New online Persona building tool - UsersBox

I have just received my invite to the beta of the new online persona building tool called UsersBox.

I have not had a lot of chance to play with it yet, but as they have a nice introductory video that explains the tool, and of course it has embed code, I thought I might just as well embed it here for you to see:


Usersbox Introduction Video from Usersbox on Vimeo.


I will let you know more when I have play with it, but head over to http://www.usersbox.com/ to take a look for your self.

Book Review - Intranet Management Handbook

Martin White, Managing Director of Intranet Focus Ltd in the UK has a new book out called the 'Intranet Management Handbook' - there are new pages on the Intranet Focus site with links to resources quoted in the book.

I will start with the succinct summary - this is a truly superb book that will be incredibly valuable to intranet managers, intranet teams, and the executives responsible for them in any organization.

The Review

I will expand on my summary with some justification as to why I think it will be so useful. I have been the joint 'business owner' of a large corporate intranet (11,000 users, 200 distinct 'sites') including being the line manager of the Intranet Manager. I have been a business consultant focused on intranet strategy working with Global 500 'blue chip' clients, and currently I manage a global intranet portal with 100's of sites, 100's of content contributors and thousands of users. In other words I have a fair bit of experience with intranets of different sizes and shapes, based on different technologies, trying to facilitate different business goals. I have first hand experience of the challenges, in both dealing with them myself, and helping others to do so as a consultant. That is why I can thoroughly recommend the absolute utility of this book by Martin.

To prove that to you the reader, let’s move onto a more detailed review. I don't want to give the full index of chapter headings, indeed I don't want to be overly detailed at any point as you should buy the book for yourself.  Martin has split the book into four main parts:

• Part 1 - Foundations

• Part 2 - Technology

• Part 3 - Operational Planning

• Part 4 - Governance and Strategy

Each chapter can be read independently so you can dive into the ones that you personally need the most first, and therefore each chapter ends with its own set of annotated resources for that topic. So your not just getting the benefit of the author’s years of experience, but you also get directed to the great work of many other experts with whom the author has developed professional relationships over the years.

Part 1 Foundations

In this section Martin briefly tackles the historical development of the intranet as a dumping ground for miscellaneous information and goes on to examine the real value proposition of a well planned and well managed intranet. He introduces the role of the intranet manager and the interplay between the 3 key dimensions of Information, Governance and Technology. The following chapters describe the foundational elements of defining user requirements for the intranet and turning these requirements into a business case that can be presented to senior management. This is all highly relevant even if you already have an intranet, as the principles as described can be used in any 'upgrade' or 'refresh' project the next time one of these come around.

Part 1 concludes with chapters examining developing a content strategy and on enhancing collaboration. Content Strategy is key in my personal opinion, and Martin does not leave anything out, discussing information stewardship, metadata, records management through to blogs and other 'social' content. This chapter also includes the role of externally sourced information and extranets. This chapter is incredibly valuable in highlighting what Martin describes as a "less is more" approach to managing content. The final chapter discusses the role of the intranet in collaborative working, another key element to consider as we move towards intranets with fully integrated commenting, tagging and rating of content etc.

Part 2 Technology

The 3 chapters of this part of the book examine the areas of managing your technology platforms, specifying and selecting technology solutions and including a chapter dealing specifically with the use of Microsoft SharePoint technologies for intranets.

The first chapter provides a comprehensive overview of what you need to consider in managing intranet related technologies, ranging from Web Content Management through Document Management to integration and authentication, personalization and even enterprise search. External hosting of your intranet, cloud computing and mobile access are all discussed. Some of these may or may not be big topics for your particular organization - but they could be soon, so once again there is something here for those who are already managing an intranet and not starting from scratch.

The next chapter covers not just the planning for a procurement, but the vital and often overlooked subject of content migration. The final chapter covers some specifics of using the highly popular Microsoft SharePoint platform for your intranet.

