It seems like there is an assumption that if collaboration tools are deployed within an organisation, they will be instantly used by all staff in the most productive way possible. This is clearly not the case, a lesson that wasn’t learned from the era of Lotus Notes, and is presently being replicated in the current generation of tools.

This makes the new book by Michael Sampson, Collaboration Roadmap, particularly important. This is the latest masterwork from the undisputed thought leader in the collaboration space, and it provides an insightful view of how to make collaboration tools work.

The book starts by exploring the technology options, through the lens of Michael’s models, including the Seven Pillars and Four Connectors. These help to understand the strengths and weaknesses of different types of collaboration tools, and how they can potentially fit together.

Much of the rest of the book focuses on how to strategically approach deployment and adoption, starting with creating a compelling vision, through to governance and engagement.

Be warned though: this book will make you think. Michael’s greatest strength as an expert and author is creating models and frameworks for collaboration, and this book is packed with them. I would encourage most readers to dip into sections as required, and to use each model at the point of need to guide design and planning.

In short: there’s no other book like this. If want to do collaboration successfully, get this book.

What makes an intranet ‘social’, and what are the differences between ‘social intranets’ and ‘traditional intranets’?

A philosophy and way of working

Social intranets are not a technology, or a specific set of features or functionality. Instead, they represent an emerging view of how organisations should work, and how staff can interact.

The underlying philosophy of social intranets includes:

• recognising that organisations are made up of people, with interests, activities and interactions
• delivering human-friendly solutions that match how people work in real life
• supporting two-way dialogue and interaction between staff
• facilitating cross-organisational communication and collaboration
• enabling staff to be active participants and owners on intranets, and not just passive consumers
• drawing on network effects within organisations, recognising that groups can do more than individuals
• enriching traditional business and internet activities with a social layer

[October article by James Robertson, read the full article]

The first is the move by internal communications teams away from just top-down corporate communications to two-way communication and dialogue.

The second is the rise of collaborative and social tools, which promise to transform how staff find each other, connect, and work together.

Both of these trends have driven the adoption of increasingly sophisticated collaboration tools, including team sites, blogs, wikis, microblogging and rich staff profiles.

While the benefits of these tools are already being seen among early adopters, their power and functionality makes adoption a non-trivial task.

Significant communication, education and change management is required to get staff up to speed with these often unfamiliar tools.

There is, however, a ‘low-hanging fruit’ that has been overlooked on many intranets: commenting on news.

Simple to implement and easy to use, commenting on news delivers many of the desired cultural benefits with less effort than more complex tools.

[September article, read the full article]

Alongside brand-new “social intranets” are traditional intranets still focusing on the fundamentals.
What we’re seeing is a landscape of two-speed intranets. While there is plenty of overlap between the go-fast and go-slow intranets, there are also many differences. If we’re to close the gaps, we need to recognize that there is no one-size- fits-all approach.

Stealing approaches from the public web, the enterprise space is becoming much richer and more vibrant. Collaboration tools of all kinds are being tried and adopted, introducing new ways of connecting staff members. In some cases, organizations are ditching old intranets and replacing them with social intranets that democratize participation.

Beyond the purely social and collaborative space, modern approaches dramatically simplify developing enterprise applications. This has enabled innovative teams to deliver business solutions targeting key needs in months rather than years. This has transformed go-fast intranets into powerful business tools.

While these intranets are the ones that you hear about at conferences, the reality is that they’re still very much in the minority. In these early stages, the right conditions need to be in place to enable this type of innovation. The challenge for these new intranets is to avoid throwing the baby out with the bathwater. In some cases, the lessons hard learned over the past decade have been forgotten, on the idealistic assumption that new technologies trump old problems.

[Editorial in Intranets magazine, read the full post]

“Blogs and wikis are dead.”

This caused quite a stir in the room, and more than a few follow-up questions during the breaks. So I thought I would expand on this statement here. Let’s start with wikis.

Wikis

Wikis aren’t the easiest tool to use. While wikipedia has been a stratospheric success, this hasn’t translated into huge adoption for wikis. Most people don’t know what they are, and this number is falling rather than growing.

