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April 12, 2012

Intranets2012 adds two more international speakers

Categorised under: Conferences & presentations

Just when you thought the intranets2012 programme couldn’t get any better, we’ve included two more international experts!

Dion Hinchcliffe of Dachis Group (from the US) will be joining us for a special session on day one of the conference where he’ll present “Transforming intranets with social software to drive performance and value”.

Also joining the speaking programme is Dorje McKinnon of Lincoln University (from New Zealand) who will bring to us the session “The ‘I don’t want to learn anything new’ intranet — a SharePoint intranet for 21 to 75 year olds”.

See the updated Intranets2012 programme for more information.

Have you registered for a post conference workshop yet?

These workshops are filling steadily, don’t miss your opportunity to gain an intensive full day of intensive, targeted learning’s and insight from these three experts:

• Workshop A: Intranets — business cases and user satisfaction (Martin White)
• Workshop B: Practical intranet governance (Rebecca Rodgers)
• Workshop C: Designing intranets that work (James Robertson)

See the post-conference workshops page for full information.

Just a month to go!

It’s now just one month until Intranets2012 comes to Sydney (May 16-18). This will be the biggest intranet event of the year in the region, so don’t miss out on registering.

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April 12, 2012

Using intranets to surface big data

Categorised under: Digital workplace, Interface design, Intranets, Usability & user-centered design

Screenshot courtesy of CRS Australia.

Alongside ‘the cloud’, ‘big data’ sits as one of the hottest topics, in both the business and government sectors. The power of the concept is obvious: organisations are already capturing huge amount of information about customers, why don’t we do something with that information?

Using huge databases, powerful software and the insight from experts, big data promises to have a real impact on how products are sold, and services delivered.

I was therefore interested to read an article in the latest Harvard Business Review (Good Data Won’t Guarantee Good Decisions by Shvetank Shah, Andrew Horne, Jaime Capella) that highlighted two key areas that are being overlooked. The first is that numbers are not enough by themselves to lead to good decision-making. What is needed is widespread ‘information literacy’, particularly amongst management, beyond just a small number of experts and consultants.

To quote:

Investment in analytics can be useless, even harmful, unless employees can incorporate that data into complex decision making. Our research offers a succinct warning. At this very moment, there’s an odds-on chance that someone in your organisation is making a poor decision on the basis of information that was enormously expensive to collect.

The second area they highlighted is the need to present and communicate the data in a way that will have the broadest impact on organisations. It is not enough just to have a complex reporting engine that will produce output on demand, as management at all levels of the organisation needs to understand and use data.

To quote:

Reliable information exists, but it’s hard to locate. Many organisations lack a coherent, accessible structure for the data they’ve collected. They’re like libraries with no card catalog and no covers on their books.

The article primarily focuses on the first point, and outlines a range of sensible suggestions around education and change management. A large survey conducted by the authors highlights the importance of taking an ‘informed skeptic’ view of data when making decisions, and explores how this mindset can be built up.

The second point was of most interest to us, and where intranets can fit in. This can, and should, occur on two levels.

Communicating key data

The screenshot above shows the homepage of CRS Australia, a mid-sized government agency. It shows the “dashboard view”, which can be enabled by managers, bringing key charts right to the front of the site. This is both a powerful tool, highlighting the key information that drives activities, and a powerful message, reinforcing the importance of the numbers.

The example from Lotterywest at the end of the article shows a similar approach to surfacing key numbers of the intranet homepage.

In both cases, the figures are driven from back-end systems that are crunching through a lot of activity. Through careful selection and design, a handful of figures are communicated the whole organisation, giving life to what can otherwise be ‘dead’ figures.

There are many other examples we’ve seen of similar approaches. In some cases figures such as ‘net promoter’ score are displayed, while in other cases it’s the output of manufacturing processes.

This is the starting point for intranets and big data, and intranet teams should proactively seek out big data initiatives to see if the intranet can be used to convey a handful of business-critical metrics. This is a win-win outcome: it reinforces the role of the intranet homepage as the starting point for all things, and it gives much-needed early visibility to big data initiatives.