 

Part 3 Operational Planning

The section on intranet operations is a mine of useful information. The initial chapter covers skills required within an intranet team, developing the intranet manager’s job description and the role of the HR department. The utility of this information is illustrated by the fact that I recently received an email from a colleague on the other side of the world asking if I had a good job description for an intranet manager, and what kind of things it should include ! The following chapters examine the subjects of project management, risk management and compliance. An intranet manager might not be expert in any of these disciplines, but they must understand the basics so that they can interact with those who are from a knowledgeable position. Martin concludes this part with comprehensive chapters on marketing your intranet and on monitoring and measuring its use. Again to me these are key issues, there is no point in investing in your intranet if no one uses it, and you need to prove to senior management just how much they are using it and how they are deriving benefit from it.

Part 4 Governance and Strategy

When I was a business consultant specializing in intranets, I would endeavour to explain to clients that governance, strategy and planning where absolute foundational key stones for their intranet projects, Martin does that job very well in the final part of this book. Frameworks for developing governance structures and developing a pertinent intranet strategy are provided for the reader to use in their own context. The final chapter of this part and of the book is entitled: "From intranets to information management" putting the intranet in context in the broader, holistic view of information management. 

Conclusion

Martin crams a treasure trove of information into 233 pages. His writing style is concise and easy to digest. I have never found another book that covers intranets in this practical style and so I thoroughly recommend it to intranet managers and their teams, to the senior execs who have the intranet within their purview, and to information management, knowledge management and content management practitioners who may have to deal with intranets, or advise clients on their development. 

If you need any more convincing (why ? Go buy it, now..... !!) you can download the Table of Contents here.

Intranets in 2011: A turning point - highlights from the Global Intranet Trends

A few days ago Jane McConnell of NetStrategy/JMC blogged on the highlights of her just released 2011 Global Intranet Trends report,you can read that blog posting here:


Intranets in 2011: A turning point


Jane says she has so many highlights to discuss, she has written 3 posts, but go to that link to start your journey.


To get your own copy of the report and make your own analysis of the trends, or to sign up for next years survey hop on over to: http://www.global-intranet-trends.com/


I will just give one direct quote from Jane's blog post: 

"An over-arching strategy for the intranet, collaboration and social media is a pre-requisite for ensuring a  coherent and effective “workplace web”"


Well amen to that ! As I have said for a long time, especially when I was a consultant working for clients who would normally hire us under the auspices of the internal communications group or department, your strategy must be holistic. If Communications 'owns' the "traditional" intranet (the publishing platform), IT owns the 'collaboration platform' and HR owns the 'self service' applications, then each has an important stake in the workplace web, and the governance structure must include all these departments (and possibly more, depending on the organization). 


This does not automatically mean analysis paralysis is the name of the game, with governance by committee tacking on a highly bureaucratic "we talk a lot, but achieve very little" feel to it. With a clear governance framework, a high level (VP, Director etc) committee should be able to agree on strategy, with the chair of the committee signing of on it and then passing down to those who do the work to execute the strategy. 


This links in to trends for intranet staff - and the questions about what exactly is the role of "Intranet Manager" and what is evolving into ? The Intranet Manager needs to be an organizer, a project manager capable of liaising between the different stakeholder departments, someone who can form the relationships needed to get things done and enable the holistic strategy - sounds like fun role to me !

SharePoint, Intranets and webinars, oh my......

Apologies for taking so long to write about this, but last Thursday (18th of June) I took part in an Intranet Benchmarking Forum webinar as a panelist.

The webinar was an "open to the public" event of the IBF SharePoint Special Interest Group (SIG) and it was timed to coincide with the release of a new IBF report on SharePoint 2010. The report was written by my good colleague Martin White of Intranet Focus Ltd, and myself and the other panelists, Michael Sampson and Richard Harbridge and varying degrees of input. It's an excellent report (IMHO) and you can purchase a copy from the IBF.

