ClearBox Consulting

SharePoint metadata: what business users need to know

Sam Marshall — Sun, 22 Apr 2012 15:17:09 +0000

With SharePoint 2010, Microsoft introduced some very flexible tools for representing metadata on intranets. However, getting value from this requires that business units take ownership of it, and the available documentation tends to focus on the “how” rather than the “why”. ClearBox therefore presented a workshop at IntraTeam 2012 on SharePoint metadata: what business users need to know.

Sharepoint metadata workshop

View more presentations from Sam Marshall

Loving the intranet

Sam Marshall — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 11:44:36 +0000

Often discussions on intranet adoption tend to focus on launch or training activities. But what role should adoption play in digital workplace strategy? Indeed, what does ‘good’ adoption look like? It’s not even clear cut that people spending more time on an intranet is necessarily a good outcome – it could just mean that they’re lost. We also need to move beyond “what’s in it for me” as a model for motivating, as this risks an over-simplified or even mercenary view of what brings people to use our intranets.

Sam Marshall recently presented at IntraTeam 2012 in Copenhagen on this topic. See the slides below:

Loving the intranet – User adoption. Sam Marshall ClearBox

View more presentations from Sam Marshall

SharePoint Intranets: Are we communicating or collaborating?

Sam Marshall — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 11:21:05 +0000

Communication vs. Collaboration

Imagine if you went to buy a new sofa, and instead of entering a showroom you were taken straight into the workshop. Inside there are rolls of fabric, wooden frames of part-built sofas, others that look nearly finished but you can’t quite tell. You pick out one that you like only to be told that it’s last year’s model and no longer available. How frustrating would that be?

The reason we have showrooms is that they make a clear demarcation between production and offering something for consumption. We need to think about SharePoint in the same way: too often we frustrate employees with sites that contain a mix of final products and work in progress without any clear differentiation.

The biggest culprits are team sites that belong to departments, where they often play multiple roles:

• Communication of news, such as announcements relevant only to department members;

• Communication of information, e.g. policies intended for all staff;

• Collaboration on work in progress, like internal presentations on an ongoing project.

Getting clarity around the distinction can help employees find the right information more easily, and also reduce the risk of people making decisions based on outdated information, or sources that are misleading out of context. In SharePoint that clarity comes down to good governance, implemented through access control, training and appropriate templates.

The SharePoint Pyramid

We can think of SharePoint content as falling into a pyramid (see figure).

At the top is the company-wide intranet, typically for news, navigation and links to reference information.

Below this is the ‘peer’ level, for a division or department. Underneath this fit team sites for closed-group collaboration on individual projects.

And lastly, there is personal work, which may take place on a My Site, though more typically this still resides on a personal drive.

Let’s look at a typical scenario to see how the pyramid works:

1. Joe in HR is asked to draft a new paternity leave policy. He’ll typically keep this on his local drive until he’s ready to show it to others (the bottom pyramid layer).

2. When he’s worked on it for a while he puts it in a private team site and asks a small group of colleagues to contribute to it (the 2nd pyramid layer).

3. Hopefully they will add some extra sections and revise it until the point where it is ready to be disseminated: version 1.0. This is the point where things can go horribly wrong.

4. The temptation is to change the permissions on the collaboration area and publish a link to it. But what this does is bring everyone into a working space, and there may well be other working copies or even the draft policy v1.1 that you don’t want people to use by mistake.

5. Recognising this, Joe may decide that as it’s an HR document, it should go on the HR Department Site (the 3rd pyramid layer). But this has two drawbacks:

i) The HR Department site should be for people working in HR. This means information relevant to everyone gets buried in more specialist content such as updates on employment law or detailed grievance-handling procedures.

ii) It requires that employees know who produced a document in order to find it. For a paternity policy this may be OK, but what if you want to order a new laptop. Is that IT? Finance? Perhaps Procurement?

