Julian finished with showing his MindMeister Map (he loved what Helen had done so much he bought the company ... scratch that, an account).
Thanks
Thanks to Mike Earley for organizing this conference, and for taking a collaborative approach to the design of the session. Eg, great use of Kiwi Intranets for finding areas of topic interest.
David Archibald, Cairo Walker, Dorje McKinnon
David Archibald, IRL
(1) biggest driver is around records management, not information management.
(2) there is a lot more talk about communities.
Cairo Walker, Step Two
- 2010 isn't too far away.
- Key theme: purists vs. pragmatists. We've seen and will continue to see vendor offerings with an all encompassing approach.
- "ECM" ... what exactly does this mean for organizations? Much exploration to happen in this space.
- Open source is coming into the light.
Dorje McKinnon, Sungard AvantGard
- If you have a strong executive sponsor, they'll drive for the 100-page strategy and six year strategy. Few organizations don't suffer from such bad ideas.
- Many organizations have something in place already. Too difficult to just throw things out. Will evolve over time, with new applications bolted on.
- We've got a lot of work to do on training and advocacy.
- The ongoing nature of Intranets means that we'll all do something, and achieve things ... unsure whether the big platforms are going to work or not.
Comments and Questions from the Floor
1. (Robyn) How do we get our organization to shift from limited access to open access? Eg, editing rights on wikis.
(David) This is the case in our organization.
(Cairo) Ask questions about what the risks are around certain items. Define these.
(Dorje) One way to mitigate this risk, is to ask who they think will go to the site and see the information. And then show them who actually is (everyone is really busy already).
2. How many people have a formal document management system? And for those that don't, can the Intranet become that?
(Audience) About 60% of hands went up for part 1, and similar numbers for part 2.
(David) How many are worried about the compliance with the Public Records Act by 2010? (Audience) Lots of hands up.
(Commenter) Perhaps the Intranet will become an interface to the document management system.
(Commenter) It's about unlocking the existing stuff. We have a lot of things today. How do we provide the best interface across this?
(Dorje) I've got 10 people that provide third-line software support. How do they manage their information? Answer ... were using Internet Explorer Favorites to add File Share links. Then shared those links among themselves.
3. (Julian) Has Australia has the same issues with Public Records?
(Cairo) We have, but I haven't played in that space.
(David) It depends on the organization. Many intranet managers will see their time sucked up into records management initiatives, rather than intranet ones.
4. (Stuart) What about communities that aren't tied to "desktops"? What about mobility?
(David) Many of our staff work in labs, not at their desktop. How do we provide access to information at the lab level?
(Cairo) Seeing customers with a demand for this. But little maturity exists. Some organizations are piloting this type of material. Some of the information requirements are very task specific, depending on the person's role.
(Dorje) Many executives have BlackBerries -- really like wireless email. Most staff are tied to their desktops ... but there are other organizations that are giving out small form factor devices for access to this. Another route is to provide access from home.
5. (A comment) I've spent two thirds of my working life on marketing and advertising, and the last third with an IT company. The drivers for intranet solutions often come from communications or IT. The drivers get the ownership, and perhaps these groups don't get enough stakeholder involvement from the other groups. Argues that IT need to be included in the discussions earlier rather than later -- eg, what technologies are they willing to support?
(Dorje) Absolutely agree. Once requirements are known, the next thing is to ask IT whether they'll play or not.
(David) I had a GM a few years ago of Knowledge Management. Was given a job review, and was said to be "too collaborative". Ironic.
6. We are in a fairly disasterous situation. How do we get availability for consultation from everyone here? Please give us your business card.
(Julian) There are two ways to access support ... ask consultants ("I'm one of them"), there are solutions providers (eg, Provoke, Datacom) ... and there's also the Kiwi Intranets forum and the Intranet Leadership Forum.
(Commenter) Our organization hasn't signed off on budget for joining things like the Intranet Leadership Forum.
(Julian) The Kiwi Intranets Forum is free. Perhaps then leverage up to the Intranet Leadership Forum.
(Dorje) I'd welcome any of the consultants / providers to contribute to the Kiwi Intranets discussion group. It will help with relationship development for future business opportunities.
(David) Ring up other people, and ask to go and see their intranets. It doesn't cost very much.
7. (Emma) We've talked a lot about not asking people what they want, but instead to discover what their needs are. When I think about doing it, it seems very time consuming.
(Cairo) Have done lots of these. Can do a whole organization in 3-5 days ... you can map out the roles fairly quickly. You can't talk to everyone, but you'll see common themes. After 15-20 interviews, you've got pretty much everything. Watch what they do ("hang out in the crew room").
(Mark) We don't try to get everything 100% with all of the user groups; we take it to 80%, and implement the core. Give the first prototype, and then look at iterative improvements.
(Cairo) One of the things I do with the needs analysis, is to reflect back the findings to the group. Set it up as a work-in-progress session, so people there can give corrections and further ideas.
(Cairo) The analysis phase will take 3-5 days.
(Cairo) Good to play direct quotes back to the people.
(Julian) Rather than "asking users what they want", go and interview them in their offices and ask them to show you what they do. You can tell a lot about the person by their information management and seeking styles.
(Philippa) We didn't have money to talk to our users. We used a program called VNC (screen sharing) to see desktops remotely. Helpful and useful. Often people did on the screen what was entirely different from what they were saying.
(Cairo) Go and work in various roles for a while, and learn first-hand.
(Julian) Much of this thinking on information architecture has come from cultural anthropology, because you are changing the system when you ask.
(Commenter) Getting a stake in the ground and get it out there, can be another place to start. You'll get feedback.
8. (Ken) At TechEd, one of the presenters said he got very "scared" when people talk about "re-designing" the Intranet. Is that a good place to be?
(David) We've just gone through a re-launch into a CMS ... we split the design for the communications people, and kept the technical work. Seems to work well. It's just a natural part of the evolutionary process.
(Cairo) Most redesigns start from "we know it's not working, so let's fix it ... and the view that if we throw more technology at it, we'll solve the problems. Hey, the vendors know more now". But this is a poor methodology. Taking a journey approach over 3-4 years is good ... iterative development.
(Dorje) In our case, we papered over the cracks. We made things easier to find and use. Immediate impact: we had happier users. From a purist perspective, felt that he had too many constraints on his actions.
(David) We used to have regular surveys, but too much change drives dissatisfaction.
(Commenter) "Stop moving things around" ... because even if it's in a dumb place, people will learn where it is. People get used to dumb positioning.
Murray Wills and Chan Kulathilake
After me and just before afternoon tea, Chan and Murray provided a case study on how the Ministry of Transport embraced SharePoint. Murray is the managing director at Maxsys Limited, and frequently takes roles within organizations as the CIO, etc. This is what he did at the Ministry of Transport -- he was Acting CIO at the time.
Agenda:
- Who is the MoT?
- What were the business issues?
- Opportunities, Outcomes
- SharePoint Overview
- Solution for MoT
Murray kicked off ...
Who's the MoT?
- All about the transport sector in New Zealand
- Supporting the Minister of Transport
Business Issues
- 2005 ... growth from 50 to 140 people
- IT architecture hadn't been refreshed by some years
- The Ministry had no intranet ... but ran Lotus Nots as a sort of quasi Intranet (were using Lotus Notes 6.5)
- As the organization grew communication and collaboration become more challenging.
