With a focus on the “digital workplace”, the report has a usefully broad view of the internal environment within organisations. As Jane explains:

NetStrategy/JMC and a number of other organizations use the term “digital workplace” to convey the sense of an eco-system of enterprise platforms and services that enable people to work, collaborate, communicate, develop services and products, and better serve customers.

The focus of this report is primarily the internal digital workplace as it is used by the workforce, although today internal and external digital channels are partially converging in areas such as customer service, team and community workspaces, and social networking.

Drawing on 456 participating organisations, the report is packed with gems and insights, such as:

The social dimension of the digital workplace is expanding as more organizations are experi- menting with social tools.The percentage of organizations that have some form of social me- dia somewhere in their organizations increased by 10 percentage points from 2010 to 2011.

However, the percentage of organizations that assessed the social deployment as “enterprise- wide” did not increase.This is true for the leadership class as well as for the other organiza- tions.

Forty percent of leadership class organizations are not satisfied with their search configuration and results. Dissatisfaction is higher for the other organizations and is over 50 percent .

In 2011, only seven percent of organizations considered mobile a high priority and made significant investments in mobile services for the workforce.

It looks like mobile solutions for the internal workforce will ramp up in the next year, as over 30 percent consider it to be impor tant and have made “some investment”.

These are just a handful of the invaluable findings in the 158 report, with graphs and key figures highlighting points throughout.

This is a must-have report for all intranet teams planing their future. Survey participants will already be receiving their complementary copy, and for the rest, it can be purchased from the Digital Workplace Trends site.

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]

Yet delivering a great intranet in a global business isn’t easy. Typically major intranet projects are run out of head office, with substantial budgets and the latest technologies. In theory, the new intranet is then rolled out across the organisation, to the farthest corners of the globe.

But this is where the problems start. What works in New York, Frankfurt, London or Paris, doesn’t necessarily work in Singapore, Sydney, Beijing or Rio. Resources are tighter, needs are different, and cultures vary.

What some organisations are discovering is that the greatest source of innovation is not the latest technology in head office, but the solutions already developed in far-distant locations.

Frugal innovation

Reading business journals, the latest discussions on innovation focus on what’s becoming called “lean innovation”, “frugal innovation” or “reverse innovation”. This turns on the head the idea that innovation happens in first-world countries, and then pushed out to third-world markets.

Instead, it recognises that necessity is the mother of all invention. With limited budgets and cost-conscious consumers, emerging markets are increasingly developing new products that are both better and cheaper. These can then be brought into established markets as disruptive new solutions.

Perhaps the most well known example is GE’s development of a cheap hand-held medical imaging device in an emerging market. Originally intended to reach hospitals that couldn’t afford the full-service solution, it’s gone on to transform well-established markets throughout the globe.

“It would be like strapping a gold brick to the back of their motorbikes”

Work we did for one global firm provides a similar example in the intranet space. We were responsible for researching intranet needs and issues in Asia, as part of a global project run by Martin White of Intranet Focus.

As part of this, we talked to staff in Singapore. They told us about the troubles they had with using the solutions provided by the head office in Europe. The intranet technologies were too expensive, it was impossible to get support and training with an 8-hour time difference, and every midnight in Europe the servers were taken down for maintenance (which was the start of the working day in Singapore).

They also told us about the even greater challenges faced by sales staff in Vietnam. The standard global solution for sales teams was to provide them for a laptop to use when visiting customers. But what we were told was this: “it would be like getting the sales staff to strap a gold brick to the back of their motorbikes”. (The laptops would be stolen in moments, or destroyed by the rough roads.)

Instead, the local office had developed a handheld solution for a fraction of the price. Head office knew nothing of this solution. More significantly, this solution had the potential to be lower-priced and more effective than the corporate solution, with use throughout the globe.

Uncovering successes

The big advantage of global businesses is that they’re, well, big. More like small countries than companies, there are literally hundreds of individual business units scattered across dozens of countries, each potentially developing their own solutions.

This is a hotbed of innovation. Some approaches will be bad, and should be discarded, but there will also be some gems waiting to be uncovered.

So alongside traditional top-down intranet improvements (which are still valuable), central intranet teams should seek out pre-existing successes. The following approach will help:

1. Seek out innovation. Spend time out of head office, visiting staff in regional locations. Take these “fact-finding missions” out to frontline and operational staff, and look for local ideas that have been previously unrecognised.
2. Give recognition. Celebrate local innovation, both at head office and in other regions. “World fairs” and similar approaches have long been used for this.
3. Pilot in other regions. Take the best of the ideas, and try them out in other countries and business units. Some will succeed immediately, others will fail, and many will be adapted to meet differing circumstances.
4. Spread the successes. Take the most successful ideas, and incorporate them into strategic plans and projects, rolling them out throughout the organisation, alongside top-down activities.
5. Grow a culture of universal innovation. Use early successes to grow a business culture of seeking out (and supporting) innovation throughout the globe. (Model this work on customer-facing strategies that are already in place in many organisations.)

None of this is to say that uncovering and sharing local innovations will be easy. There are significant barriers in terms of travel costs, corporate culture, differences in regional practices, and IT complexity. Despite these hurdles, smart organisations are increasingly realising that frugal innovation applies to staff-focused solutions, and not just to consumer-facing products.

What have you seen work?

“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 I was honoured to give a presentation at the monthly meeting of intranet managers organised by NetJMC. These were some of the world’s largest organisations, across a range of industries. There was a lively discussion around my topic: delivering a mobile enterprise.