6. What really needs to happen is for Joe to ask himself where the audience already goes to and publish the document there. As it is aimed at all employees, this would be the company-wide intranet (top of the pyramid). In recognising that publishing step, he is going from a collaboration mode into a communication mode. Clarity about this transition prompts him to ask not “where would I keep it?” but “where would my audience look for it?” This is the equivalent of Joe taking the sofa out of the workshop and into the showroom.

It is fair to say that this scenario is by no means specific to SharePoint, however the breadth of SharePoint’s functionality seems to make it more common. When intranets were largely based on a dedicated CMS and collaboration mostly happened via email attachments, then it was more common for people to reach a step where they would request something be published on the CMS when the policy was complete (and if they didn’t the same pattern appeared within a mess of shared drive folders or attachments emailed to the entire company).

SharePoint governance in practice

In practical terms, what can you do to encourage the right approach?

1) Govern where it matters most. The higher up the pyramid you go, the stricter the governance should be in terms of quality controls and locked-down templates.

2) Have a policy that makes collaboration areas restricted by default. This is hard to enforce automatically in SharePoint because site owners can add the “everyone” group to the permissions, but it can be done through education and policing.

3) Get your information architecture right. This should state how the different sites fit together. In particular, it needs to specify where content by a department for its own members (e.g. HR for HR) lives compared to content aimed at everyone (e.g. HR for employees) – one is the workshop, the other the showroom.

4) Design templates for each level in the pyramid that reinforce appropriate behaviour. This applies in particular to the “Peer” and “Team” levels. SharePoint provides many templates out of the box, but the vast majority of implementations seem to use only a few templates, such as “Publishing Site” and “Team site”. For Department sites there is some ambiguity, so don’t be mislead by thinking that the templates map neatly onto a collaboration\communication distinction:

• For small departments, a team site may provide appropriate functionality so long as it is not visible outside the department. Within-department communication is typically served by an Announcements or Blog web-part. It can be seen as the equivalent of the workshop notice board: informal, but fine for a restricted area.

• For larger departments, it may make more sense to use a publishing site for department-wide announcements and resources – in effect the “staff showroom”, with multiple team sites underneath that may be closed even to other department members (so that they don’t refer to a draft paternity policy by mistake, for example).

What about 2-way communications and social media?

Much of the hype around social media claiming to improve enterprise collaboration has only added to the confusion. Most social media tools such as commenting on news, blogs, microblogs etc. excel at supporting two-way communication, but that’s all. Clearly communication does need to happen as part of the collaborative process, but the difference is that the talking is not the end goal in itself.

What defines collaboration is that multiple people work towards an end goal. So collaboration tools should invite people to add to or modify an outcome. Wikis are the honourable exception in that participants actually modify the content, whereas comments on blogs do not change the original post. Therefore, the same principles apply when thinking about how to govern the experience at each level. On the group intranet, by all means encourage people to comment on a company-wide announcement, but it needs to be clear where the announcement ends and the comments begin.

This post originally appeared as a guest article on Simply Communicate

The Digital Jester

Sam Marshall — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 09:01:19 +0000

photo by Roy Blumenthal

Introducing the Phantom – a character created for the social network at LexisNexis UK and vividly described by Laurie Hibbs at the Melcrum Digital Workplace Summit this week.

The phantom is an online avatar that joins their internal Yammer discussions and is able to say what many think but few would post. He tells people who post trivial comments to the whole organization to go over to the “water cooler” group instead; he will post questions to the CEO on behalf of people who want to stay anonymous; he even chides the CEO if his remarks are too drab.

There’s a long tradition of comedy and guise being used as a way to speak the unspeakable. Mediaeval court jesters were one of the few who could get away with criticizing despotic kings. But they would also pick on others in court who went beyond the boundaries (probably a preferable fate to a beheading!). The Phantom seems to me to be a digital jester: tolerated for being more direct than anyone else, but also there to energize with a little friction sometimes. Nothing draws people to a social intranet like tasty subversion.

Hibbs observed that the Phantom was able to say things that someone like the HR Director could never do, yet he also sets the tone for what is different about a microblogging tool at LexisNexis compared to their traditional intranet. By pushing the outer boundary, he moves everyone forward.

