Whether their organisation is in a position to make use of these solutions or not, the intranet team needs to stay informed. Personal likes and dislikes should be set aside to keep an open mind on investigating tools to support the business.

To be effective, the team should be able to understand and articulate the functionality, benefits and risks of potential solutions. Often other staff in the organisation are already investigating and proposing new solutions.

It doesn’t matter if team members love or hate Twitter, or if they spend their evenings knitting rather than Facebooking or using the latest mobile applications. Intranet professionals need to be able to explore and evaluate new solutions in a range of ways:

• Practicality — how does this new element work?
• Usefulness — what could it add to an intranet?
• Execution — what is the end result?
• Emotion — how does it make users feel?

[CM Briefing 2010-11 by Catherine Grenfell, read the full article]

Post 4 of 10 in a series of blog posts giving more insight into this year’s Intranet Innovation Award winners.

This case study is available in full as part of the free executive summary of the 2009 Intranet Innovation Awards report, which features dozens of high resolution screenshots, case studies of winners, and tips and advice for success on a wide range of intranet initiatives.

About Sabre
Sabre’s mission is clear: to connect people with the world’s greatest travel possibilities. As a world leader in the travel marketplace, Sabre Holdings merchandises and retails travel products and provides distribution and technology solutions for the travel industry. Sabre Holdings supports travellers, agents, corporations and travel suppliers worldwide through its companies:

• Travelocity, the most popular online service.
• Sabre Travel Network, which includes the world’s largest global distribution system (GDS), connecting travel agents and travel suppliers with travellers.
• Sabre Airline Solutions, the leading provider of decision-support tools, reservations systems and consulting services for airlines

Not so long ago, employees in Sabre’s few offices would congregate in hallways and around water coolers to discuss current projects, share information they had recently acquired, ask and answer business questions and, yes, even socialise a little.

Today, Sabre has grown into a workforce that’s highly dispersed, working from a variety of remote locations, on the road, or telecommuting. In a three-year period, Sabre went from a company where 85% of its employees worked in the United States to a company where 55% of the employees worked in one of 59 countries outside of the US.

However, such a change also meant an increasingly disconnected workforce that was spending way too much time searching for the expertise they needed to get jobs done, if they could find it at all, and using a business toolset that wasn’t helping them connect or collaborate across boundaries.

The solution? Sabre Town. A social networking solution that enabled company employees to once again engage each other in a single location in order to provide the collective abilities of all employees to help answer the questions of each employee.

The Sabre Town employee social network is a stand-alone community platform that uses Single Sign On and XML data exchange to seamlessly integrate into the existing Intranet and other portal platforms.

Benefits of Sabre Town
The benefits of the social network are as limitless as the ways it can be used. At the highest level, Sabre Town:

• Creates a stronger company culture: Allows for inclusion, internal networking and diverse personalities to shine. It adds faces and backstories to the names and titles.
• Captures, stores, and makes available collective wisdom: Allows many to share in a single knowledge base, and all to access that knowledge in real time.
• Minimises new hire ramp time: Allows shared knowledge to benefit new employees beyond new hire training and as continuing education throughout a career.
• Reduces communication lag time and geographic divide: Allows many employees to quickly answer questions and build on each other’s thoughts, regardless of where they are located.
• Drives collaboration across organization: Allows for the skill sets and expertise of all employees to be searched and leveraged.
• Drives innovation: Allows many to contribute, post and act on new concepts.
• Minimises knowledge loss from departing employees: Retains expertise and answers in a searchable format.
• Provides a unique window into the company: Is a high level explicit and implicit data aggregator helping determine what subject matters are popular, relevant, and who has a reputation for expertise in them.

These are just some of the benefits Sabre found with their new platform. Designed with purpose and with defined improvements in employee engagement, and hard dollar savings outlined ($500k in 2008 alone), it’s a benchmark example of using social network-based technology in the workplace for the good of the organisation.

(For full details of this Award-winning entry, download the executive summary, or obtain a copy of the 198-page Intranet Innovations 2009 report.)

Rich people profiles, including projects and availability. Screenshot courtesy of IDEO.

Post 2 of 10 of a series of blog posts giving more insight into this year’s Intranet Innovation Award winners.

IDEO are world-renowed as design thinkers and innovators. Its 500 staff are experts in design, engineering, social sciences and business strategy. It should come as no surprise that their intranet is equally innovative.

