For those that read more high-minded publications, a wiki is a server program that allows users to collaboratively contribute content to a website. Editing is done in your web browser using a user-friendly editing tool not too dissimilar to a stripped-down version of MS-Word. But a wiki is more collaborative than your average page authored by one person. A wiki may contain the writing, edits and additions of many, many users. Any user can edit any other users’ contributions.
The most famous wiki is Wikipedia.com which is an online encyclopedia authored by whomever wants to author. Yes, you can make your own edits and additions. Wikipedia now features over 600,000 files with thousands of contributors though they do disclose that “Nonsense and vandalism are usually removed quickly.”
The biggest wiki profile story just hit the pages of mainstream media when the LA Times experimented with a ‘wikitorial’ that allowed readers to rewrite an editorial on the paper’s website. However, the experiment was sabotaged by morons who sabotaged the effort by posting pornographic images.
Wikis are beginning to hit corporate intranet.
Michael Reiter, managing editor for IBM’s global intranet, tells me the IBM intranet now has several wikis including one for company jargon and acronyms. IBM also encourages employees to blog. With thousands of employee blogs the IBM team set-up a wiki to establish corporate blogging guidelines that were completed in 30 days.
Ziff Davis, one of the largest publishers of technology magazines in the World, uses a wiki to speed-up software development producing huge savings. 1UP.com, the gaming division of Ziff Davis, uses a wiki product made by Socialtext. According to the customer testimonial on the Socialtext website, the development wiki has created a far more efficient environment for working together which has greatly reduced the reliance on email, as well as the associated lag time.
“This customer case study shows how use rapidly evolved from strategic planning to day-to-day coordination and communications, supported the brainstorming and launch of a new product and has led to promising experiments in group writing,” says the Socialtext website case study. “Workspace for group communications has reduced email volume dramatically to result in soft cost savings in excess of $1 million per year for a 50 person team. Project communication accelerated the project cycle of a four-month project by a month.”
Impressive.
I encourage anyone to post a REPLY with any successful (or unsuccessful) attempts to use wikis or blogs on their corporate intranet.
Technology vendors always paint a rosier picture than what reality otherwise proves. Ultimately, technology vendors want you to buy. That’s why free webinars are almost always sales pitches that have little to do with reality, and everything to do with selling you software and hardware.
CMS Watch’s 2nd Edition of the Enterprise Portals Report finds that enterprise portal solutions are still very difficult to use and that customers must invest substantial resources to create usable and accessible user interfaces.
The report not surprisingly cites portal vendors for usability challenges, including complicated, dashboard interfaces, as well as tools generating non-standard code that fails common accessibility tests. In short, the author of the report, Janus Boyle, alludes that he does not recommend buying and implementing a portal product for the vast majority of organizations (he confirms this in a recent presentation conducted in Europe).
I agree. I’ll tell you why at the end of this article, but for a minute, don’t take my word for it, rather keep an open mind and listen to what one of the portal vendors has to say. BEA is one of the big portal vendors and leaders. In a webinar last week, State of the Portal Market 2006, BEA provided a “synthesis of New Original Survey Results and Recent
Analyst Research on the Portal Market.”
Now, you may be familiar with the phrase, “we can develop a survey to produce whatever results you want.” Truer words were never spoken by a research house.
Here are some of the findings from the analyst research on the portal market:
- 53% of companies have intranet or internal portals on their IT project lists this year (Information Week)
- 51% reported being fully operational with portal software, and 52% companies already have mandated portal framework standards. Budgets rise to a mean of $5.1M in 2006 (AMR Research)
What a load of… pardon me, what did the colonel on MAS*H like to say, horse hockey?! Not only do 51% of companies not have fully operational portal software, I venture to guess it’s barely 5%. How do they get away with such a statistic? Well, they don’t provide the sample details for starters. But I’ll bet it was a sample of CIO and IT executives in a larger companies that have volunteered for an online survey and therefore the survey results are highly skewed (not representative of the business population).
This is the difference between sales and reality – perception and the truth. Beware the study and survey that doesn’t denote the sample size, sample make-up and process for deriving the sample.