Mobile and social intranets – IntraTeam 2012 Day 3

Sam Marshall — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 11:21:00 +0000

Day 3 from the IntraTeam Conference

Sharon O’Dea – Mobile Intranet at UK Parliament

Sharon (@sharonodea) wins my vote for the most entertaining session. She talked about the challenges of being an intranet manager in the unusual world of a near 1000-year old organisation. When she started there was an old intranet, but with elections coming and a new influx of younger, novice MPs, they needed a better way to support them.

They couldn’t do user research because their users hadn’t been elected yet. Go-live date was non-negotiable, it had to be election day. The good thing was that there was a clear induction event that they could use for launch.

They decided that mobile had lots of potential. MPs have their own phone, so needed to support all 3 main platforms (but there was a clear pattern of: iPhone – Labour, Blackberry – Conservative, Android – Liberals). 70% of budget went into making the Blackberry version work.

Top sections of the mobile version include

Alert when they need to go into the house to vote
News feeds
What’s on calendar
Map of how to get around parliament
Key Facts content written especially for mobile
Help pages – turned out wasn’t needed
Canteen menu (there are 19 bars & restaurants on-site and this is the most popular page)

It turned out that the map wasn’t so successful, despite working well technically. For security the map quality had to be downgraded. Moreover, there are so many police around that it is easy to get directions long before you get a phone out.

By making the intranet available in a way that suited members, 75% said they checked the intranet every day (compared to around 40% with the old intranet).

Next step is to develop a tablet version which supports annotation and more content interaction, rather than just looking things up as is the typical mobile use-case.

Oscar Berg – Why traditional intranets fail today’s knowledge workers

@oscarberg began this talk as a blog post 2 years ago and its had more hits than nay other. He argues that fixing the intranet needs to look outside the intranet itself and rethink our attitude to work itself. It matters as we outsource more of the structure-based work overseas and keep more of the knowledge work.

He argues that intranets traditionally have focussed only on structured work, not knowledge work. From a long tail perspective, they focus only on the most common and predictable tasks. It used to be that serving the long tail wasn’t cost effective, but social and consumer IT have flattened the cost [think about Amazon vs. a traditional book shops' stock]. We need to stop thinking of the intranet as a destination, and more something that follows you as you work [and Sharon's talk above was a great illustration of that]. One implication of the long tail is we risk bloating content by hanging on to files that meet niche needs. Oscar’s advice is to focus instead on reducing duplication and redundancy.

Traditional collaboration is about act /co-ordinate /form team. Social collaboration is connecting, relating, sharing and contributing, but the challenge is that these have low visibility. However, teams will failif we don’t support it. For one thing we need networks as filters to avoid information overload.

Griet Johannsen – Shell Wiki

Shell won a “Most Admired Knowledge Enterprise” award for being a learning organisation. Real, current, success stories for enterprise wikis are pretty rare so I was keen to hear how it works at Shell.

They use Mediawiki and keep the homepage simple to focus on content quality. They encourage few visuals. True to the wiki spirit, anyone can make changes to any page. Overcoming a ‘content control’ mindset was a challenge in first 2 years. A good thing about MediaWiki is that it looks like Wikipedia, so familiar. The downside is that the editor is complex.

The wiki is positioned as an internal encyclopaedia. There are 90,000 users of which 5,500 publish, mostly without having a formal role to do this. Over 44,000 articles have been created. To avoid duplication, you have to run a search first and from that create a page when there’s no hits. But still there’s a risk of pages created around synonyms, so content custodians are still needed for ‘gardening’.

A strong feature is that content is organized by subject, not organisation structure. The rule is not to re-create anything that exists outside the wiki. It took several years for people to develop a sense of what was appropriate for the wiki vs. SharePoint, records management etc.

A good example of the approach is that they took a Production Chemistry course and turned it from Powerpoint to wiki pages. It was designed for 50 students, but a further 4000 employees also accessed the material. At the start, they had 10 people who could lend central support. When they took this away usage dropped quite suddenly. The support team has now been re-introduced.

