Social architecture

April 9, 2009 at 8:08 am · Filed under Collaboration, Communities, Culture, Enterprise 2.0, Intranets, Web 2.0, Work Design, social media, social networks

I’ve been working lately on two projects with companies building social networking platforms with a purpose. While some aspects are clearly around technology, features, and the like, there are also the subtle aspects that go into understanding how these sites will be used. In a meeting with one of the clients, we talked about this difficult area of how to ensure that the use of the site aligns with its purpose: will people interact on the topics that we want them to, will the site discourage irrelevant content or social tourists from joining?

The word “social architecture” came into my head (or all of our heads simultaneously, it’s always hard to tell, isn’t it, when an idea emerges from the collective consciousness in a conversation?).

Like a good web 2.0 doo-bie, I tweeted that I was interested in using the term but needed to understand it more. My friend and colleague, Andrew Gent, tweeted back a definition, but then went on to do much more: he researched it, thought about, and has written a wonderful blog post, Social Architecture, that offers the definition that he tweeted back to me:

Social architecture is the conscious design of an environment that encourages certain social behavior leading towards some goal or set of goals.

Andrew’s blog details the current use of the term with respect to social media as well as its history in the field of architecture. When I began my own superficial search, the thread I followed was biased toward the design of the interaction of various social media (Sam Huleatt: “To me, social architecture is best thought of as a cross between three elements: interface design, social media functionality and user engagement strategy.”) which didn’t reflect what I needed. Andrew has, I think, hit on the more sociological and social engineering (without the negative connotations of that term) disciplines needed to shape a user’s experience.

While Andrew’s context is the corporate intranet, where it is possibly simpler to design intent and purpose into the environment, my work is currently leading me to social networks in the world, a case where an individual company wants to draw people into a network to expand its field of vision and expertise.  No answers yet, but Andrew’s exposition is a terrific start and I thank him very much.

Web 2.0 & the Enterprise. A Symbiotic Relationship

February 3, 2009 at 9:57 pm · Filed under Collaboration, Communities, Enterprise 2.0, Intranets, Web 2.0, social media, social networks, social tools

I spoke at the Social Networking Conference in Miami two weeks ago on “Web 2.0 and the Enterprise: A Symbiotic Relationship.” As someone who’s advised Fortune 1000 companies on Enterprise 2.0 strategies as well as their Social Marketing ones, I see those two worlds blurring very much.

Historically, they’ve been treated as two very different beasts but I believe with the consumerization of the enterprise and the portability of social graphs the walls that divide the two are breaking down. And not just that but to do one effectively, an organization will need to be practicing the other as well. View my deck from the conference.

Opinions on Nielsen’s 10 Best Intranets Alertbox

January 9, 2009 at 12:16 pm · Filed under Intranets

Jacob Nielsen has just published his thoughts on the 10 Best Intranets for 2009. Now I’ve been following Nielsen for a number of years and his intranet rankings too while leading teams that designed intranets for 30,000 employee plus companies and publishing best practice reports. Needless to say, I know the intranet space well and have an opinion on it.

I invariably feel that the Nielsen rankings are more a reflection of how he defines the intranet space than what denotes a best intranet. The reason is that his definitions of what an intranet is, how it should be measured and results are all left a tad bit vague for me. Don’t get me wrong, the intranets he chooses are stellar and his guidance is strong but there some opinions of his that I contest. So here’s a critical look at some of the points that he’s highlighted in the article where he introduces the top intranets.  

The biggest trend that he sees is in the growth in the number of employees supporting an intranet. That seems strange to me. I would have thought that with the move towards social applications and self organization, the core team supporting the intranet would have gotten smaller rather than larger. Is his opinion based on a statistically significant sample of all intranets or based on the composition of submissions?

Nielsen argues that intranets are getting more strategic by virtue of their team sizes, reporting lines and the functionality on them. I agree they’re getting more strategic but I think that’s largely because intranets are integrating with the other parts of an enterprise infrastructure. Also, the intranets are now knowledge management and social network driven tools more than ever capturing the tacit information that resides in people’s heads. That’s what’s making them strategic too. Its important to remember that its not just about team sizes, reporting lines and rich uses profiles. They matter but there’s more to the story.

I like the attention being given to the social network and collaboration features in the article. CEO blogging also gets a mention. That’s along the lines of what I’ve been seeing in the intranet space too. And quite frankly, these are obvious trends. What I do wonder about it is the participation from employees on the CEO blogs. Also, does the CEO blogging replace top down email communication? I was a little surprised to see no mention of wikis. Why was that? Are they not getting enough attention or are they badly implemented. I’d be interested in learning more about that.