Now, not all of the study is horse hockey, some of its more realistic and balanced:
- Business users have a less than rosy view of IT
- Projects average an 18month
- delivery time
- Existing systems are too rigid and inflexible to adapt to business
- changes
- Project costs do not match returned value
- Customers use of portals are evolving into a foundation for
- larger IT strategy
- Portal’s play significant role in SOA
- Customers see real, concrete benefits to portals and related
- technologies
- Portals learn from the modern Internet and are adopting Web 2.0 technologies such as blogs, wikis and social bookmarking
Portals represent a nascent and developing market. The technology has evolved greatly but it’s not what it could be. I’ll be honest, I’ve never seen a portal product I was fond of and we’ve yet as a company to ever recommended a portal product over a content management system (CMS) for a client. That’s not to say though that a portal product doesn’t have value.
I think that portal products can be very helpful for some enterprises. Mind you at this point in time, given the problems with portals, l believe very few companies (and almost exclusively limited to very large companies with sprawling intranets and heavy integration needs) would benefit from a portal product. However, the vendors are trying and the lines between portal products and CMS products are becoming more and more fuzzy. Things will improve though… but it may take some years.
My point as always is caveat emptor – buyer beware. Do not let technology vendors make your decisions for you. Make technology purchases based on sound planning and requirements analysis, not on vendor sponsored research and technology demos (dog-and-pony shows). Spend the necessary time (a number of weeks) to define and document the requirements and needs of the business, key managers and end users before looking at technology solutions. Make the vendors work for your business by issuing an RFP. If you don’t know how to do a thorough and proper RFP (oh my goodness I’ve seen some bad ones so really make sure you know what you’re doing, don’t just let purchasing prepare and run the RFP), then hire someone that can help.
General Motors Corp. (NYSE: GM), the world’s largest automaker, has been the global industry sales leader for 75 years. The intranet is a unifying force in massive, sprawling enterprise that employs about 327,000 people in 33 countries.
In 1999, the intranet was in fact a large, sprawling collection of many, many hundreds of websites and applications. Through the early part of the 21st century GM began creating functional portals for different business units. However, since the late 90s the focus of GM’s intranet has been on reducing the complexity of a massive and diverse environment and the drive towards a single, personalized portal called mySocrates.
The move to a single, personalized portal is driven by Communications, IS&S and Human Resources stakeholders in the form of a Global Web Steering Team.
The goals of the portal include[1]:
- Extended user access
- Single sign on
- Profiles and directories
- Governance teams
- Reuse of solutions
- Eliminate (reduced) cost
- Improved image
In 2001, GM created the new intranet home page, Socrates. Any person with access to the GM network can view Socrates. There is no personalization; everyone sees the same content and tools. Those that have access can login to mySocrates, the personalized portal. Unlike the static website that is Socrates, mySocrates pulls content from many different sources and repositories.
When the new Socrates debuted in May 2006, monthly logins increased 20% to more than 543,000. The portal has more than 100,000 active users including 40% of the hourly workforce.
The added challenge of making a portal relevant in 33 different countries and multiple languages is the process of integrating all of the regional requirements and concerns so that it is not something that is merely driven by HQ in Detroit. Challenges include[2]:
- Local, regional & global web content hosted in disparate locations
- using a wide-range of web authoring tools
- Non value-added time searching and navigating multiple portals and
- websites
- Redundancy and inconsistency with individuals/groups creating their
- own solutions including global, regional, local interpretations of content
- Difficult & costly to maintain up-to-date content & navigation
- Difficult to integrate processes and technology
- Limited personalized delivery and no re-usability across sites
The personalized portal looks to overcome many of these challenges with a governance model that engages and represents interests at various levels. While Communications, HR and IS&S continue to be the intranet owner champions, Regional Leaders of HR, IS&S, and Communications oversee deployment within regions and sectors of GM. Not only can users personalize mySocrates, but the portal is available in multiple languages.