Despite this success story, Shell faces many issues shared by the rest of us – such as competition from SharePoint and Confluence wikis within the organisation.

Sam Marshall – Loving the Intranet

This was my slot about intranet and digital workplace adoption. Slides on SlideShare

End of the Conference

Mark Morrell(Digital Workplace) and Jesper Lauridsen (feeding LinkedIn into profiles at Lundbeck) wrapped things up, but sadly I had to run for a flight.

It was another excellent event laid on by Kurt and team. Highly recommended as an event with a strong community feel and high-quality discussions.

IntraTeam Conference Day 2: What’s happening in Intranets and the Digital Workplace

Sam Marshall — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 15:52:21 +0000

This is part 2 of a day-by-day blog of Intrateam 2012

Tony Byrne – Latest Trends in Collaboration and Social Computing Within Larger Enterprises

Tony (@TonyByrne) of the Real Story Group (RSG) began by saying: If you throw in blogs, wikis etc. at the organisation and people don’t use them, it’s not an adoption problem. It’s a technology strategy problem: you haven’t given employees anything aimed at solving their problems. So it can be misleading to do a feature by feature comparison of, say, SharePoint vs. Something else. Your approach should be more about fulfilling specific use cases, and out-of-the-box SharePoint doesn’t really help you here. For example SharePoint has no native notion of communities.

So if you use SharePoint you have 3 options:

Extend – develop new software and risk upgrade headaches.
Supplement – 3rd party tool like Newsgator. Again upgrade risks.
Complement – something on the side with perhaps data exchange. e.g. Jive.
…or wait for the next version. But we wont’ know much about what it does until late thsi year and probably you wouldn’t deploy until well into 2013.

Tony was refreshingly clear on what collaboration is really about. He described ‘Networking’ as interacting where the relationships are an end in itself, whereas ‘collaborating’ is when there’s something produced at the end. He feels that networking emerges from collaboration and not the other way (as Enterprise 2.0 may argue). i.e. Networks are a side effect of work

ing together. It also helps to be able to talk about collaboration projects rather than social ones from a business acceptability point of view.

RSG see the biggest opportunities for collaboration in R&D, Marketing and Sales and Customer Service. Less so for Finance, HR or Supply Chain.

Tony also commented on “Traditional Knowledge Management” vs. “Community Facilitation”. I can’t help feeling that traditional KM was never as rigid as it is being portrayed in hindsight. After all, Communities of Practice was a major poster child of old KM.

He had a great shot about getting people to fill in profiles at Yum! (Jive case study) – when people stand at the washroom basin, their reflection appears like an online profile (see photo).

Jim Ylisela (Again) – Making the Business Case for a lively intranet

Jim (@jpyjr) coming at it from a comms point of view. He opened with: Can you imagine the day when people keep coming back to your intranet because they’re afraid they might miss something?

Your content needs to merge the needs of the CEO and the employee to be effective. Too much top-down and all the good words companies use about “innovative, openness, diversity” fall flat with the reality of how the comms come across.

Why intranets fail:

Communicators don’t talk with IT early enough… Or at all.
Too often they seem content to leave it to IT to re-design the intranet, but IT have their won set of goals that probably don’t align with Comms unless you sit down and talk.
Communicators don’t do enough audience research.
Communicators don’t find a strong executive sponsor to push for change

Jim’s tips:

Find some early adopters to lead the way
Get your exec sponsor (and others) to show everyone its OK (more on this in my “Loving the Intranet” talk tomorrow)
One org teased employees to fill in their profile. They put up the “no photo” picture and said “Do you think this person: Lacks the skills? Doesn’t want to talk to you? Lacks Confidence? Or really looks like this?”
Don’t use the words “social”, “media” or any combination of the two when talking to executives

Most WalMart employees go to their intranet from home. There’s some social on there, but mostly they talk about their work and the stores.