- Up to 6 different contact databases were used
- 140 Lotus Notes databases, a number of which were dead or legacy
- Authoring and process for content authoring was sporadic
- No Content Management System (CMS) was used for intranet or internet development
- Current publishing process was very email centric
- No publishing division
- "All staff" emails
- Introduction of Fun ... culture creation
- Teams need to be "connected" to their content to create ownership
- Team sites ... give ownership
Opportunities
- Strategic information systems
- Clear need to move off Lotus Notes for email and calendar. Staff were actively seeking/asking for Outlook, because they had used it at previous organizations.
- Intranet with workflow capabilities, integrated with email and with Office products
- Distributed authoring
- The Ministry looked at using SharePoint 2003 and CMS ... but it wasn't ready
- ... so, went with the beta of MOSS 2007 ... the promise of integration, collaboration and interoperability
- Pleased with the path they chose
Outcomes
- In October 2006, implemented "Discover", the MoT Intranet
- Went to the RTM version of MOSS in early 2007
- Have since been through some updates and changed the visual design (all normal intranet stuff)
- Integration has occurred with Microsoft CRM v3
- The path from Lotus Notes not as difficult as first thought. There were about 20 key databases ... that have gone to SharePoint or CRM ... some have been left, and haven't been shifted yet.
Outcomes
- Integration with Active Directory and Exchange
- Migration tools used for email and calendar
- Tools and coding used for database transfer to CRM or to MOSS
- Office Communicator implemented to replace Lotus Sametime
- Integration with HR system and Exchange for floorplan and organization chart. See an example at inside.liverton.com. This technology is generated out of MOSS. The integration with Exchange is for signalling that a meeting room is busy, and when it is free again and for how long.
Chan took over for the technical presentation ...
Chan works at Provoke Solutions. He blogs at www.chandima.net.
SharePoint ... "... is an extensible platform for service delivery within organizations". It is extensible to the various levels and needs of people, teams and organizations. MOSS includes six major components: collaboration, portal, enterprise search, enterprise content management, business forms, and business intelligence.
At the MoT, key capabilities of focus were Intranet Portal, Enterprise Search, and Enterprise Content Management.
The Journey
- Analysis
- Planning (governance, ongoing management, proliferating sites vs. not, backup and recovery)
- System architecture
- Implementation
Chan showed a video of the Intranet (not on YouTube, AFAIK).
Content and navigation ... tagging, meta data, contextual navigation, screen click through to certain items. The pages are personalized to individuals.
Used a lot of out-of-the-box capabilities, along with custom development.
Support for online / inline editing of content. Can also alert users directly from the editing window.
The search capability offers RSS for subscriptions, plus alerts for email notifications of when things change.
The public facing internet will be able to pull out some information from the Intranet and publish it for wider distribution. It's on the roadmap.
Lessons Learnt
- Plan ... Refine ... Adopt
- Beta's can be volatile (get the right technical support and expertise early)
- Engage users
- Long term plans are key for architecture
Murray finished off ...
We knew MOSS would be a core system, but it's become even more core. Eg, integration with the HR system, possibility for using it for the Web presence, and future direction of document and content management. "In order to do that, we will implement Office 2007 in the next couple of months. We're not implementing Vista -- that's a whole different kettle of fish."
Chan's closing ... go look at www.codeplex.com
Great lunch, then it was me. No, I couldn't blog and talk at the same time -- even though Julian challenged me to do so. Here's my slide deck:
Great session. Great questions. Thanks to everyone for listening and engaging ...
In the final session of the morning proceedings, Richard Burdes and Kaye Churches from Airways New Zealand, presented a case study entitled Moving on from Paper and Emails -- Our First Steps into Online Collaboration.
Kaye started off. "I'm a content person", and she's not full time on any Intranet projects. Richard is the one and only full-time Intranet person. Kaye's background is in document design.
Agenda:
- RFCs online ("Request for Changes")
- Background to the development
- Explain the key features
- How we managed the change
- What worked and what didn't
- (Richard) The techo stuff and a demo
Airways ... provide air traffic control services. Have towers around the country. Key job: to keep planes apart. Manages all domestic and international air traffic within NZ's 37 million square kilometers. Airways has two distinct workgroups:
- Those who provide air traffic control services
- Those who develop and maintain the supporting systems and infrastructures
- ... traditionally, both sides of the business have created their own systems and processes. The RFCs process was the first time the two groups worked together.
There's 680 staff in Airways, with 67% as air traffic controllers. The average length of work history is 15 years, so for Kaye and Richard coming in, they were perceived as "new". Many of the staff have only worked at Airways ... for 30 or 40 years. The business is very risk averse ... incredibly safety conscious (thank goodness!). The majority of staff use specialized systems. A cultural descriptor is "caution". Staff are familiar with basic windows features and actions, and manager users are unfamiliar with web forms and basic windowing actions. The lack of technical competence has caused some issues for Kaye and Richard.
RFCs Online
Before April 2007, requests for changes was a paper-based process. Everything has to be logged and tracked -- due to a strict regulatory environment from the CAA, and ISO9001 accreditation. Any changes to manuals to do with air traffic control, eg, plane routing changes -- it all has to go through a change process.
The online system was launched on April 2, 2007. It supports both change requests, and "ideas for improvements", and "good ideas". It was designed as a collaborative intranet-based business tool, and was available to everyone. It replaced 3-4 different paper-based systems. It was a very manual process ... eg, knowing who RFCs should go to, there was no visibility and reporting on what was going on, some RFCs were years old without resolution.
Key requirements for the new system:
- To be used for all business units
- To collect information required for ISO compliance
- To automate workflow
- To standardized reporting
The challenge: to shift from paper to online, with 2 part-time people, to work within the regulatory compliance framework, with minimal budget (not allowed to buy stuff). In essence: "Hey guys, squeeze this into your real full-time job".
The Approach
Brought together a group of 10 stakeholders and users. It featured a lot of managers from both sides of the business, and key users of the system. We ran a workshop to gather requirements, getting everyone together in a room. We showed a dummied-up form, and this helped with eliciting requirements. We documented the discussion, and how people wanted the system to work. We requested sign-off on the model, requirements and scope. And we repeated with various workshops during various stages of development.
Key questions:
- What are the business problems we're trying to solve?
- What are the different roles in the system, and what actions are needed to be taken at each stage?
Key features of the system they developed:
- A user customized RFC page. All the actions you can do (by role/login) are shown there. Eg, managers see pending RFCs that require their signoff/approval.
- Anyone can submit an RFC.
- Extra files can be attached.
- Everyone can find and read all logged RFCs. Eg, if a manager is asked to approve an RFC about which he has some serious doubts, they have to write "why". Anyone can see that in the future. Staff like the fact that managers are more accountable.
- Automatic emails notify the next person in the workflow.
- RFCs can be sent back at any step.
- Reports can be generated by everyone.
The biggest challenge was managing change. Eg, dragging people away from paper, managing user expectations, managing (low) user skill levels, managing user attitudes, and managing the Managers role. Although the system started off as a low key thing, it quickly became high profile due to its impact across the entire business. Had to do a lot of selling, particularly because it forced people to fill out more information than they previously were asked for. People who were key to future adoption of the system were viewed as key stakeholders, and were invited onto the key stakeholder group.