Today, the portal focuses on the “one company” philosophy and primarily consists of announcements, news, links, & historical “static” information. The new working environment while in its infancy with bigger plans for the future has realized some real value including:
- 411.1M combined visits/hits
- 1.1M transactions with 98.1% online usage
- $17.4M combined soft/hard dollar cost savings
- $170K lost savings due to manual transactions
- GMID Password Reset Cost decreased 19% since January ’06
- Initial myJobs Tab has resulted in $1m in annual savings
Immediate plans for the future and the next generation (‘generation four’) of the portal include:
- Full cross-functional integration of work related processes
- Collaboration tools (e.g. wikis and blogs)
- Detailed data and reporting (e.g. business intelligence)
- Multiple platform delivery (e.g. wireless / PDA)
While GM has come a long way with their intranet, a lot more work is required – a process that will take years. The mySocrates portal is not in itself a benchmark in innovation, but it demonstrates how difficult it is to create a valued, unified environment in a traditionally decentralized company of many, many different cultures if all the far flung corners of the globe. GM has done well in creating a “one company” intranet that in comparison puts them far ahead of the pack amongst their many Fortune 500 colleagues.
Any of you fellow parents out there know that the wish list letter to Santa is a big deal. My daughter Rachel had her letter in the mail on December 1. Anything Barbie or Bratz is an instant winner. Frankly, I think they all look like cheap harlots.
Anyhow, I am not as well organized as my daughter so I figured I’d skip the letter writing paper and hit the blog with my intranet wish list for Santa. Gone are the dreams of the ol’ G.I. Joe, or the subsequent Star Wars action figures (though that Jar Jar Binks action figure is an instant collectible!). I’ve even given up on the Porsche and hockey season tickets. Instead, I’ve prepared a most reasonable wish list – all in the name of clients.
Dear Santa, having been a good boy (mostly) this year, I would like to request the following for the intranets of my clients (past, present and future):
1- Senior management support – as you know all to well, as the CEO of a flourishing elven manufacturing conglomerate, the success of the intranet is largely dependent on the level of support afforded by the executive suite. As your case study reveals, the success of Santa’s intranet largely flows from the big guy in the big red suit. Please impress upon the elves and in turn all of their customers and clients that their respective intranets deserve more support (and funding) from the other big fat executives.
2- Measured value – successful intranets deliver a ton of value – almost as much value as toys in your sleigh. From cost savings to increased sales and employee productivity, the intranet is a virtual Christmas stocking chalked full of goodies. Please convince more companies to measure the value of their intranets – particularly ROI and employee productivity. If they refuse, a lump of coal should suffice.
3- A decent RFP – Santa, please send a fleet of your elves out into the market to teach purchasing, IT and communications managers how to write an RFP. With the North Pole’s purchasing power and financial genius surely you can impart upon these souls that a successful RFP is more than one or two paragraphs of requirements and 15 pages of legal mulch and schedules. As Donder and Blitzen have oft said, a thorough RFP to reconstruct an intranet has some at least a dozen (if not two dozen) pages of requirements and should include information architectures, site metrics (including number of pages requiring migration), required functionality and integration, etc. If teaching fails, then send that new reindeer Knuckles.
4- Loose the design – Please ignore any letters that ask for an intranet redesign. Even the half-wit reindeers Prancer and Vixen know full well that the success of an intranet has nothing to do with design. In fact, design doesn’t even make it into the top 20 most important aspects of an intranet. Please deliver each manager seeking to reconstruct their intranet a copy of Transforming your intranet so that they may shake this deadly design virus. Or heck, give them an RSS feed of the Intranet Insider or IntranetBlog.com. It’s particularly good reading when washed down with some shortbread and egg nog (the real stuff, not that sickly drool called egg nog lite. Be afraid of any food that spells ‘light’ as ‘lite’… be very afraid.)
5- A gun – Actually, all I want for Christmas is a Red Ryder carbon-action, 200-shot range model air rifle with a special sight, a compass in the stock and a sun dial. I promise not to shoot my eye out. But I’d settle for world peace – and tall glass of real egg nog.