One of the problems is wiki markup, which I’ve argued against in the past (wiki markup has no future). Even the wiki products themselves are ditching wiki markup, replacing it with WYSIWYG editing.

So while we should be doing more collaborative content creation, it needs to be simpler and more intuitive than wikis.

Blogs

Let’s face it, blogs have struggled within the enterprise. It’s a great idea to give a voice to senior management and key experts, but people are hesitant to take up the baton. In part, it’s the name “blogs”, which can be quite intimidating. It also takes real commitment to keep blogging, and it’s hard to sustain in the medium to long term.

Why not just add commenting to news? And then open up news so that most (all?) staff can post news items. (This is something I’ll be covering in an article soon.) Better this than a separate “blog central” that competes with other communication channels.

Escaping tools

Both wikis and blogs sell a technology. They are fundamentally geeky tools, alongside RSS and personalisation. The majority of staff don’t really understand them, beyond a vague familiarity with the name.

Am I arguing against collaboration and social tools? Quite the opposite! We need to substantially grow these capabilities within organisations, and spread their adoption and use.

But instead of pushing tools and functionality, each delivered on a separate platform, we should be providing simple, integrated and coordinated experiences. Facebook doesn’t need to provide a “blog central” and “video central” — these are just two elements of the overall solution (they don’t even get a distinct name).

So let’s stop talking about “blogs and wikis”, and instead talk more about helping staff to work better together.

Deploying microblogging involves more than understanding the technology, because it is really about providing opportunities for conversations between staff. The content of microblogging messages can vary widely, from accounts of what staff are working on, and questions for other staff, to updates about products, projects or situations.

The growth in microblogging is a relatively recent phenomenon and its success within organisations varies greatly. Where it has been successful, microblogging has been able to better connect staff, break down hierarchical structures and improve the sense of belonging felt by staff.

As with many of the social media tools, there is an impact on the intranet, particularly on communication channels and siloing of information. This article outlines:

• strategic considerations
• practicalities on how to set up microblogging
• how to drive adoption

Microblogging is a quick informal channel people can subscribe to with a low time commitment. It goes beyond Twitter-style 140-character comments but it is less structured and time-consuming than blogging. Ease of use and high levels of engagement make this a powerful tool to complement any intranet.

(July article by Catherine Grenfell, read the full article)

Yesterday in Stockholm, I gave a presentation at a local IntraTeam community group meeting. A friendly bunch of people, with lots of good conversations (and great lunch!). These were the key points of my presentation:

• The unmanaged spread of collaboration tools is anti knowledge sharing.
• Intranets and collaboration tools can’t afford to compete: both lose.
• Instead, collaboration tools and intranets must be brought together.
• Start by clarifying the role of the intranet and collaboration tools (including using the shop window metaphor).
• Establish good governance for collaboration tools
• Explore the many ways that the two sides can be seamlessly integrated, including simple ways of providing access to collaboration tools.

Yesterday I gave the keynote presentations at Intranätdagarna (Intranet Days) 2011 in Stockholm, Sweden. A friendly crowd, and some great presentations from the other speakers.

The talk shared in this post looked at social tools within organisations, a hot topic for many. My key points:

• There are many different types of “social tools”, under the one umbrella, all working in different ways.
• You can’t change the culture of the organisation using social tools.
• Social tools are only interesting when they help the business, meeting a need or solving a problem.
• Business value is delivered in the way tools are used, rather than from the tools themselves.
• When it comes to business benefits, focus on concrete outcomes (eg customer service, product development), rather than “soft” goals (such as improving communications or knowledge sharing).
• Get out into the organisation, understand operational needs, and deliver great solutions.

The video from British Airways I played was a great hit, as was the $8million of savings from AEP.

There was also palpable enthusiasm for social tools amongst participants at the Intranätdagarna (Intranet Days) conference in Stockholm today. This is feeling like the “topic of the moment” for intranet and comms teams.

There’s no doubt that social tools provide a powerful new way of connecting people with people in organisations. These tools are increasingly effective, easy to use, cheap and transformative. But there’s some serious over-enthusiasm and naïvety about the impact of these tools.

When asked about why social tools are such a focus, comms and intranet teams say:

“We want to help people connect with other people.”

“We want to break through silos to connect the organisation together.”