Michael posted his thoughts about the event on his blog much more promptly, finishing his article with this statement: "Don't get pushed into doing unnatural acts with SharePoint because Microsoft or your Business Partner thinks you should. It will take time ... and money ... and thought. Spend it now, or spend it repeatedly over the next few years."

Truly excellent advice that I agree with wholeheartedly ! However I want to return to a question which Martin does address in the report, but which was also asked by attendee's:


Where does SharePoint 2010 fit with my intranet ?

Well its a good question, but unfortunately there is no one size fits all standard answer (oh come on now, there never is !). The question has to be examined in context, and reflected upon by asking follow up questions about your current intranet, and what your aspirations for further development of your intranet are.

For a start, what is your organisations definition of 'intranet' ? I have tackled that question before in this posting: What is an intranet anyway?

There are various intranet maturity frameworks available, but this is a good one based on original Avenue A | Razorfish work from some years ago: The Intranet Maturity Framework - so where does your current intranet sit with respect to this framework ? And perhaps more to the point, where do you want to be ?

I ask this question because its a good way of mapping your requirements to SharePoint 2010 feature sets. So for example if your a:

• Stage 1 Communications & Information sharing intranet - then you probably need to be interested in SharePoints Sites features (the Web Content Management or "Publishing" features)

• Stage 3 Collaboration driven intranet - then your focus maybe on the 'communities' features, i.e. Team Sites and other collaboration features

• Stage 5 Digital Dashboards - if your at this stage then its all about the 'insights' features for you, maybe with a dash of 'composites' added too
  

However in some ways this is an overly simplistic view of things. When I was working as an intranet consultant for Prescient Digital Media, I had clients that did not take an holistic "intranet ecosystem" view of things. To them the 'intranet' was the internal corporate web site, run by Communications, with a focus on news articles, and maybe navigation and search. Their MOSS2007 installations were often run by a different department and were under a different governance structure and day to day management regime because they were "collaboration". Finally they may well have had small scale digital dashboards already, based on web tool kits provided by their data warehouse or Business Intelligence product vendors.

This is what I mean by "it depends on your context" ! So we are back to what do you define as the intranet, and what do you want to do with it ? (See this excellent presentation on SlideShare by James Robertson of Step 2 Designs "The four purposes of an intranet" for some ideas!).

As I have said many times before on this blog, start with your requirements - this links to Michael's closing comment which I quoted above, don't let IT push you into using SharePoint 'Sites' WCM for your 'corporate intranet' layer just because SharePoint has been procured to fulfill the collaboration requirements, or the dashboard-ing requirements. One size does not fit all, and shoe horn-ing parts of your intranet into SharePoint "because we have it" is no recipe for success.

However to be pragmatic, SharePoint might meet 75% to 80% of your requirements, in other words it may be "good enough" even if its not perfect. You may find an integration with an existing WCMS, or a third party add on takes you up to the 90% to 100% mark !

So to summarize - "how does SharePoint fit with / fit into my intranet" - I don't know, nobody does actually. It's up to you to do your requirements analysis and then decide upon the fit based on research or the help of vendor neutral consultants.

Divulge your innermost (intranet) secrets

So the brilliant west coast gang at ThoughtFarmer have put up an excellent new site called:

Intranet Secrets

They beseech you to drop by and anonymously leave some gems of wisdom or wit about your intranet - go on, you know you want to...... :-)

There are a few good witty entries already, so I urge you to go and add yours. On the serious side, some of the comments will make you shake your head in wonder.......

ThoughtFarmer 3.6 released - instant demo available

ThoughtFarmer is an excellent "intranet in a box" product. They have just announced the release of their new version 3.6 - you can go to this page to read about the new features:

ThoughtFarmer 3.6: Relevant Home Pages, Easier Searching and Customizable Groups

However, even better than this, they now offer an 'instant demo' account, all you had to do is provide an email address, and they you can get access to a live server and play to your hearts content. I have sent off for mine, and will report back when I have had the chance to play with it a bit.