Strategies that worked for managing change:
- Using the same stakeholder group for each iteration of the form.
- System owners were senior managers from both sides of the business. It ensured top-down buy in from the staff.
- Identified keen key users to help test.
- Promoted the launch of the new system using news on the Intranet.
- Advertised roadshow demos and user training in certain centers by email and on the Intranet. Unfortunately, funding wasn't available for going to all of the regional centers.
- Made ourselves available for team meetings prior to the launch of the new system.
- Made a few small changes for key (potentially negative) users following demos.
- Giveaways to all staff at the time of the launch -- little branded product with "RFCs Online" printed on the side.
- Removed the old forms the day the new system went live.
Things that didn't work:
- Being naive about the politics of the company. Eg, failing to engage with two divisions early on. After a sincere apology, things got better.
- Relying on senior staff to communicate changes across the business.
- Assuming our users had an average level of windows/intranet functionality.
Under-the-Hood "Cool Stuff"
Richard gave a peek behind the covers:
- Online forms are written in ASP for users
- ASPupload for file attachments
- There's an SQL database
- Use CDO for email notifications
- Active Directory to assign user permissions
- Javascript to copy hidden fields and display form actions
Main challenges:
- Browser compatibility, eg, for staff working at home
- Internal and external access
- File uploading and retrieval
- Communicating using CDO for email
- Reporting using Crystal Server and web summaries ... not available from outside the network. The security system won't permit access to the Crystal Server from home.
Richard showed us through the Intranet and the RFCs system.
Questions
1. (Chan) Did you look at other solutions before writing this inhouse?
(Richard) No, we had no budget. We were just told to do. If we had a budget, we'd look more widely.
(Kate) We couldn't buy anything "cool", even though it was a very high profile system ... and core to the business.
(Kate) The "Find a Technical Drawing" application (that Richard showed) has been one of the biggest successes. Highlights the key: find a problem that a significant group of people face, and solve it. It pulls users into the Intranet.
(Gulp ... it's lunch time, then I'm on ... )
After a del.ic.ious morning tea of cream scones, Simon Ovens, previously the Intranet Support Officer at the IHC NZ Inc. presented on a session entitled Case Study: Open Source Intranets on a Shoestring (not his, however, he wasn't wearing sandals). He was talking about the IHC did during his tour of duty. Simon is now a .NET developer at Intergen in New Zealand. Simon's been working in the IT industry for 5 years. He joined IHC in 2006 to help them with their Intranet, and 3 weeks ago joined Intergen.
Let's Get Into It ...
IHC has a national office in Wellington, but has 150 branches throughout New Zealand, supporting over 2000 staff. The inhouse IT team is 5, and there are three data centers.
The IHC had an intranet, but in moving forward, had to decide between three routes:
(1) develop an inhouse application
- Advantages: don't need time to learn the framework, total control over the system, and ownership of the source
- Disadvantages: there's no existing framework to work with, longer timeline (usually), scalability issues, and ongoing support requirements.
(2) use an open source solutions
- Advantages: it's a tested system or framework, there's a lot of third party modules available (good extensibility at low cost), online support, large developer community to support, cost lower than vendor supplied
- Disadvantages: support can be slow to respond, it doesn't include some of the features that vendor supplied offers, and internal staff may not be familiar with the technology used.
(3) go for vendor supplied
- Advantages: it's a well tested system or framework, professional support is usually available, and it may have more core features
- Disadvantages: generally higher cost
Some of the business drivers and factors:
- It needed to align to the business size
- Budget was an issue
- Functionality was important
- ... looked at OpenSourceCMS and The CMS Matrix as helpful resources
The decision: DotNetNuke won ...
- Cost
- Inhouse developer with CRM experience was available
- Runs on Microsoft .NET environment
- Follows Microsoft's coding best practice
- Maturity in the product
- Active Directory integration
- Modular based system ... good for extendability
- Easy to develop and build new modules, eg, developers can build new things
- There's a very active community around DotNetNuke ... roadmap plans, in-person conferences, forums
- There's a large community of organizations using it
- It was the platform being used by Gen-i for the IHC public Internet site
- Featured a good interface for users to manage the site
- Good documentation available ... online websites, online forums, books (even DotNetNuke for Dummies), developers, etc.
Functionality
Out-of-the-box functionality is extensive ... Simon called out Active Directory Integration, Forums (initially thought it would be for informal / casual things, eg, parties, but found that some groups wanted forums for business purposes ... very good tool to bring distributed teams together), and third-party modules (for automatically generating real-time charts things from internal systems on the Intranet to report on things).
Lessons Learnt
On the bad side:
- It could take some time to get an answer on the forums. It was unpredictable, and there was no one to get mad at.
- It can be a learning curve to understand the system ... both .NET and DotNetNuke. Probably need 1-2 years previously exposure to .NET to get straight into it.
On the good side:
- The system is very stable and mature.
- It is completely free.
- Great speed and responsiveness.
And now for the demo ...
Simon showed the site. He also showed how easily it was to edit the Intranet and add new content.
- You can say where you want the page to go through a drop-down list of current pages.
- There's integration with Active Directory for showing groups. You can give them view/edit rights as required.
- Modules can be targeted for specific areas of the screen.
Questions
1. (Richard) How long have you spend on user training?
(Simon) Spent a couple of hours with one Intranet editor. Can also provide the DotNetNuke for Dummies book as and where required.
(Simon) Biggest training issue was uploading pictures.
(Simon) Biggest concern was about changing size, color and fonts. It is possible to lock this down too, so only text is displayed.
2. (Ken) Support for other browsers?
(Simon) Yes, works with lots, eg, Firefox. The core team spends a lot of time working on browser compatibility.
3. (Ian) As a charity, IHC could get MOSS 2007 for about $1,000. Why did you choose that?
(Simon) I don't think we got it offered as low as $1000! We were also put off due to the previous edition.
(Simon) Given that the public Internet was in DotNetNuke as well, it was helpful to run modules on both sites.
Catherine Grenfell presented the second session of the day, about the Intranet Leadership Forum. Catherine is from Step Two Designs in Australia, and is in New Zealand on her first visit.
"Catherine comes to Step Two Designs with a background of managing highly-successful intranet teams and IT projects in the corporate sector. She is the manager and full-time facilitator of the Intranet Leadership Forum, as well as a senior member of the consulting team. "
The Intranet Leadership Forum is a group of people who get together to share their expertise and learn about making intranets more effective. Paid membership in the Forum includes:
- Quarterly meetings
- Access to reports
- Member only web sites
- A pledge of confidentiality
Today
We're going to do an "information session" as per what we'd do in a seminar. I'm going to show examples of intranets from companies around the world. Some examples are from members, and others are from applicants to the Intranet Innovation Awards.
Intranets shown include (I'm respecting confidentiality, hence I've made this more generic):
Key Takeaways
- Gain extensive knowledge of how your users work and perform their duties BEFORE making decisions about usability and navigation structure.
- Things that work for one organization won't necessarily work for everyone.
- Don't underestimate the value of good branding and ongoing Intranet promotion.
- Providing a link to submit news on the front page keeps the home page fresh.
Any Stand Out Ideas?
Feedback from the audience:
- "I liked the synonyms tools"
- "Ask the CEO is a great link"
Conclusion
We're all on a journey. It's about sharing within a group, and learning how to improve over time.