At GM one employee saw a customer in the car behind at a drive-thru food place. As a random act of kindness he paid for her mail just to see the smile on her face. He then posted this on GM’s internal discussion board and the idea really took off.

Jeff Willinger – “What’s in it for me?” User Adoption – Making SharePoint Sexy

Jeff (@jwillie) got us dancing to Katy Perry (no, really!). Social intranets, he vividly explained, are a bit like sex as a teenager – it sounds exciting but nobody really knows what they’re doing.

5 best practices for Employee Engagement

Employee recognition
Social computing
Targeted content
Rich media
Search

He went on to talk about some best practices

REALLY listen to user needs up-front
Governance from Day 1 matters to ensure the solution is aligned with culture.
Don’t customize when you can configure
Just cutting down on the number of clicks goes a long way to helping user adoption

You can think of this as “Digital traction”. The business context, human context, technology context need to come together.

New Balance have a page-per-shoe approach and a design that is very iPad-like, for example, and this fits their youthful employee base.

Quick plug: I’m speaking on Employee Adoption tomorrow: see Loving the Intranet for a sneak preview.

[Apologies that this is a slightly truncated account - I'm afraid those of you that have to write conference reports for work will have to fill in the blanks!]

How good is your people finder?

Sam Marshall — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 15:41:40 +0000

Here is a quick checklist that you can use to rate your phone book ‘maturity’.

Count your points for the following:

1) 1 Point if all your employees are in one phone book

2 bonus points if contractors are too

2 bonus points if you have supplier contacts

2) 1 Point if all employee data comes from a master source

2 bonus points if you have a process to check accuracy (e.g. when people have left)

3) 1 Point if you include photos

4) 1 point if you include manager information

2 bonus points for a dynamic organisation chart (i.e. a grahic visualisation that changes as soon as you change your manager)

5) 2 points if you include skills and expertise

1 bonus point if 50% of your people have filled it in

2 bonus points if more than 75% have filled it in

6) 1 point if you can refine search by department or location

2 bonus points if you can search skills or expertise

7) 2 points if you have presence

8 ) 1 point if you link to availability \ calendar information

9) 2 points if employees can access phone numbers from a mobile phone

10) 1 point if you can start a phone call by clicking on a name or number in the phone book (unified communications)

If you add up your points the maximum possible is 25. I use this in when I run Mastering Intranet Management courses. Anything over 10 is pretty good. Over 17 puts you in the elite zone.

Please add a comment below to share how you scored.

What’s happening in Intranets and the Digital Workplace – IntraTeam 2012

Sam Marshall — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 14:59:18 +0000

I’m at IntraTeam 2012 in Denmark and will be blogging my take on the highlights (apologies to the speakers in tracks I miss).

Jim Ylisela on Writing for the internal Web

Jim (@jpyjr) reckons our employees are getting rapidly cynical as intranet content falls behind web content – it’s boring, not interactive, words not video.

For articles, nobody follows the Who, what, where, why, format anymore. You need to be more selective about what matters.

Easy to convey: What, Why

Much harder to get across: Why it matters to you, now what?

He advised to think in terms of how long the reader has:

5 seconds – headline, text message, link

50 seconds: summary, lead, tweet (<-personally, I’d put a tweet in the 5s category)

5 minutes: read the story, listen to the audio, watch the video

50 minutes: Participate in conversation, read whole article, take poll, rate content, follow further links, share, watch video…

CEO Blogs

Always end the post with a question to get a comment
Don’t write from ‘on high’ if you want responses
Use an informal profile photo to reinforce the tone – not suit and tie
At Best Buy, the CEO blog has a “Tell me about it” mail link in the sidebar so if you don’t want to post in public its a good overture to get dialogue. He’s open that some may only be ready by his staff so he manages expectations if there’s a flood of mails.

Martin White on Virtual Teams

Martin (www.intranetfocus.com) gallantly stepped in last-minute to replace Jane McConnell who sadly couldn’t travel due to illness.