ThoughtFarmer instand demo sign up page

Intranet global trends report summary video

I posted previously on Jane McConnell's Intranet Trends 2010 report, and now Jane has video on YouTube that was made at an event in Brazil, where she summaries the five key trends. I have linked to it below, enjoy !




You can find out more about the report and get a copy from Jane's site here: A unique report, Global Intranet Trends 2010

What makes a good intranet ?

............and can you build it in Sharepoint ?

That was the title of my presentation session at JBoye09 in Philadelphia earlier this week. More on that shortly, but the presentation is below:

What Makes A Good Intranet

View more presentations from Toby Ward.

You can find other slide decks from Prescient Digital Media colleagues at:
http://www.slideshare.net/prescient

Come and join the Intranet Best Practices workshop at J.Boye 09

I have the pleasure to announce that I will be running a pre-conference workshop at Janus Boye's innaugral North American conference: Philadelphia 09

The workshop is Intranet Best Practices and its a double act with my very good friend and colleague Martin White (of Intranet Focus Ltd).

Martin is also doing a session entitled: Making the most of SharePoint 2007 and I think current plans may see me doing an as yet to be determined session on the Intranet track.

Toby Ward of Prescient Digital Media will also be there doing sessions on the e-Health and Intranet tracks, along with many other excellent speakers. The full programme is available here:

http://www.jboye.com/conferences/philadelphia09/schedule

I have paticipated in Janus' conferences before in Denmark, they are excellent and informative, so I hope you can come and join us !

What is an Intranet anyway ?

A question I ask (and intend to answer) in response to a posting by Shiv Singh on the AppGap blog entitled 'Intranets are not just intranets anymore'.

I am not going to regurgitate Shiv's posting, but I would suggest you go take a look at it. So what do you consider to be an 'intranet' ?

A good place to start is with the wikipedia definition:

"An intranet is a private computer network that uses Internet protocols and network connectivity to securely share any part of an organization's information or operational systems with its employees. Sometimes the term refers only to the organization's internal website, but often it is a more extensive part of the organization's computer infrastructure and private websites are an important component and focal point of internal communication and collaboration." It is acually quite a long page, so you can read it all here.

Interestingly, my opinion on what an intranet is goes back to when I first started in IT, and I would have summarised it as "a private internet" too. Anything that uses internet protocols including HTTP, DNS etc

However it has become apparent to me that many people still consider the 'intranet' to be the "internal website". For some reason they do not consider all the other applications as being a part of the intranet, they just think of the 'corporate home' or news pages as provided by a commercial or home grown CMS. If we take the bigger picture as espoused by the Wikipedia definition though, it opens up the world to an 'intranet ecosystem' which may include your;

• Information published in the form of web pages via a CMS
• Browser based interfaces to document management systems, your CRM system, your ERP's systems enterprise applications,
  
• Browser based query and reporting interfaces to your data wharehouse, operational management systems, strategic planning systems, dashboards and scorecards et al
• Browser based access to workspaces, and various other 'collaboration' tools

It's all part of the intranet, and so in my opinion when we start to look at Enterprise 2.0 or Intranet 2.0 in particular, i.e. the use of tools and concepts such as blogs, wikis, commenting, user generated content - anything that addresses the original Andrew McAfee SLATES or Dion Hinchcliffe FLATNESSES acronyms - then questions such as 'do we put this in Sharepoint or put it on the intranet' or 'do we use a wiki for this, or do we put it on the intranet' are slightly misplaced. The questions should become those of integration and navigation, of how you craft your information architecture and modify your navigation schemas to take the new tools into account, and of how your governance structures need to change to deal with the new concepts.

Where 'Cloud computing' fits i.e. integrating external, beyond the firewall applications into an existing intranet is another complex, but intrinsically linked question.