- Usage and value: 80% of IBM employees access the intranet daily
- Workforce enablement: 68% view the intranet as crucial to their jobs
- Employee retention: 52% are more satisfied to be an IBM employee because of information obtained on w3
- Some other measures of success:
- 300 trained publishers using Lotus Notes as a publishing tool
- 94% of all employees access the intranet every month representing 6.5 million page views per month
- 100% of internal (and external) recruitment is done online
- 100% of employee travel is booked online
- 75% of pensioner (retiree) self-service is done online
- 75% of staff have undertaken online training (33% of all training is conducted online)
- 80% of employees update their own contact information online (from 10% in 2003)
Online benefits at Baxter International has replaced the former voice recognition system (VRU) and accrued savings of between US$300,000–$350,000 per year.
- Intranet value (is the intranet any good? Does it inspire use?)
- Corporate culture (value of communications)
- Employee access (% with direct access to intranet)
- Web competency (ability and comfort level using the intranet by employees)
- Nordea: 70-80% of the employees visit the portal every day
- HP: 95% of employees use the intranet on a monthly basis
- British Airways: 94% of all employees access the intranet every month
- IBM: 80% of all employees access the intranet daily
- DaimlerChrysler: 70% of all users in Germany — including 120,000 blue-collar workers — log in at least once per month
- Microsoft: 60% employees visit MSW once a day or more, and an additional 25% use MSW at least a few times per week
“State officials launched their investigation after a Feb. 9 Watchdog column disclosed that Best Buy stores had a secret intranet site in its stores — one that mirrored the public BestBuy.com Internet site, but with different pricing. The intranet prices usually reflected the individual store’s price, not the public Internet price, which Best Buy since 2005 has promised to honor.Since publication of the Feb. 9 and subsequent Watchdog columns were published, hundreds of Best Buy customers have complained to the newspaper about being charged higher-than-advertised prices. They said they looked up sales on bestbuy.com, but when they went into stores, clerks would show them a bestbuy.com site that would not have the sales price.
Customers were told that the sale must be over, or that they had misread the advertisement.
What in reality was going on was that the salesman was accessing an intranet website that was almost identical to public site. According to current and former employees and managers, some workers knew they were misleading customers, other employees were unaware of the duplicate site.
Of course, Best Buy employed the worst kind of communications and PR when faced with the accusation – they lied about it.In what could result in millions of dollars in penalties and refunds, Connecticut officials have sued Best Buy, accusing the giant electronics retailer of deceiving and cheating its customers using a secret in-store computer network.Consumer Protection Commissioner Jerry Farrell Jr. said Thursday that he believes the suit will result in a “multi-million dollar case” against the Minnesota-based chain, which has 10 outlets in Connecticut.”
- Better and faster responses to customer RFPs
- Better customer service leading to more sales
- Reduced time to market for promotions
- Increased collaboration amongst sales people
- Enhanced collaboration between reps and customers
- Migration of sales brochures to the web
- Sales programs
- Products & services
- Sales support
- Commerce agents
- Proposals
- Training & events
- Forms & resources
- Compensation information (commissions)
- Expense reporting
- Etc.
“Thanks to Microsoft’s free Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) and free SQL Server 2005 Express database, you can design and deploy an entirely new collaborative intranet or social network for your company that features many of the hottest web 2.0 features… “Not only is it all free, but it can all be setup and ready in just a couple of hours. I know because I’ve done it.”
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Announcements
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Calendar
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Contacts
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Tasks
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Projects
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Wiki
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Blog
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Message Board
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Image Library
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Forms Library
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Shared Documents
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Surveys
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Meeting Workspace
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RSS Feeds
I just previewed the slides Liam Cleaver of IBM is presenting at the upcoming Intranet Insider World Tour Webinar: IBM’s w3 – Transforming The Total Workplace Experience.
“We see the future workplace as ubiquitous; totally integrated; and senses work activity and responds with resources,” says Cleaver. The goal of the IBM intranet is to increase productivity, collaboration and innovation of its 380,000 employees worldwide, 45% of whom work remotely in all global time zones.