“We want to enable two-way communication with staff.”

“We want to create a collaborative, knowledge-sharing culture.”

“We want to reshape the way the organisation works together, from the bottom up.”

These are all interesting goals, but in response I have to say:

You can’t change corporate culture using social tools.

Simply rolling out new tools, particularly as part of a pilot, will not magically change the organisation and its culture. There are also growing concerns that collaboration tools will simply reinforce existing silos, rather than break through them.

While there is a clear need and opportunity for social tools, we must:

• set clear, business-focused, objectives for social tools
• recognise where social tools will, and won’t, work
• use tools to support, rather than drive, culture change
• focus on gaining adoption
• be realistic about the cultural impact of social tools

If you have an organisation where business areas don’t work with each other, don’t think that this will be solved by deploying social tools. If there is a business goal of transforming the organisation, by all means support this with the deployment (and adoption) of social tools.

But let’s never forget that connecting people is about people, not the tools we deploy.

For all this, these are deeply unfamiliar tools for most “normal” staff (ie not us). They are not drop-in replacements for our old ways of working, and require different behaviours and ways of thinking.

It is therefore strange to see so many organisations rolling out these tools with little or no training or support. In many cases, there isn’t even an announcement heralding the release of these new tools, with adoption left to organic growth through word-of-mouth.

Is it any surprise, therefore, to see staff replicate their old behaviours in the new tools?

Rich team spaces become online copies of the file shares they were meant to replace, with the same problems. Social tools are used as replacements for all-staff emails, increasing noise rather than reducing it. Collaboration spaces are created as experiments, and then quickly abandoned.

If these tools are meant to transform our organisations, why are we not making the change management effort required to achieve this outcome?

Communication and support

When collaboration and social tools are deployed, they shouldn’t be rolled out quietly. An overall communications strategy is needed to:

• inform staff about the new tools
• educate them on how to use them
• sell them on the benefits
• encourage them to change their working practices
• answer their questions
• help them to be effective

For example, we’ve seen some great videos produced within organisations to promote the adoption of collaboration tools (including in this year’s soon-to-be-announced Intranet Innovation Awards). The Transfield case study also shows what should be done to support and educate staff.

Adoption strategies

Michael Sampson’s book User Adoption Strategies is also a must-read. In it, he compellingly outlines the need behavioural change if collaboration tools are going to succeed within organisations, and provides a simple four-stage model for planning this transformation.

Most importantly, he outlines 20 (!) different change strategies that can be applied to gain adoption of collaboration tools. These range from quick-and-easy activities to major enterprise initiatives; all are worth considering.

This is a masterwork, and it highlights what organisations must do make collaboration tools work. As Michael reminds us, “hope is not a strategy”.

When I work with global organizations to help them define the business objectives of the intranet, we do it from these 3 angles. The problem is when we push each dimension to its logical conclusion, we end up with a technology dilemma.

By using a forum or threaded discussion tool, you can engage your employees around specific topics and challenge them to start talking about topics that matter to them. For instance, Project Managers might discuss the project they are working on along with the status of that project, IT employees may share valuable technology updates, and HR personnel may share links to recruiting best practices. Be sure that the tool allows employees to create a profile and specify the topics they are interested in. This also provides a way for employees to get to know their colleagues and share information.

From a purely practical standpoint, various activity streams, and social software in general, are extra tools layered on top of the current systems a worker has in place.
This is inherently true because we’re not replacing systems of record; social software should be designed to complement them and make them more useful.

[Thanks to Intranet Lounge.]

Prince was wrong – it’s not the internet that’s dead, it’s the intranet. When I talk to clients about intranets as a collaboration hub they cock an eyebrow as if I’m speaking 2003 speak rather than 2010 speak. Some of it may be terminology tedium, but the sentiment is born out of a sense that the intranets of old no longer offer a compelling enough business proposition.

[Thanks to Intranet Lounge.]

An intranet that features multiple social media tools for most or all employees to use as collaboration vehicles for sharing knowledge with other employees. A social intranet may feature blogs, wikis, discussion forums, social networking, or a combination of these or any other Web 2.0 (intranet 2.0) tool with at least some or limited exposure (optional) from the main intranet or portal home page.