The article also talks about personalization and customization taking hold. That makes sense but I must admit the type of personalization being discussed is still rather rudimentary. Customizing links, and creating customized reports are intranet elements that I’ve seen for years. Those are important but I’ve started to see a lot more from intranets - personalization driven by the composition of a person’s social network and usage patterns, customization based on the time period (end of quarter versus a normal day) etc. I’m surprised that some of those more advanced solutions don’t get mentioned.

And lastly, I found the extrapolation about Sharepoint intranets unusual. Don’t get me wrong, Sharepoint is a great platform for intranets but as with a lot of the other thoughts in the article by Nielsen, I think it is unfair to generalize about the state of all intranets without talking about sample sizes and being statistically significant with the data.

So here’s my plea - next year please share the total number of submissions for the awards, the countries from where the submissions came from and categorize the submissions by size (employees using the intranet). Without that data, it is hard to pay too much attention to this list of the 10 Best Intranets for 2009.

It is worth noting that my agency did not submit any intranets for the awards last year. We do buy the reports often because they’re still insightful.

Fighting Internal Spam that Hurts Productivity

November 20, 2008 at 8:21 pm · Filed under Change Management, Collaboration, Intranets, KM

Apparently, President Obama will not be allowed to have his blackberry with him. It is a security risk and he wouldn’t be in compliance with the Presidential Records Act if he carried it around. Imagine that. An efficient use of technology is a security risk. But then it got me thinking. Do organizations depend too much on email? Has email become a lazy way to communicate and collaborate? With all the copying and blind copying going on in emails, is it serving as more of a distraction than a productivity enhancer? 

A recent IDG report highlighted that there will be 40 trillion inbox clogging spam e-mail messages this year resulting in smart companies building separate email system - email systems that are detached from the Internet.On the surface, it may seem excessive to build a private email system to avoid spam. But the strategy does have merits. Its not that employees won’t be able to email the outside world (many of them need to just to do their jobs) but rather it’ll separate external email from internal communications.

Now lets see if we can take this thought process a little further. What if employees were limited to say a hundred emails a day. And if they went over that limit they were charged 25 cents per email sent. What would that do to the organization? Would it mean more meetings? More stopping by each other’s desks? Better and more efficient uses of the corporate intranet? A reduction in knowledge sharing? Increased productivity as employees would be spending less time cleaning up their inboxes? 

It is hard to know but it might be one way to fight what I’m going to call “internal spam” just as private email systems fight public spam. This doesn’t get much attention but I’m willing to bet it hampers productivity and fuels laziness. 

Intranets in a Profile. LinkedIn to shake up things?

November 2, 2008 at 10:54 am · Filed under Collaboration, Enterprise 2.0, Intranets

Not surprisingly and in a very smart move, LinkedIn has expanded its platform to allow professionals to add specific applications to their profile. On the surface, this appears to be just a copy of the Facebook Application Platform strategy, but in reality its quite different. And it marks LinkedIn’s most major assault on the traditional intranet.

So first some facts about LinkedIn Apps. It launched with 10 applications from 8 big time developers. LinkedIn users (and there are 30 million of them) can now add SlideShare and Google presentations,  Amazon reading lists, Huddle Workspaces, Wordpress blog posts and Box.net applications among others. If you look at the list carefully, you’ll notice that many of these applications when stitched together form the core of an enterprise intranet. Especially when you add the fact that LinkedIn itself is a living people finder that’s more complete than anything behind the firewall. 

Why does this matter? It’s not going do very much for the largest of enterprises. They still need their secure intranets, with their dashboards and business applications. But for everyone else, this becomes a much easier way to collaborate and share information especially among small and medium sized businesses. Given that the smaller you are, the more you need to collaborate with people outside your company, LinkedIn Apps provides the perfect platform. Everybody already has a username and password and are familiar with the interface.

I’m willing to bet that within the next year if LinkedIn Apps plays its cards right, players like Zoho, Basecamp, Intranet Dashboard, WebExOffice and Intranets.com will find themselves losing customers. Now, the current version of LinkedIn Apps is quite light and unlike Facebook which allowed anyone to build an application on the platform, LinkedIn has been very selective in who they partner with. In its current incarnation, LinkedIn Apps can’t compete with any of those other hosted intranet solutions. But that can change quickly. And when it does, those competitors will be in trouble especially because everyone is already using LinkedIn for some purpose or the other and it allows its users to collaborate with people outside the firewall too. 

In a nutshell, this is a great move by LinkedIn and with their cautious approach similar to Apple’s first iPhone launch with its limited applications, they’re being sensible and strategic in how they play in this space. Now lets see how many of the 30 million LinkedIn users adopt these applications or should I say “Intranet in a Profile” offerings? 

Intranets are not just intranets anymore

October 21, 2008 at 9:25 am · Filed under Collaboration, Intranets

I spent the better part of yesterday locked in a brainstorming room with a client and my team as we discussed what a next generation intranet should look like. I was struck by how little some business assumptions have changed in the last few years. We forget these assumptions as we strategize, design and build next generation intranets. Here are a few of those assumptions.