Here are some of the Web 2.0 areas that Liam, along with moderator, Toby Ward of Prescient Digital Media, will be showing and telling about:
Blue Pages: One universal employee directory, 50+ applications access & use the directory data, More than 1.5 million hits per day, 65% of employees use BluePages once a day.
Beehive: Opt-in social networking site from IBM Research, Create a personal page to share interests, thoughts, photos and/or what you do in IBM, over 33,000+ registered members and 41,000+ photos uploaded
Fringe: Experimental directory and networking site from IBM Research, Find colleagues based on skills, interests or other shared connections,
see what’s going on with the news in your social network through aggregated feeds
BlogCentral: Opens up collaboration and creates connections across IBM through use of Web 2.0 technologies, 50,000+ users, 1,600+ active blogs
WikiCentral: Provides easy and effective ways of collaboration in any size group. In April 2008, 3M+ page views, 1.3M+ total visitors
Jams and ThinkPlace: Open, collaborative and on-going global forum, surfaces solutions to specific challenges, 16,000 ideas submitted since launch, 350+ ideas adopted, facilitates exchange of smaller ideas
TAP @ work: SmallBlue: within intranet search retrieves experts based on tags and employee profiles recommending best path to connect, gives analysis of social network visually depicts people networks and geographic clusters.
The last slides includes this juicy quote from Clint Boulton, eWeek.
“Google is often portrayed as the technology hipster, rolling out Web applications almost at whim. But unseen to the public, IBM is rolling out Web 2.0 technologies such as blogs, wikis, mashups and virtual reality technologies to help its employees be more productive. Inside its firewall, Big Blue looks pretty hip.” Clint Boulton, eWeek.
Seven Can’t-Live-Without Features For Your Intranet |
Good news: your organization is heading down the path of greater efficiency and streamlined productivity through its new Intranet project, and you’re part of the team that will make it all happen!
Your first order of business is to select the perfect product – one that fits into your budget and can be deployed in this century. No small task, when you consider the sea of vendors all presenting a slightly different version of what makes an Intranet worthy of your attention; or the fact that you need to find a product that excites employees, to ensure your Intranet is widely accepted. Put these seven “Can’t Live Without It” (CLWI) features on your shopping list, and you’ll be way ahead of the game. |
- create a profile
- post pictures
- updates
- comments
- organize events
- tag others’ photos
See many more sessions like this at INTRANET INSIDER WORLD TOUR LIVE 2009, April 16-17, 2009, New York City. In fact, Elliot Luber, Internal and Executive Communications, IBM Software Group, is presenting a case study titled: Cultural Change and Enablement at IBM.Here’s an excerpt from Communitelligence Intranet Insider Webinar, IBM w3 2008: Transforming Our Workplace, enabling collaboration in a complex organization, led by Liam Cleaver, IBM CHQ, Innovation and Technology; and Toby Ward, Prescient Digital Media, 70 min. CD, Purchase |
Posted on Tuesday, Mar 03, 200 |
Watching the challenges facing companies in today’s challenging economy I wonder how much of a priority leadership will place on their intranet activities.
I shouldn’t have to wonder but we seem to be in an era of confusion as to what really drives productivity in the workplace. To those of us closely linked to our user community it may seem obvious that corporations will need simple, easily adopted collaboration tools. These tools are needed to help employees rediscover the wealth of knowledge being lost as the experienced and often high powered workers walk out the door. Unfortunately for many corporations, the loss of intellectual property will be a high price to pay for financial crisis survival.
This could be a chance for your intranet to grow in importance if you approach the situation proactively. Messaging is not expensive, create the content and capitalize on the demand for information about current events and organizational changes. Take advantage of the curiosity of your users. They are feeling lost, concerned or at the very least happy to be in the company that isn’t downsizing. They want to read all about it. Provide them the updates and establish yourself as the gold source.