The first speaker of the day is Helen Baxter, the Managing Director from Mohawk Media. Helen has been involved in "content" for a long time ... as a writer, as a new media lecturer, as an ecommunities producer, as an Editor of Knowledge Board 01.
Helen is presenting using Mind Meister, not PowerPoint. Helen's map is available for viewing Content is Free.
About KnowledgeBoard
Knowledge Board was a three year project funded by the EC to define knowledge management strategies in the EU. They had 60 editors, and Helen managed it from New Zealand. They won a couple of awards ("Best of the Web", Havard Business School 2002; "Best User Experience", International Information Industry Awards 2003).
Why did we win these awards?
- We had a clear information architecture
- We were very content rich
- There was active participation by members in the community
- After time, we started special interest groups (SIGs); and these were multi-lingual.
- We took an iterative process to improvement ... the Kaizen philosophy, needs-based, be adaptable, and listen and re-act
Major Trends
Some major changes going on:
- from brochure sites to blogs
- from Intranets to communities
- from portals to knowledge centers
- from one-way to two-way knowledge flows
- from controlled areas to open areas
- toward creating conversations
- toward facilitating knowledge flows
- from formal to informal (no more corporate speak in conversations; natural voices important)
- towards making content timely and relevant
- from content "management" to Web 2.0 (collaboration, communication, community)
- toward dis-economies of scale ... our small NZ organizations are very able to adapt. 150 people / individuals is the magic number for a sticky, engaged community. After that it is too difficult to maintain relationships. (This is very similar to Tom Peter's "200" idea in ... Liberation Management?)
Changes in Organizations
Helen believes we're moving into an era of seeing the "corporation" as a "community", not as a "structure". You'll need to include partners and suppliers in this.
- Content, community and collaboration are the three key phrases.
- The optimal system is where people in an organization know who to go to for an answer.
- We've moving into an era of "pull" based communication, not "push". Eg, the technology of RSS provides a subscribable-way of pulling what you want/need. You can have everything coming to you if it's relevant.
- Beware of the new laws around sending email to outside people (eg, spam laws)
- Support natural communication styles, in whatever way they find most relevant. There are big generational issues too ... the new hires, perhaps TXT is better. Email is for "old people". We need to incorporate these ideas into our communications plan.
- The technology is here to support people, not the other way around.
- Manage the outcomes / the work, not the process. Manage the work, not the workers. Particularly in distributed teams, a focus on outcomes is critical, not how much time people spend in front of their screens.
Knowledge Networks in Organizations
Helens' view of knowledge in the organization:
- A good KM system should enable people to find out who knows what, how to get to them, when they are accessible, where to go to find them ... mapping out the knowlege of the organization. Turing it from tacit information (in their heads) into explicit information (surfaced and available)
- How do we get people to share knowledge, when knowledge is our safety net? The organization thinks it can extract the knowledge and get rid of the workers, but it doesn't work.
- In one KM project Helen was involved in, they kept the system simple. They had a knowledge officer - to champion the initiative. Their enthusiam and passion will really help drive it. You've got to be seen to act ("what's in it for me?", says the individual). You need to be seen to giving credit to people for brilliant ideas. Everyone in the organization ha to buy into the iterative improvement process.
- On cleaners ... if they see things that can be improved, "come and tell us". The organizations that have done this, have seen remarkable ideas and savings.
- What we're aiming for is full transparency ... where everyone knows what's going on all the time. This is the end goal. The intranet should give a snapshot of what's going on right now. And then you can hone in and view specific projects.
- Simplicity is really key. Don't make things to complex. If there are too many steps in a publishing process, people won't do it. And per comments ... if you don't respond, people won't keep making comments.
- In the early days of a community, there's a big job in getting the community off the ground (find good content, encourage contributions, find an editor to look outside the organization and pull information in, etc.). Over time, the community should become self-supporting.
- It's really a good idea to have a "spam list" ... where people can forward funny things on to their friends and colleagues. This is the social glue, this is the new digital watercooler. Helen has seen this kind of idea pulling people together ... greater connection between people.
- Intrinsic motivation ... provide carrots, not sticks. Give them tools that are really relevant and timely and help their jobs, they will use them.
What Kind Of Tools Can We Use?
In a recent project in Wellington, for a day long workshop, they used a variety of tools:
- A project wiki ... for "internal" usage ... for collaboration
- Blogs ... for "external" usage ... for announcements
- Project management tools ... a space where tasks can be assigned to people, and others can check in and see whether they've been completed.
- Not a fan of email for work like this. Email is a very important tool in business, but email lists can be a great time waster. "Carbon copy" is too easy to overload people -- "lazy knowledge management". Information can end up in email silos. A project wiki is a much better idea for project work -- it's open, transparent, it's all archivable, all changes are captured, it's very hands-off.
- Asynchronous and synchronous tools ... for two different types of communication. Online meetings provide a way for bringing everyone together at the same time.
- Tagging and searching are very key. Helen finds Drupal very good for this. Tagging is very helpful ... tag clouds are great. Difference between taxonomy and folksonomy ... good to have a combination of both (see my article on this if you want more).
- As an example of a wiki, see the Wellington LOOP wiki. You have to register to edit.
Conclusion
- Let your staff decide your content.
- Support staff, don't dictate. Focus on the outcomes, not on the process.
- Make it timely and relevant
- Have an open source attitude ... learn / hack / share / collaborate, aim for the best, be user driven, and step aside (let people manage their own systems). It may be a big leap of faith, but go for it!
- Find out what staff need, and built it around them.
Questions
1. (Dorje) RSS in the business ... how many people have staff using RSS in the business?
(Show of hands) about 60% of the audience said yes
(Helen) Recently did a survey, and very few people know about it. We need to do more education on this. Google Reader is great. If you are looking at RSS for external content, Helen recommends partial feeds, so that people come back to the site to read the full content. Don't use full feed.
2. (Dorje) "Be seen to act" ... I've worked in Japan, but working there, it doesn't actually mean "act". It's more about impressions than reality.
(Helen) Right ... you actually have to do things.
3. (Dorje) On the Mohawk site, you have three channels. Does this work by tagging with the channel tag, or does it work another way?
(Helen) I've set up the taxonomy, and on the top bar, I link to one of the tags.
4. (Julian) What tool are you using?
(Helen) MindMeister ... really excellent tool. It's online. It's collaborative (multiple people at once). Little German company doing great work. There are free and paid for services.
(Helen) You've got to use mind mapping internally. It's awesome!
5. (Dave) You have some good philosophies and ideas, it is important to note that the audience you need to convince is our CEOs, not us. It all needs to be aligned to productivity.
(Helen) I absolutely agree. This is part of defining your outcomes collaboratively, with important stakeholders in the business.
6. (Marie) On the idea box, I feel like I've been given an idea box, but the CEOs aren't opening it. How do I break through this barrier?
(Helen) You have to do a lot of translation across different audiences. Need to open the idea box, and put it into a business case that the top management people will understand. It has to be outcomes and benefits; they won't be interested in "making people's lives better". Tailor your pitch accordingly.
7. (Ken) Where do you start? What's a good starting point?
(Helen) You need a concerted effort ... but the key thing is to find the key people. Work with them, and build it around them. Find the real evangelists, and work with them.