In IDEO’s entry, they say:

‘Effective knowledge sharing is a social activity that’s enabled by technology’. This key insight, and its reverse (‘Technology alone will not increase knowledge sharing’) guided the design team throughout the implementation phase of the project.

The focus of “The Tube” (IDEO’s intranet) are people and projects, and connecting the two. This includes:

• seamlessly integrating a range of social tools
• creating rich staff profiles (shown above)
• producing engaging and interactive project sites (over 1,000 at last count)
• providing rich search tools that allow, for example, staff to be found who a) have specific skills b) are based in a certain office; and c) are free for a minimum of 20 hours in the required period
• delivering intranet content to display screens in cafeterias globally

This entry shows the power of the intranet to support a professional services firm. It also demonstrates how the intranet can reinforce and build an innovative culture.

(For full details, obtain a copy of the Intranet Innovations 2009 report.)

Government 2.0 grew out of Web 2.0 in an attempt to define a new approach to governing which provides governments and their citizens more direct and immediate ways to communicate, engage and collaborate enabled by Web 2.0 principles and tools.

Andrew Mcafee discusses the differences between web 2.0 and enterprise 2.0, and where his research is focusing.

[Thanks to George Dearing.]

Although there is evidence that the two styles will converge in the future, enterprise and consumer Web architecture and technology are quite different today. If one talks to an enterprise application architect, he or she will probably say that while consumer Web applications are cute, simple, and sometimes useful, their architectures and technologies are merely a bunch of scripts and hacks put together. If one talks to a consumer Web architect, she or he will probably say that enterprise software is overly complex, often unusable, and based on over-priced and under-performing technologies (i.e., JSF or Portal).

[Thanks to Bill Ives.]

1. Not enough people in your company understand it

You would not believe the number of people who I meet who don’t know what a blog is, haven’t tried facebook, or used a wiki (although I’d have to admit that nearly everyone I meet has used wikipedia). Even if they did understand those things, I would suggest that it is not these things that define web 2.0, they are examples of possible web 2.0 executions. If you can’t understand something at a practical level, how are you going to exploit it?

Web 2.0 and social media mean that for teachers a declining part of their job involves telling. An increasing part is listening to the class and facilitating them in having conversations. Teachers should help moderate these conversations and draw new learnings from them. They need to say less of: ‘let’s open up a book.’ and more of: ‘let’s open up a conversation.’.

One comment I made yesterday is, “the difference between Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 is like the difference building a tunnel through rock and tunnel under water”.

That this is getting at is Web 2.0 takes work to build to get through the earth, but once built it can suffer from imperfections and still work well. The tunnel can crack and crumble a little, but still get used with diminished capacity. We can look at Facebook, which has a rather poor interface and still gets used. Twitter is another example of a Web 2.0 solution that has its structural deficiencies and outages, but it still used as well as still loved (their Fail Whale is on a t-shirt now and a badge of pride worn by loyal users).

This diagram captures some of my evolving thinking on intranets, information management and enterprise 2.0. It outlines three scenarios:

Scenario A

This is the “now” scenario, typical of most intranets and information management strategies.

Information is mostly published at the corporate level, delivered to “all staff”. The closer you get to any one staff member, the less the information is targeted to their their needs. All staff are basically considered the same, and there is no personalisation or tailoring.

Scenario B

This is the “ideal” state, as outlined in the web 2.0 and enterprise 2.0 world view.

The individual is at the centre of all things, and information is specifically delivered to meet their specific needs. This may be via customisation, tailoring, or self-driven social networks. This recognises that organisations are made of up individuals, who need to be effective and engaged.

There is, however, a huge change from scenario A to scenario B. While portals and other technologies have offered personalisation functionality, this has often failed to be used. “My page” and other personal homepages are commonly left empty. Adoption of “enterprise 2.0″ and “social” tools is still in its early stages.

Scenario C

Perhaps this is the middle ground we can work towards in the short term.

While information is still published at the corporate level, there is tailoring of information at business unit level. Call centre staff have relevant information delivered to them, distinct from that delivered to sales staff, engineers, or admin staff.

This is relatively easy for intranet and information management teams to handle. There may be anything from a few to many dozen business groups to target, but this is much easier than trying to address the needs of thousands of individual staff.

Putting it all together

This is just some early thinking, but what I’m looking for is a way of bridging the gap between the corporate on one side, and the individual on the other. This is the middle ground that we need to play in for the immediate future.

So, does it make sense? Do the diagrams help?

(Don’t forget that there is now commenting on this blog!)