Designing great dashboards

In practice, though, very little of what big data can be distilled down to just a few graphs or figures. The sheer scale and scope of big data means that hundreds of different questions can be asked and answered.

While some of this will be surfaced via complex reporting solutions, this is a daunting option for most managers. What is needed are well-designed ‘dashboards’ that present a package of insights for a particular group of managers or staff.

Strong data and business analysis skills must be combined with great user experience (UX) techniques to deliver dashboards that work well. And again, the intranet plays a vital role in giving visibility and access to these dashboards.

(For more on designing great dashboards, listen to the UIE podcast with Hagan Rivers, and then watch the associated webinar.)

This is something that we covered in our Week in the digital workplace report, which presented a vision of data sitting seamlessly alongside content, integrated directly into the working practices of staff.

It’s also important to take a ‘service design’ approach to delivering big data information, targeting key processes and business needs, and designing end-to-end solutions to match. (This is something that Maish Nichani from Singapore will be covering in his talk at the upcoming Intranets2012 conference in Sydney.)

In short, big data is, well, big. But the promise will only be realised if the data is presented in a way that works for the whole organisation, and supported with great skills and training.

Screenshot courtesy of Lotterywest.

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April 5, 2012

William Amurgis keynoting at Intranets2012

Categorised under: Conferences & presentations

William Amurgis flies in from the US to be the opening keynote speaker at Intranets2012 (Sydney, May 16-18).

William is the director of internal communications at American Electric Power (AEP), a large electric utility serving 5.3 million customers in the United States.

His group manages the corporate intranet, “AEP Now”, which was recognised by the Nielsen Norman Group as one of the world’s ten best in 2007 and received an Intranet Innovation Award in 2009.

He has spoken about intranets across North America and Europe, but has never visited the Southern Hemisphere (until now). He lives in Columbus, Ohio, with his wife and five children.

William’s keynote session “The promise and peril of internal social media” will be a passionate and inspiring journey into the practicalities of delivering internal social tools, and the principles that drive all of AEP’s intranet decisions:

With the advent of social media inside the organisation, leaders can no longer control the message—if they ever could.

With insights and perceptions flowing top-down, bottom-up and side-to-side, this session will explore key success factors and pitfalls to avoid. Specifically, you’ll learn how to:

• Inspire and encourage employees—including top leaders—to participate responsibly.
• Respond to concerns about misbehavior and misuse of time.
• Focus the conversation and reinforce key messages.

We’ve seen William present in the US and Europe, and he’s wonderful to listen to (as well as great to chat to in the breaks). We’re very proud to bring him across to Australia to share his knowledge and experience at Intranets2012.

To learn more about William and his inspirational outlook on employee communication, read his article How to build a successful intranet, and watch the video above.

See you at the conference!

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April 4, 2012

Latest two-day Intranet Leadership Forum session covers mobile and more

Categorised under: Intranets

Five years on, the Intranet Leadership Forum is going from strength to strength with new members, long-standing members and lots of new intranets and wins to share.

The heart of the Intranet Leadership Forum are the face to face workshops where we as a community get to share our ideas, successes and woes. One of the highlights for the year for each chapter is the annual intensive, a two-day workshop with the latest on techniques, design and strategy.

Last week at the Brisbane annual intensive we covered a lot of ground, some highlights included:

• Building a sustainable author community. How one organization has over the last 5 years gradually built their author community into a high performing team. Support for authors includes one-to-one start up training, buddies, on-line help, video tutorials and an annual conference on the Gold Coast. We explored how each tool was developed and what worked best.
• Designing for mobile devices. A practical session where we all mocked up designs for a mobile site to provide university lecturers with access to “on the go” information like timetables, room changes and attendee lists. We focused on good mobile principals of designing a simple and easy to use tool.
• Gamification for intranets.A insiders look at how other organizations are using gamification to increase intranet capability. We discovered the links between staff engagement and basic principals of reward, recognition, direction, learning and progression.

We love running the Intranet Leadership Forum and the feedback we get from members is they love it too:

“Awesome, exhausting, stimulating, super professional and engaging speakers, looking forward to the next one.”

“Really great day, good group of people, interesting info shared and encouraging atmosphere.”