The key talking points:

• The latest generation of mobile devices have changed the wider world, but what about within our organisations?
• Start by recognising there are four different mobile scenarios.
• Don’t deliver a “mobile version” of your intranet.
• Instead, focus on the six things that staff want on mobile devices.
• Mobile devices are personal devices.
• Starting developing a mobile enterprise strategy.
• In the meantime, start small, and start delivering solutions (like the ones shown in the presentation).

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.

While there has been quite a lot said about mobile enterprises, and how to deliver them, this has often fallen into the trap of ‘hand waving’ discussions that cover the topic at a very high level.

The reality is that there are many different aspects to enterprise mobility, which need to be delivered and supported in distinct ways.

To help with planning and delivery, it’s helpful to distinguish four types of enterprise mobility:

1. mobile connectivity
2. mobile productivity
3. fieldforce automation
4. desktop replacement

Each of these requires different technology solutions, design approaches, and management models.

[May article, read the full article]

At a basic level, intranets based on SharePoint are just like every other intranet. The same questions of design, structure, management and governance arise, regardless of the technology used to publish the site.

As discussed in the earlier article Promoting the intranet as a service, the intranet should be considered a service, underpinned by a technology product.

SharePoint does, however, introduce some new questions into the intranet planning process. The greatest strength of SharePoint is its breadth of functionality, from content publishing and collaboration, to CRM and application development.

It is this wide range of capabilities that can be so daunting for many teams. Without a clear plan, the results can become a little bit of everything, but no one clear and compelling success.

This article outlines a best-practice methodology for planning SharePoint-based intranet projects. Drawing on the Intranet Roadmap™, it provides a step-by-step approach that every team can take.

The result is confidence from the outset that the project will deliver clear benefits, and an approach that brings together business needs and technology considerations.

Intranet projects on SharePoint need a clear direction

Challenges and opportunities

Intranet projects are not easy at the best of times. Often replacing sprawling legacy sites, they have to meet the needs of a diverse audience with a limited budget and constrained resources.

SharePoint intranets are just like any other technology platform in this respect. Independent of the underlying product, the new intranet needs to be usable for staff, valuable for the business, and easy for the intranet team to maintain.

SharePoint does introduce, however, some particular issues of its own, both positive and negative.

[April article, read the full article]

The client in question has a pretty typical intranet: well-structured and content-rich. Future visions might be expected to include further upgrades to the staff directory, more collaboration tools, two-way communications and more online forms.

One word came up time and time again, however: mobile. From senior management down to the intranet team, everyone described a world in which staff could access enterprise information wherever they were.

This was more than just a mobile stylesheet for the whole intranet. Instead, the desire was to deliver key content (and often tools) that staff need on their mobile phones or iPads.

A key manager described the needs of a key audience, highlighting how often they were away from their desks, and how much time was spent in meetings. They outlined a vision where their mobile devices, based on GPS information, would deliver contextual information and tools based on whether they are at their desks, in the meeting rooms, or at airports.

Powerful stuff. It was also fascinating to see how quickly the consumer experience of modern phones was driving enterprise thinking, much faster than previous technology shifts.

Of course, this is a huge challenge for intranet teams, IT teams, and technology vendors. We’re going to need some quick movement to meet staff expectations!

This is shown in the way that the current crop of mobile applications are designed:

• We are rarely asked to login to mobile applications, once our identity is initially authenticated.
• Our personal identity is a key element of many mobile applications.
• Applications are tailored to our personal needs, providing simple interfaces and a handful of relevant options.
• Location in the real world (my current location) is used in many applications.
• Applications are designed for a single user (“me”), tied to the device itself.

All of this has some big consequences for enterprise solutions.

An impersonal enterprise experience

On the whole, enterprise apps are impersonal. Intranets provide information for everyone, and users are expected to find for themselves what is relevant to their situation. Even when some personalisation or tailoring is done, it is very limited, often restricted to the homepage.

When using enterprise applications, users are often asked to login. These usernames and passwords may vary from system to system, and few applications have a “remember me” option. Once in the apps, users are again expected to work through long menus of all-purpose options.

Replicating this experience when delivering mobile enterprise applications is very problematic. Users, conditioned by consumer apps, will find impersonal enterprise apps to be clunky and frustrating. Worse, the productivity gains hoped for will not be realised, as users struggle through complex options on small handheld devices.

Designing personal enterprise apps

Mobile enterprise apps should be as personal as consumer apps. We know much more about our staff and their needs than application developers know about consumers. Staff have a long-term engagement with the business, rather than the fleeting interest of consumers.

Delivering personal applications simplifies the user experience, and delivers greater productivity benefits. It also means that the full capabilities of mobile devices are exploited, rather than just delivering “handheld desktop apps”.

To do this:

• Have staff login once, remembered for all future uses.
• If this isn’t possible, ensure that staff only login in once per session, with single sign-on provided for all apps and functionality.
• Make personal identity the foundation for every piece of mobile functionality, from the mobile intranet to specific enterprise mobile apps.
• Tailor information and functionality to ensure it is specific to the staff member. For example, the five relevant leave policies should be displayed, not a list of 100 documents. Similarly, menus should list only those HR actions that can be taken right now, not every possibility for the whole organisation.
• Proactively deliver information and notifications, using the functionality of the mobile device to do so in real-time, where possible.
• Exploit the full capabilities of mobile devices, such as targeting information based on the staff member’s current location in the real world.

(Of course, these approaches generate some security and information management challenges. In practice, these may be better handled at the device level, rather than burdening each app with a security straightjacket. As experience grows in delivering enterprise apps, practical approaches will become better understood.)

How will you deliver a personal experience for staff?