Shiv gets really interesting though, when he suggests the intranet might have grown beyond the browser. Using desktop widgets, built using the likes of Adobe AIR or MS Silverlight, we can have Rich 'Intranet' Applications (RIA) that don't need a browser. As noted in a comment on Shiv's posting, less than a year ago I had a serious conversation about using 'Outlook as a portal' - levering MS Outlook's messaging, task management and calendering, with add on's such as integrated RSS reader (now a standard feature of Outlook 2007), the Documentum Client for Outlook (many ECM suites provide an Outlook client) and integration with MS Live Communications server. In the end we did not progress this train of thought. Would it work? Maybe, in an organisation with an MS centric desktop infrastructure.

So what do you think ? You can check out many Intranet 2.0 themed postings by Toby Ward at www.intranetblog.com and even better, you can take part in Prescients Intranet 2.0 survey and help us build the body of research.

Also the slides for 'Intranet 2.0: the future of intranets' are available on Slideshare.net, this is a sneak preview of Toby's session at the Jboye08 conference in Denmark.

Enteprise Search - its not just the technology

I had a great chat with Martin White of Intranet Focus today, he rang me from the UK. We worked together on various elements of the intranet and search projects that were under my pervue at the Open University.

He debriefed me on the Enterprise Search Summit 2008 in New York, for which Martin gave the keynote. He later sent me his slides so I could have a read myself. Now Martin's knowledge on search is encylopedic, and we have had many chats on various elements of the subject and it turned out that we had similar opinions about search and ECM, i.e. that sorting out search problems or enteprise content management problems are as much about planning, governance and building teams of people to 'manage' the technology - bottom line, as per usual its all about people and not the shiny new software.

Martin puts emphasis in his presentation slides about building a team to manage your search, when I was presenting on the OU ECM programme I would always be sure to emphasise the size and breadth of the multi-disciplinary team brought together to implement the strategy. Martin has posted a summary of the conference and some of his thoughts here.

Now this also fits with Prescient Digital Media's advice on implementing or improving intranets, that there should be an emphasis on planning, governance and 'managing'. Indeed to push the theme even further Toby recently posted on the Intranetblog on the Pro's and Con's of Sharepoint, qouting Shawn Shell, the author of the new CMS Watch Sharepoint report. Shawn's advise on how to ensure success in deploying Sharepoint also focuses on what might be called 'soft' aspects of information systems project management.

OK, so non of this is 'rocket science' to me, Martin, Toby or Shawn, but if your a newly promoted IT guy (hey, I've been there !) who's been told to implement Sharepoint, or buy a new search engine, the change management, people management and information management (metadata, taxonomies, classification schema's, 'findability' etc) aspects might be a long way from the top of your task list ! When it comes down to it they may not be at the forefront of the CIO's thoughts either.......

Having been involved around the periphery of a big CRM programme, and having watched colleagues do data warehousing and BI etc, non of this is specific to 'unstructured data' - but, time for the blatant plug (!) if your doing ECM, Intranet, CMS or search projects, Prescient can help to ensure you have the right executive backing, the right governance structures and the right team in place to implement your projects.

New country, new job - its official !

My new employers have posted my bio on their website, so I am very pleased to announce that from the middle of May, I will be working for Prescient Digital Media in Toronto as a business consultant.

As well as contributing to Prescient's body of material on our main site, and probably adding the occaisonal article to the Intranet Blog I will continue to post to this site, hopefully more regularily once we are settled in our new home in Mississuaga. The usual caveat will continue to apply, that opinions published on my blog are my own and not those of my employer etc.

So, exciting times, new job, new house (not yet !) and new city, new country ! Let no one ever say I am averse to change :-)

I am looking forward to integrating into the Prescient family, and helping our customers with ECM, Intranet, web content management and search related projects. I will be sad to leave the amazing institution that is the Open University, and will probably do a longer 'official goodbye' posting at some point.

But for now lets look forward, so if your reading this and might be in the market for some assistance with your intranet or content management strategy, head on over to Prescients site and see what we can do for you !