(Helen) Another thing to do is to run scenarios around each of the groups and audiences. Focus on outcomes. Get the group people in, go through it with them ... big push, keep the momentum going.
(Helen) Run "knowledge cafes" every month ... and publish the outcomes. You'll pick up more people over time. It's like pushing a rock up the hill at the start, but once it's over the lip, things will get a lot easier.
(Helen) Need to make KM "part of their job", not something additional and extra.
8. In our company, we tried opening things up so people could talk freely. Introduced a blog. "Corporate" didn't like it, and shut it down. Where are the internal organizational examples that I can take back to argue the case with "corporate"? Any case studies available?
(Helen) Go and talk to the Drupal community, and ask them. They'll have case studies.
(Dorje) Register for Kiwi Intranets, and ask them about internal case studies.
Day 2 of the BrightStar Intranets and Portal Management Summit for 2007 is starting. Opening question: who saw the lunar eclipse last night? Wonderful view from up here. Great city to be in.
Intranets I've Been Involved In
One intranet I was involved in was with the Financial Division at Telecom New Zealand (35 people). One key theme kept coming up in the design of the Intranet was the metaphor of the UI: they wanted a game, and they wanted it based on Monopoly. They couldn't see the irony.
In a recent speech at the NZKM, Mike Riversdale (hi Mike!) presented on how they were using blogs and wikis at work. However, they took an invisible approach, not calling things out by name, but just adding editing and commenting capabilities on various places. It was a great idea.
In another Intranet project, Julian did some work at State Insurance. He thought that his methodology and approach would scale to 1,600 people ... it seems to work well ... but what he learnt in mapping out the information flows, he realized that information is just a vector. It's a vector for knowledge. And knowledge is a vector for making decisions and delivering outcomes. As per in knowledge management, "knowledge is something that only exists in people's heads, and information is one way of getting it out". Within KM, we need to know who knows what, knowing what we know, and (one more). Question: How do we bring this thinking into our Intranets -- Intranets not just for publishing, but as a place for knowledge.
On Today
We've got an interesting line up for today. Lots of great speakers.
The BrightStar conference is being held at the Rydges Auckland. I haven't stayed here before, but whenever I have the choice, I will stay again. They have paid attention to the "little" things that mean a lot to a corporate traveler:
Highly recommended.
And my room even had a nice view - albeit sandwiched between some high buildings ...
Julian Carver, from Seradigm, and the Conference Chair, summarizes the day:
- Cairo, "don't try to boil the ocean"
- Paul, radical trust, "blogs are an unexploded bomb", and "invisible rain" is a great phrase.
- Mark, open source CMSs
- Kylie, "FaceBook within the organization"
- Dorje, sex appeal of the Intranet, David Brent analogy
- Paul, user-centered design
- Shailesh, usability
Key themes:
- Maturity and pragmatism stood out. There's a real maturity here. Very little talk about technology saving us. It was about how we use those things.
- Trusting users stood out. Nothing bad happened when people were able to contribute.
- Learning from each others are Intranet professionals.
- It's about doing it well; the technology isn't the be-all and end-all
See you tomorrow morning!
The final speaker of the day is Shailesh Manga, from Optimal Usability Limited
Opening Comments
Shailesh recognizes that he's the only thing standing between us and drinks.
Usability covers everything in real life. Many things are done very badly.
Agenda:
- Introduction
- Is usability a good idea?
- Common usability problems
- Summary and Questions
Key theme: To beat into you what you've already heard.
Introduction
Usability, per Jakob Nielsen, "Usability is the measure of the quality of a user's experience when interacting with a product or system - whether a web site, software application, mobile technology, or any user-operated device."
Another definition, "usability really just means making sure that something works well"
There is a rich toolkit available for usability studies: field studies, surveys/questionnaires, use cases, participatory design, focus groups, information architecture, card sorting, paper prototyping, expert reviews, and user testing, among others.
Where does usability fit into the process?
- In the analysis phase, it's all about understanding the user's need.
- In the design phase, get into information design, heuristic reviews, design critiques
Is Usability a Good Idea?
Yes, because:
(a) reduced costs
(b) increased user productivity
(c) decreased user goals
(d) decreased training costs
(e) reduced development costs
(f) decreased user support costs
(g) increased job satisfaction
Eg, some tasks:
- Finding information about an employee ... a difference between a best-case intranet ($53) compared to a worst-case intranet ($491).
- ... Over a year, for a range of tasks, the total different can be up to a $5000 differential.
Users annoyed with the technical products are not slow to turn to computer rage. See Computer Rage for more.
Trends with the Intranet:
- More intranets are becoming template-based
- No standards across Intranets ... although standards within each Intranet
- Shift toward richer content, eg, video, collaborative elements, personalization. People expecting more out of the Intranet.
- Almost all intranets see increased use when usability is improved
Common Usability Problems
Question to the audience: "what are the common usability problems?"
- System jargon driven by the developers
- Inconsistency over time as Intranet page diverge.
- Information overload
- Low level of technical capability on the behalf of many staff. Eg, through poor training.
What about poor search? Some best practice guidelines:
- Ensure there is a search box on every page; search is one of the most important functions on every intranet
- Default search to all of the Intranet
- Index help information in search
- Ensure results are easy to scan
Consistency is important. A common and consistent mental model is really important.
- Put a search box on every page
- Put a logo on the top left
- Link the logo to the home page
- Use standard labels
- Use consistent navigation
- Establish internal standards
Information architecture and navigation: key principles:
- Help the user know where they are. Eg, highlight the user's current location in the navigation bars
- Help the user know where they've been, eg, change the color of visited links
- Help the user know where they can do, eg, ensure that there is a logical and natural organizational of information with clear structure and systematic, clear and meaningful labels.
- For navigation, label things using tasks rather than catchy terms/branding
- For navigation, provide concise descriptive names
- For navigation, beware of quick links, eg, what's the purpose of quick links in a given intranet? Is it to pave over bad design?
- For navigation, it should reflect common activities and groupings
- For navigation, offer HTML information and don't be lazy with PDFs
Task-driven content: knowing your users, and what they want to do. It's important in all design activities, not just intranets.
- Intranets should vary because users and their tasks can be very different. There may be similarities between organizations in the same industries, but there will be differences across industries.
- Understand who your users are and what they are trying to do, eg, have afternoon tea with them and talk
- Establish a task hierarchy and ensure clutter does not impede primary tasks
- Provide goal-driven content ... provide the most important information first, use simple language, chunk information into manageable sizes for reading on screen.
Summary and Questions
- Usability is about designing for people first.
- Good intranet usability saves serious time and money
- Ensure the fundamentals are right
- Feedback from users as the intranet evolves is critical
- Guidelines exist, but it has to fit with your situation -- continually get users involved
Usability isn't rocket science. It's common sense. Get out and get to know your users.
Other
Shailesh gave out two copies of Don't Make Me Think as prizes for good questions / funny stories. He highly recommends the book.
The second speaker after lunch was Peter Grierson from SHIFT, who is a User Experience Specialist there. He's previously worked for the ANZ Bank (on the Intranet design team), Sensis, and Information and Design (Australia). SHIFT started as a web/intranet design firm, but in recent years, have expanded into business and information architecture.
Agenda:
- Principles of Usability
- What makes a good intranet?