How can you demonstrate to management the value of social media? Build an internal wiki where your users can pose questions to the general population. “Does anyone know why there’s a 5k cap on type 2 purchase orders?” “Is there anyone who knows how to design a whatever?” “I have a problem with fitting my part in the assembly, who knows the tolerance history?” Get people to share and they will become a community focused on the future. They will be looking for answers and empowered to move forward. Moving forward provides a mechanism for hope that provides a small sense of control in a world of uncertainty.
Don’t ask for a project or funding to implement these changes. You must be resourceful when times are tough. Relook at the tools at your disposal and figure out how to make this happen. You may not have onsite posting, web content management or a social media tool waiting in the wings but you do have other means to solicit and post questions and responses. Perhaps you could focus on highlighting key information, critical process reminders, hints and helps.
Ask yourself where your company is? Where your company wants or needs to be? What is the gap? What information can you share to bridge that gap? How can you be a solution in times of confusion and trouble? I suggest that you build a communications strategy and determine how to position content over time to build organizational understanding.
Change the focus of your content and watch the organizational change begin to transpire. Be the light, integrate your intranet into the culture of your newly defined corporation. What have you got to lose? The priority leadership will place on your intranet is directly proportional to the impact the intranet has on the organization. You can determine your own future if you are willing and able to post the content. Go for it. This could be the opportunity your web team has been waiting for. You and your intranet can make a difference.
Employees want to connect with each other, and more importantly, they want to connect with the company and senior management. A study by Towers Perrin found that employees overwhelmingly want to know “that leadership is interested in them.”
Social media on the corporate intranet (Intranet 2.0) presents a unique opportunity for all employees at all levels and geographies to better connect, and share information and knowledge they might not otherwise share or learn. In fact, distance – both geographical and intellectual – between these connections is often significant with little if any filtering from one side to the next; an information gap that is not easily bridged in larger, dispersed organizations. For example, the Towers Perrion study also found that:
- 43% of employees do not feel they know enough about their own customers
- 65% of employees do not feel they know enough about the competition to be fully effective
- Only 39% of employees feel they are informed about the differences between their company’s products and the competition
Social networking allows employees to connect with relevant or related individuals by subject matter, job description, geogrpahic location, and by personal networks to help birdge this information gap. In fact, for those social media doubting-Thomases that question the value of Intranet 2.0, there are increasingly more numbers that quantify the measured value:
- 52% of organizations using Web 2.0 achieved Best- in-Class performance (5% didn’t) (Aberdeen Group)
- Companies using Web 2.0 tools achieved 18% increase in engagement (1% of those that didn’t) (Aberdeen Group)
- Sabre has already attributed $500k in savings to their employee social networking tool
- Cisco attributes $millions in savings to their wikis
Leading organizations that understand the power of Intranet 2.0 are blazing some incredible trails. Early adopters are finding positive business results by helping employees connect through “internal Facebooks.” By effectively harnessing these new networks, organizations are seeing positive impacts on internal brand building, as well as employee engagement, satisfaction and motivation — which leads to higher levels of productivity, revenue, and profit.
But the world of the internal social network is the opposite of command & control. That said, reasonable guidelines, a group of informal influencers, and a posse of community managers who help keep the dialog lively and the network on track.
One place to learn more about internal social networks is from the Intranet Insider on Communitelligence.com which is featuring an upcoming webinar on the topic, Building Employee Branding And Engagement With Internal Social Networks (March 17, 2009 at 2pm EST). Hosted by Lee Aase, Manager, Syndication and Social Media at the Mayo Clinic, with Polly Pearson, VP Employment Brand and Strategy Engagement, EMC Corporation, and Paul Pedrazzi, Vice President, Product Strategy, Oracle. The webinar promises to educate “on what works and what doesn’t in this brave new world of internal social networks from companies that are already figuring out the path to success. “
Reserve for INTERNAL SOCIAL NETWORKS.
Another related, upcoming webinar of note: INTRANET NEWS 2.0: Creating an Intranet News Publication in the New Age of Communication on April 2, featuring Katie Sauer, Monsanto.
Finally, a special welcome to my new co-leader of the Intranet Insider community, Laurel Castiglione, formerly of General Motors Communications, of Bridge The Gap Solutions.