Broken
Delivering
Governance
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There???s no link back to the top
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An online knowledge community, or one that is clearly from a particular department must be connected into that same department. Community members will quickly lose interest if they think that nobody is listening to and feeding back on what they are saying. They will uncover a community manager who is unable to connect them into the hierarchy or represent the firm in the community. A real connection is needed to make the most of your online community and this can often mean enacting real change in your department. If you are using it to its full potential, an online community should be a way of getting the user voice deep inside your department. You should be talking about the online community in meetings right up to, and including, the top level meeting. This is the way your users are heard in the department, and the way your department can talk to its users. One of our top Partners never addresses a meeting without mentioning his community area on our intranet. No other site on our intranet can make that claim of such top level support?. Its no surprise its the most visited area on the intranet. |
How to stay in touch
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Our intranet is based on a distributed publishing model. In such a model the ‘central team’ is often not responsible for any pages, but merely facilitates other parts of the organization to publish. Its not an ideal model for external sites and can fail miserably internally unless close control/engagement is kept with the publishing community. Last year this publishing community was over 300 people! One of the constant challenges the intranet team (can a duo be called a team?) face is determining how many publishers throughout the firm we can professionally manage? 20? 50? 500? It is simply impossible for an editor to professionally manage 300 publishers. Managing 50 publishers and achieving basic quality standards is very demanding. We have a number of quality and compliance standards with various degrees of enforcment. With no budget for travel or training the challenge for us is to leverage relationships and find ways to engage on a regular basis with our publishing community. We do this through a number of techniques: getting sponsors for all our work conducting training via webinar intranet newsletter intranet blog News updates on our site section pages Insite/Knowledge meetings sponsored by streams. We’ve manage to achieve much with little. How sustainable this approach is as the demands on Insite grows is a question in our minds for 2010. |
So what do you do?
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Been contacted and asked exactly what the Intranet team does. Well..here goes…. I would like to believe we offer a consultancy service in how to manage communities (both task and knowledge based). We also host workshops and lectures on the intranet concept, knowledge sharing and communication on the internal platform. This, among others, include the selection and implementation of a community ??? organizational and in terms of content. We also look to encourage use of collaboration, social media and other digital tools to meet the strategy/goals of the site. We are often involved when a site is dying and in need of revival, or when a department/group faces an implementation of a site for the first time. Knowledge sharing between the persons responsible for the community takes place in our various network groups and communications. We also have a ‘day job’ that includes Global and local governance implementation Site production Content Management Training Technical liaison Technical implementation Oversee the global community management of sites and make sure all the hosts and users are working well Oversee any growth, development, change in direction of any communities Oversee the launch of any new communities/closure of any others that are not working Troubleshoot any big editorial, legal, technical problems with our developers, coders, and management Work on the strategy and integration of the community areas Distribute any updates to any global guidelines Help the Content managers when they need it Monitor the value and quality of the communities Policing of content standards |
Mark Tilbury - digital workplace specialist 