- User centered design
- How to conduct research within your organization
- Usability testing and validation
Principles of Usability
The official measures for usability, as defined by the ISO, include (a) efficiency, (b) effectiveness, and (c) satisfaction. We need to know who the users are, the tasks they are doing, and the context in which they are doing the tasks.
What Makes a Good Intranet?
- Can staff find what they're looking for?
- Are things consistently placed on the Intranet where people can find them?
- There will be good feedback on the Intranet, eg, people are getting through their work faster, improved productivity
- Features of a "good intranet" ... include effective search, Who's Who, HR online.
- Intranets go through a variety of development points in their evolution: (1) the initiation stage ("try things out"), will need a sponsor to shift to the next stage; (2) contagion ("new things done"), but it needs a critical mass to get to the next level; (3) control, but will need more control to get to (4) integration. See Damsgaard and Scheepers (2000) for a graphical overview of this.
User Centered Design: Balancing Business and User Needs, Design and Functionality
User centered design (UCD) places the user at the center, not the "solution" being developed. Some of the questions that UCD tries to answer:
- What's their experience with this kind of thing?
- What functions do the users need?
- What information, and in what form?
- What are the user's tasks and goals?
- How do users think this thing should work?
Depending on time and budget available, will depend on how deep you go.
SHIFT seeks to combine UCD with good visual design. The foundation levels include user research and strategy, information architecture, visual design, digital branding, and content management systems and solutions. This is an iterative set of analysis points. For each stage of the redesign process, there is an iterative process: start with (a) discover, (b) do a design, (c) build it, and (d) test it ("often and early as you like"), and then start again with (a) discover, etc. Use what you learn in previous iterations to improve future processes.
Research Techniques for Achieving User Centered Design
Research techniques include:
- Interviews. Be careful that people might tell you what they should be doing, not what they really are doing. Also, if you take people outside of their environment, it can become very formal, and you miss out on a lot of the interruptions and environmental factors that should be taken into account.
- Discussions with stakeholders about goals and values.
- Review search logs, and in particular what searches failed.
- Use tools that show click trails that worked and those that didn't. Fix the latter; don't break the former.
- Key questions ... (a) who are the intranet users?, (b) what are they trying to achieve?, (c) what other sites exemplify best practice for your users?, (d) what organizational goals should be supported?, and (e) what drivers prompted the project?
When mapping this out, there's a discovery process to go through:
- Who are the key user groups?
- What tasks and goals do they want to achieve?
- What environment do they work in?
- What is their background?
- How do they perceive intranet content?
- What are the differences between the different stakeholder groups?
Information architecture is a set of techniques used to make information with a purpose findable to an audience who need or want that information. Information architecture includes navigation, site structures, links, search, titles, sitemaps, promotional features, icons, and more.
Card sorting is a great approach.
A traditional project with a firm like SHIFT would involve up to four stages:
1. investigation, 2 weeks
2. sitemap, 3 weeks
3. schematics technical, 3 weeks
4. present / sign-off -- final presentation, content schedule, completed technical documentation (1 week)
Usability Testing
Aim: to validate that people can do the tasks that you established as being key tasks on the Intranet.
- Ask people to find things. Don't tell them what to do; ask them to find things. Can they do what we set out to enable them to do?
- Test with target users. Test first with paper-based models, then on a working prototype, and finally on a fully working implementation.
- Measure through satisfaction surveys, feedback, usability testing, web logs, and comparisons to prior benchmarking on the previous Intranet. Do this on an ongoing basis: bench mark key tasks periodically, review search engine metadata for optimization.
In the Build phase, the design can be expressed through many design tools and solutions.
Looking for an External Consultancy
Look for:
- Case studies of successful sites
- A process
- User centered design
- Iterative design
- Communication between the organization and the consultancy
- ... and an opportunity to meet the information architects and usability consultants (access to the staff, not just the front sales person)
After a one-hour break for lunch (during which time I got to speak with Vivek, Richard and Ken), Dorje McKinnon from Sungard AvantGard took the stage to present a case study entitled From Phonebook to HR Information System. He'll be presenting on AvantGard's intranet evolution.
Opening Comments
"Dorje" is a Tibetan name, and like the Tibetan circle of life, Intranets go on forever. They are not a "project".
Dorje's goal is to provide a timeline and evolution of the AvantGard intranet. He wants to provide useful stuff for those embarking on an intranet, those for running intranets, and those overseeing them.
History and Evolution
In 1999, the Intranet looked disgusting (black background, green text). People were listed in 19 different Excel spreadsheets, but they convinced the Admin staff that it was better to work together. This required lots of ongoing training, especially when staff didn't know a lot about Intranets. You need to "date" these people.
What they did:
(a) geek speak -- relational database ("keep it simple"), reporting (extension list for each office, with an Excel spreadsheet download link for everyone, so they could download contact details to the phone), integrated logon ("a peg to hand user details on"; one per company, not per website). All of this lead to happy people -- they could get access to all of their information, and they could edit their own profiles. We trust the people, so we didn't see bad stuff going on.
(b) consider staff input into the Intranet
(c) go and listen to people about the problems they experience with the Intranet. Go to a different coffee room each day, and sit with different people at lunch.
The next couple of editions got rid of the black background, and made the UI easier to work with. Some applications were added to the intranet:
- The ability to apply for leave and to have those approved online. They extended this into a list on the right hand side of the Intranet to show when people were away "today" or "tomorrow".
- Each time the home page is refreshed, a photo and profile link to a person is shown. This helps with opportunities to meet other people.
- Added the ability to apply for software licenses from the Intranet. Within the last 6 months, approval for this takes 20 seconds.
- They offer a compatibility search engine, for checking whether various software products will work together on the same machines or not.
- Linking car number plates to people's profiles, so that when you're stuck in the car park, you know how who to call.
About 2003, they faced some major issues: no executive sponsorship, no budget available, and more. One of the key questions was "are we normal?" We found StepTwo and their Intranet roadmap thinking, and found out that:
- we were mostly normal
- we avoided the redesign by failing to implement it; and
- we jumped into usability.
The internal Usability Engineer pointed out that the six phases of the Intranet don't just apply to the whole Intranet, but to each of the six phases within the model.
Version 4.4 of the Intranet (current edition) has a cleaner look (quick links at the top which popups a list of common tasks so people don't have to go through 6-7 clicks to get to major task actions, major story at the top, links on the left, etc.). Task actions include things like: lookup phone numbers, log IT requests, add car, request leave ... these task lists are personalized to a job role, eg, a software developer, and information related to the person are contextualized / personalized based on their physical office location. On the bottom of the popup, there is a list of tools that are provided by the Intranet, eg, time sheets, leave requests, etc.
Successes
- Staff use it
- Simple and the same as other sources
- If it is unavailable for more than a few hours there is a direct business impact
- It is universally accessible, both inside and outside via HTTPS
Failures
Dorje, "we don't talk enough about failures"
- Poor redesign decisions ("we really did a bad job, but we learnt from it")
- The sales and marketing team wanted a portal, but due to lack of funding and their location in the US, Dorje couldn't help. They did their own thing.
- The organization may not be set up for global management
- The office tag cloud tag size didn't work, eg, a tag cloud that showed office locations in a cloud with the size of word dependent on the number of staff. The CIO hated the idea, because the smaller offices might be targeted for closure
Current Challenges
- It is too easy for staff to avoid the Intranet. Staff have traditional used various tools (eg, the Office suite), but there are newer applications that people can choose to use (eg, Google Docs & Spreadsheets, YouTube, etc.) Key takeaway: find some way of integrating these new tools into the Intranet.