 1. Intranets are about Lunch Menus and People Finders. Everyday intranet managers around the world try to make a strong case for why the intranet is a strategic tool. Why its about collaboration and insights and how it can transform an organization bottom up. Unfortunately, many senior managers and employees across the board still think of it just in terms of lunch menus, people finders and human resources information.

 2. Intranets are an HR & and Corporate Communications asset. Intranets are very important to HR and Corporate Communications, but its extremely important to other departments and teams as well. It can be an effective medium for employees to share information and collaborate among themselves. That doesn’t have to happen outside the intranet.

3. Intranets aren’t mission critical business applications. Here’s the biggest misnomer. Intranets can be mission critical and they can and should integrate business applications. Remember the portal craze of the late 1990s? That wasn’t a mistake, it was just ahead of its time. Employees are demanding single, consolidated, dashboard interfaces that serve as a true virtual desktop. Some intranets play that role. Others can too as well.

4.  Intranets are browser based and top down in nature. Who’s to say that intranets need to be browser based. The best intranets take advantage of social technologies, desktop applications (like widgets) and mobile solutions to provide greater value to employees where and when they want it. Its not about the intranet, but about employee productivity using digital technologies.

Intranets have a long history in most organizations dating back to the mid 1990s. That’s what drives its current perception. The organizational silos within IT departments that separated intranet ownership from other business applications made sense at the time but don’t anymore. Today, employees demand more consolidated interfaces where all the information, collaboration, self service and business application access needs are met.  Its probably time for the departments to reorganize to more directly align with employee expectations and less by application ownership.

ROI for Social Computing

August 26, 2008 at 3:01 am · Filed under Collaboration, Enterprise 2.0, Intranets, KM, Web 2.0

I made a presentation recently in Sydney to local government on intranets and how I think they’re dead.

Around 10 years ago, we held great hopes for our intranets. For our investment [1] we expected the technology would deliver cost savings, working efficiencies, collaboration and best-practice knowledge management. By 1998, we’d spent about $10.9 billion USD [2] on corporate intranets, yet our ideals about collaboration remained relatively unrealised with COIs ignoring the strategic value and assuming that an intranet’s only purpose was to serve as an information repository. After spending billions of dollars we’d received little more than an electronic filing cabinet.

Part of the failure to realise the value of intranets was our misplaced trust that the newly emerging web technology would somehow deliver something that is essentially a people process, because collaboration and knowledge management is about people, not technology. The other failure is in our management practices and a missunderstanding about how people work — that information is somehow a product, a Word document for example, that, like an engine in a car factory, is produced by the end of a hard days work.

There’s no return on investment to be had in this paradigm. As my AppGap colleague Jon Husband writes in his article The Design of Knowledge Work, it reflects a very Tayloristic view of the world, where efficiency is to be had by motivating workers to behave in more efficient ways, rather than to think smarter. Certainly, you can offer better tools like large intranet repositories with a wealth of information inside, but the synthesis of information into knowledge is a difficult task when the person who created a piece of information, or a similarly empowered individual, is not there to help you know where to look, understand what you find, and then assimilate it.

The truth of most modern work is that we analyse data and information and reach out to our networks in order to gain access to knowledge. We collaborate on ideas and then have a burst of work that reflects the sharing of ideas. And, of course, once we have produced something, we then tend to socialise it again within our networks in order to refine the ideas we’ve produced. This is knowledge work in action and people are at the centre of it.

Of course, when I say collaborate I mean individuals engage in a range of activities, from using the telephone or meeting face-to-face, to using Twitter or engaging others through blogs, in order to reach out to people (not technology like traditional intranets), in order to socialise ideas, create new thinking, help refine old ideas and make them better.

This is where modern organisations find their investment in social computing tools is paying off. Tools, like Twitter, give employees instant access to their trusted network of colleagues, friends and experts. Blogs allow people to have access to other people’s thoughts in a storytelling style that communicates in a much more personal and effective way than a clinical report ever can. And then, of course, individuals can comment and ask the author a direct question and have a discussion that leads into the use of other social computing tools.

Its this access to people that the investment in social computing tools brings. When considering closing down the walls to applications like Facebook or Twitter, consider the impact on workers inability to access the experts in their professional networks. When considering bringing social computing tools into the organisation look at how they will support and strengthen communication within your internal communities of practice. This is the ROI for social computing and when used as part of an array of tools that help connect people, facilitate communication and collaboration, then it can rejuvenate your intranet and make it live!

M

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1. Melcrum Internet Survey (2001)

2. Computerworld (1999) $10.9 billion spent on intranets. International Data Corp Briefs, 42, 26 July.