“Great 2 day intensive with several cutting edge topics.”

“Great as always, loved the venue.”

“Great 2 days – I think this has been the best one! Such a wide range of topics but all highly relevant. I found all of the presenters great and got ideas from all. Awesome venue and lunches, keep up the great work!”

The next workshops are:

• Canberra (1st May): Demonstration of Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry intranet and accessibility on your intranet.
• Melbourne (17th and 18th April): annual two day intensive, including Launching an intranet, governance for your home page, VIC Department of Justice intranet, Gamification on the intranet and more.
• Sydney (30th May): Demonstration of Commonwealth Bank’s intranet and the equation of leadership and governance.
• Brisbane (6th June): Demonstration of Toowoomba Regional Council’s intranet.

To join us at these workshops you will need an annual membership to the Intranet Leadership Forum. For more details, visit the ILF website or contact Catherine Grenfell (catherine@steptwo.com.au)

NOTE: Until May we are offering a special bundle of Intranets2012 conference registration with a full-year Intranet Leadership Forum membership. Visit the Intranets2012 site for more.

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April 3, 2012

Two streams of SharePoint governance

Categorised under: Information management, Intranets, SharePoint

A few weeks back, we were at the Australian SharePoint conference in Melbourne, which was packed with both attendees and vendors. The word of the event was “governance“, to the extent that it was starting to be seen as an over-used term.

It’s no great surprise that governance is a hot topic for SharePoint. It’s a complex technology, with many opportunities for unruly developers to make a mess. SharePoint also tends to spread virally in organisations, with some serious long-term consequences.

What was interesting to observe at the conference is how there are really two separate streams of governance.

Technical governance

This was the focus of most governance discussions at the conference, touching on topics such as:

• how requirements are gathered and validated
• determining scope and functionality
• software development practices
• deployment from testing to production
• processes for updates and bug fixes
• release management
• access rights and privileges
• server farm configuration and management
• use of tools such as SharePoint Designer
• backups and disaster recovery
• compliance with regulations

With the inherent complexity of the SharePoint platform, and the degree of customisation and development required, it’s important to get technical governance right. Talk after talk showed the benefits of taking a disciplined approach to development and deployment, and the costs of not doing so.

Fundamentally, this is about good project management practices, from effective gathering of requirements, through to testing, launch, maintenance and documentation. In other words, standard IT management, but with a SharePoint flavour.

There are a lot of good sources for SharePoint technical governance documents, including from Microsoft.

Business governance

This is only half the story, however. SharePoint isn’t deployed as an end goal in its own right, but rather as a tool to deliver one or more business solutions.

Each of these solutions needs governance and management, and this varies greatly depending on what’s being delivered.

For example, governance of an intranet includes:

• overall ownership and management
• processes for involving stakeholders
• strategy and planning decisions
• role of the intranet in the organisation
• information and document management policies
• publishing and review processes
• design and content standards
• overall information architecture
• page templates
• intranet features and functionality
• business benefits and ROI
• training and support
• decision-making processes

Governance for collaboration spaces is similar but different:

• site establishment
• site review and closure
• available collaboration functionality
• selection of appropriate collaboration tools
• adoption practices
• training in effective collaboration behaviours
• codes of conduct
• social media policies
• alignment between collaboration tools
• compliance with regulations

This is governance at the strategic and business level, looking at business requirements and information management practices. It sits above technical governance, but is closely related to it.

While technical governance is a prerequisite for success, business governance ensures that business benefits benefits are realised, and that solutions are sustainable and effective in the long-term. While business governance is mostly agnostic to the underlying technology, it is informed by the specific capabilities of the technology platform (in this case, SharePoint).

We help with business governance

Our role is to help organisations with developing and sustaining effective business governance. We’ve written a bunch of governance articles, and run public workshops, including one at Intranets2012, coming up in May.

We work closely with teams (and their stakeholders) to establish appropriate policies and processes. In part, this is about creating documents, but it’s mostly about setting in place ongoing ways of working that align business and staff needs.

Have you implemented SharePoint, only to discover that what you’ve also been given is just technical governance? Get in touch, and we’ll help you put in place simple but effective business governance.

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