- SharePoint 2007 is a bit of a challenge for AvantGard; they already had an intranet, so what's the value of SharePoint? The solution: give SharePoint sites to specific teams and groups for collaborative activities, but leave the Intranet alone. There are manual processes for moving things from SharePoint to the wider Intranet place. Key takeaway: the new SharePoint is exceedingly complex. Get training on it.
- Intranets are like David Brent ... own pearls (the Intranet has some good stuff), facilitate access (the Intranet is an entity that delivers information, but it is also a medium that provides a user interface to other resources)
- Dorje's idea: staff will use whatever tools they have to solve problems. Dorje can't make the Intranet as good as all the things that are available, eg, BaseCamp, Skype, more. Key idea: integrate the tools into the Intranet, eg, use the Zoom Search Engine to index these other places.
- On Enterprise 2.0, definitely take a look at Scott Gavin's 'What is Enterprise 2.0' Slide Deck. Dorje argues that Enterprise 2.0 is "empowered people" plus "business value".
Conclusion
It's not about technology. Intranet use, but aren't successful because of, technology.
If you are an Intranet sponsor ... be open minded, invest in Intranets, there are soft and hard ROI benefits, and lead by example.
If you are an Intranet Manager ... provide training, go and visit them, and support them in their activities.
Final plug: Check out the Kiwi Intranets Group (free to join, great for meeting like-minded people)
It's not an impossible task!
Questions
1. (Ken) Are you using a CMS?
(Dorje) No, our Intranet is based on the old version of ASP. No CMS. We use FrontPage for authoring and editing content. Once people have login credentials, people are allowed to edit pages. Have never had problems with inappropriate content.
Audio Recording
We recorded Dorje's Speech (38MB)
The final speaker before lunch was Kylie Gibbon from the Auckland Regional Council, presenting a case study of what's happening with the Intranet at the Auckland Regional Council.
Current Situation
The current Intranet is called "Our Backyard" ... it has evolved over the past 5 years, bits have been tacked on, the information is out of date, content owners have left, people don't necessarily trust that the information is accurate or up-to-date, an organizational restructure and re-focus has impacted on values and ways of working, and the most common compliant is that staff don't know who's who.
So ... ARCHIE is coming along. Key ideas:
Questions
1. What did top management think about opening up the debate about what the ARC represents?
(Kylie) They are struggling with it, but it is going on anyway by email, in the lunch room, etc. We should make it public and visible. However, we have a great CEO that recognizes who the workforce is, and wants to keep them involved.
2. Are you doing user training?
(Kylie) Yes, we are offering online courses about the Web, that includes the history of the Web, how to write content for the Intranet, and more. We're trying to help them understand it more, so that they can be engaged and involved.
3. How many people are at the ARC?
(Kylie) About 450 full-time employees, plus another 100 contractors. The latter group doesn't get an induction to the organization, so the Intranet is very helpful for getting them up-to-speed.
4. Do you have someone monitoring the forums?
(Kylie) No, it is self-governing, because everyone's name is on their postings. It is not an anonymous forum. We haven't had any issues yet.
5. How have you chosen your technology?
(Kylie) We maintain that it is all about the user, and will not be dictated by the technology people (eg, go for SAP Portal). So we'll probably stick with our existing content management system (ShadowCMS), because SAP Portal can't do what we need.
6. How many people in the Web team?
(Kylie) Until recently, it was me and one developer, with a couple of contractors helping out. We are doubling the group shortly.
7. How are you tackling people issues around content updates and maintenance?
(Kylie) Via content ownership and through training. We have focused on the people who have attended the training sessions, and have asked them if they want to be involved in keeping the Intranet up-to-date (either directly or by approaching the people who can). It's very informal -- no one has it written into their job descriptions.
(Dorje) Would the CEO be willing to change job descriptions to make this more formal?
(Kylie) Yes, will happen in the future. We also find the secretaries and PAs very engaged -- they know everything that's going on.
8. (Ken) What goes in FaceBook and what belongs in the staff directory?
(Kylie) Very interesting question. This needs to be a judgment call, and keeping it focused on the business side. Common sense and political nous is important.
After morning tea (complete with bad workflow design, eg, tea placed after the hot water, not before), Mark Pascall from 3months.com, presented on Delivering Web Content the Open Source Way. 3months is a Wellington-based web development and consulting firm.
"3months has been providing professional web development and consulting services for over 7 years. Combining our technical expertise, solid business domain experience, knowledge of latest industry trends and agile development process we offer end-to-end web solutions."
Agenda:
- what is open source?
- what is a CMS?
- what's so great about open source CMSs?
- what's going on with open source CMSs in New Zealand?
What is Open Source Software?
Definitions from the Open Source Initiative:
(1) software that can be freely redistributed
(2) access to the source code
(3) derived works
(4) distribution of license
(5) no discrimination against persons, groups, fields of endeavours
(6) the license must not be specific to a product, must not restrict other sotware, and must be technology neutral
The aim is to bring more innovation into software development efforts, leveraging community ideas.
Whereas commercial software is building on the shoulders of giants (or ogres), open source is building on the shoulders of acrobats (community, more agility, greater reliability).
What is a CMS?
A content management system separates content from design, and the content from technology. The idea is to return management of content back to editorial and business people, rather than the IT technicians. There are a variety of commercial CMSs available:
- top tier (over $200K), eg, Vignette, Documentum, Interwoven
- middle tier (over $50K), eg, FatWire, SharePoint, PaperThin
- bottom tier
There are also a lot of open source CMSs available ... Plone, eZ publish, Midgard, DotNetNuke, Drupal, and OpenCMS, and many more. The majority of open source CMSs are PHP based, which has good outcomes and bad ones. On the bad side, the PHP community is split in alignment with a specific product. When choosing an open source CMS, you need to ensure that the community supporting the initiative is sufficiently large to support ongoing development and refinement.
The out of box experience includes: templates (for content/design separation), WYSIWYG editing, a flexible content model, integrated search, metadata, workflow, roles/permissions, security model, version management, multi-lingual, a development framework (eg, "more than a CMS, for building CMS-enabled applications and add-ins for the CMS"), syndication / aggregation / integration, and e-commerce, among others. It's a long list, and in Mark's view, therefore worthy of consideration within organizational settings. There can also be a wide variety of add-ins.
Paul showed a video entitled Editing with Plone (.MOV, 50MB, 12 minutes).
Comparison on Plone and DotNetNuke
3months.com works with Plone, DotNetNuke and Drupal.
Comparisons:
Risks and Hidden Costs
There are some legal issues that need to be thought through; seek professional assistance. Eg, no warranty, possible IP infringement, release of proprietary code, loss of software rights, and more. As another source, see the Guidelines from the State Services Commission.
There are also some software risks, including bugs/flaws, security holes, malicious code, poor architecture, poor documentation, and more. The key thing to seek is a large development community that will pay attention to these things.
Development risks include limited developer availability / familiarity, poor understanding by or communication with the desiger, the product loses popularity, and consider maturity as well as the breadth of the developer community.
There are also some hidden costs. It's more about total cost of ownership than initial / upfront licensing and development fees. Be careful on that one. Also be careful of commercial vendors offering apparently "much better" offerings. Other costs include retraining (eg, from Microsoft Office to Open Office), incompatibilities, uncertain release schedules, and upgrade pain.
Open Source in New Zealand
- There are open source awards within New Zealand ("and even the likes of Rod Drury are commenting on it")
- There are some open source projects being run out of New Zealand
Questions
1. (David) We went down the Drupal path, and looking ahead, how will we be impacted by records management?
(Mark) Not entirely sure on the RM situation with Drupal. With PHP-based ones, there are more safer paths.
2. (Julian) Why is your company called 3months?
(Mark) Because we aim to deliver projects within 3 months; agility to delivering business value every 3 months is the intention.
Key Takeaways
1. Ensure that whatever you choose has a big and supportive developer community.
2. Any organization looking at a CMS should do due diligence on open source CMS platforms.
Paul Reynolds is the Director of McGovern & Associates, and blogs at McGovern Online. He presented the second session of the first day, Leveraging the Web 2.0 Ecology on the Corporate Intranet - Myths vs Realities.
Paul wants to outline a framework about what he's been thinking about for the last year. The framework isn't formal and all thought out, more a "perpetual beta" ("so people like me never have to finish"). It's not that he doesn't want to finish, it's just that this stuff continues to fascinate him. Paul believes we are inventing the future--in social, in culture--and this is extraordinary energizing. There's still much to do, so we have to work together.
On Web 2.0:
The challenge of Paul's presentation is that you have to figure out the implications that Intranets should be a read-write-collaborate space.
Conclusion
We are in the midst of some major changes on the public web, but what about on our Intranets?
- from formal to informal
- from taxonomy to folksonomy
- from open to closed
- from them to us
- from network to my/our/space
- it's all about people - tools - sources
Paul is a very engaging and interesting speaker, and he's actually very difficult to take notes on. I hope the above makes some sense; if not, my fault, not Paul's.
I was a bit late to the conference due to a plane delay, but as I arrived, Cairo Walker from Step Two Designs was kicking off the key note presentation entitled What Makes Intranets Work?
Some of the opening ideas from Cairo:
Information Management Planning
Traditional approaches to IM planning ... boiling the ocean, theoretical approaches, taxonomy first, technology first, end-to-end process mapping, content audits, and 100 page strategy documents. These don't work, or the information is too quickly out of date. The approaches try to create an abstract model that encompasses the organization's entire needs, but the diagrams are meaningless.
Cairo stressed the role of "needs analysis", and some of the key factors to getting needs analysis right: don't jump to conclusions, don't ask staff what they want, etc. Conduct interviews with actual users, and focus on their jobs. Drill into the main activities of what they do. "Who did you meet with last week?" "What meetings did you go to last week?" "What did you take to the meeting, and where did you get it from?" It's a simple form of information mapping.
Case Study: Consumers Institute in Australia (CHOICE)
CHOICE is a policy and advocacy group. They used to have a magazine only, but now have an online subscription model too. Their internal processes and systems date back to the 1970s, and they don't map to current publication requirements. Key systems:
- SharePoint, for default contact database
- Intranets .. centrally managed, good content
- CHOICE Online ... old CMS, risky, limited
- Network drives ... used well for projects. Every single article would be called a "project", and all of the supporting material would be put into a shared network drive. They built an application that asks the project code, project title, project manager, and more, and then it publishes the folder to a Projects directory, along with sub-directories, templates in each sub-directories, and so on. Cairo thought this was very successful.
- TRIM ... mirrors the old system; is confused
- Project database ... built in Microsoft Access, good information, but poor user interface
Key issues for CHOICE: speed and real-world reality verses CHOICE quality and reputation. They are also grappling with the role of consumer. Is CHOICE the only authority? Eg, what do other people say about this, and how do they involve other authority figures?
Key outcomes for CHOICE:
- an information manager across TRIM, Intranet and SharePoint
- CMS for online, and then for the intranet
- Digital asset management, as a tactical initiative, eg, be cost effective
- resolve the issue of authority
Case Study: Family Law Courts of Australia
There were recent changes in the way that cases were heard, and a single call center was put in for all of Australia (except one part). Information is contained in huge training folders to help call center staff to answer questions; but the content isn't indexed, and therefore it's very hard to work through. There is a very steep learning curve for the first 6 months, but then after that there are some very difficult and unique questions.
The solution? Use team and individual instant messaging to get answers to unusual questions. The team does the "gardening" at the end of each day, capturing the salient points out of all of the chats and publishes them to the Intranet (or into the manual, or into the call center application). IM is also used for team socialization, interacting with associates in court. Team chat works by everyone having a team chat window open, and questions scroll by thoughtout the day.
6x2 Methodology
There's too much to be done, and not enough resources to do it. Step Two's recommendation: 6x2 methodology. Have a firm plan for the next 6 months, and have some general ideas for the 6 months following.
Case Study: Health Care
This organization provides high quality telephone-based health care throughout Australia and New Zealand. Within the call center, 80% of staff work from home. There is built-in support within the application to help call center staff work out what to do, and offers online training. The current Intranet is fragmented, search is broken, and it's not tied to business indicators and goals. Information is created in a way that suits owners, not the users.
There are lots of things that they could do ... a long shopping list of possibilities. The take 1 proposed solution? Within the constraints of time, money and poor system availability, they decided to put in better search, user metrics on the existing intranet, and source a new CMS. They wrote this up, presented it to the CEO, and he wanted more (a full time intranet manager position was created, and a developer assigned to the project). Key outcomes:
- homepages were created or updated for various operational programs
- put search in place
- put user metrics in place
- put in place distributed content ownership model (spending time with people on training and upskilling)
- source a new CMS
- create a new information architecture (how is all of the information going to be organized?)
- design new site look and feel.
Case Study: Caltex
Caltex has 3000 employees, with offices throughout Australia. They were centralizing various functions into a single team, and a range of questions would have to be answered from within the single team. They have over 58,000 documents in 6,200 folders. They had 10 weeks to go live. The cunning plan was to use a wiki approach, with knowledge custodians for all of the supported business processes. The UI isn't pretty, but it is very flexible. Pages weren't locked down, but there were some business roles wrapped around updates (eg, if I'm not the knowledge custodian, I can't edit directly, but rather need to write the suggested changes into the Comments area).
Case Study: Leighton Construction
A heavy construction company, eg, highways, railways systems, etc. They were piloting a very large CMS platform, with millions at stake. Step Two was brought into answer the question: "What should our CMS look like?" Key finding: if you can't find things, it is because others didn't want to share the information. Historically, people's bonuses were tied to the outcome of their own specific projects. The bonus structure has been subsequently removed, but the culture hadn't changed. Key recommendation: Leverage and improve existing systems, and make changes to the culture. The company didn't like that answer.
Questions
Why did you like the Leighton Construction case study?
Because from a professional integrity issue, I felt that I did the right thing. We weren't told this going in, but we believe that we uncovered the real issues. And there wasn't a happy ending (yet).
I'm in Auckland for the next two days, attending at the 7th Annual Strategic Intranet and Enterprise Portal Management Summit hosted by BrightStar. I'm speaking tomorrow, but between now and then, will be taking notes as best I can.
I'll put all my blog posts into the Intranets & Portal Summit 2007 (BrightStar) category.