He began talking about the Challenger disaster. Barriers are not just country culture, but there are barriers of expert language too. For example ‘MTBF’ (Mean time between failure) is used commonly by engineers but not understood by all managers. For Challenger, people thought that managers had agreed to the launch because they didn’t object; managers thought they were there as observers. There was no clarity on whether the meeting purpose was agreement to launch or just sharing of information.

An Economist Intelligence Unit survey asked about the most important factors for virtual team success. “Setting clear, achievable goals” was top. The main challenge was “Misunderstandings due to differences in culture, language and inability to read people’s expressions”. Yet mostly we tend to worry about the place and time factor. Jane’s Digital Workplace Trends 2012 report is only one to identify extent of challenge multinationals face in balancing English with local languages.

Collaboration Personas by IBM.

IBM developed 6 types:

Dynamic Project Team. Some members come and go during course of project.
Stable project team. Same people end-to-end.
Client-supplier relationship group
Community
Committee
Professional relationships

(SlideShare summary by Luis Suarez)

Articles on collaboration tend to talk about situation where team already exists, not about how the team should be formed virtually in the first place. Martin recommends “Developing real skills for Virtual Teams”.

…and Martin White again on Mobile Intranets

Many people thought 2011 was going to be year of mobile intranet. It wasn’t – there was usually no mobile champion and little in-house experience. The gap between mobile and intranets is as big as the gap between intranets and the physical workplace.

Big shift now is how tablets have become centre-stage so quickly. People are talking about it being the dominant platform, where tablets come first and a PC version will be a bonus. Morgan Stanley predict 472m units by end 2014. Lucky Apple – and all done without asking you, the consumer what you wanted! (see also Should intranet managers ever listen to their users?). For example, SAP have deployed 40,000 iPads to their global workforce. They want people to play and learn as they begin to develop for it themselves, and also to support mobile roles such as sales.

The Aberdeen Group in September 2011 found top App priorities were email, calendar, directory and then messaging and social collaboration. What’s worrying is that Millennials see security as somebody else’s responsibility (Cisco study).

Really important mobile use case is field personnel reporting back – not consuming info on the device, but sending in updates via online forms etc.

Questions that need answers:

Who covers cost of calls and data if you bring your own device (BYOD)?
If you provide mobile devices, how do you address countries where they’re taxed as a benefit in kind.
Who is taking lead in developing a mobile strategy?
How do you assess requirements when the primary user type is hard to get hold of?

(Martin had 8 more – I’ll link to his slides when available)

SharePoint Metadata – What business users need to know

I had the warm-up slot first thing on the day so ran a short workshop in the knotty question of SharePoint metadata (slides on Slideshare)

A review of the 2011 in Intranets and the Digital Workplace

Sam Marshall — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 11:24:32 +0000

Many people are boldly doing 2012 predictions, which is nice guesswork if you can get it. I’m going to stick to more certain ground and talk about the 10 things that stood out for me in 2011.

1) Intranets remained stubbornly not dead. There seemed to be a rash of articles by people writing headlines “the Intranet is dead” and then saying why it wasn’t. Unfortunately the meme that leaked out was the ‘dead part’ (e.g. Death of the Intranet, Reports of Intranet’s Death Are Greatly Exaggerated, Death of the Intranet: ‘The Times They are a-changin’ ‘)

2) Digital workplace concept grew steadily. Use of ‘Digital Workplace’ as a term grew progressively, significantly with Jane McConnell changing her Annual Trends report from ‘intranets’ to ‘digital workplace’, and IntraTeam (including my own Digital Workplace Model), Gerry McGovern and others all picking up the term. It’s fair to say though that the idea is growing far faster than that specific label, with the Netherlands having a “New Way of Working” week, and the UK and Belgium holding a “National Working from Home Day”. The trend looks to be accelerating for 2012 driven in part by the growth of “Bring your own device” (BYOD) and expectations of remote access, and government moves to promote Anywhere Working (e.g. in the UK). Collaboration, as a component of the digital workplace idea, also seems to be gaining traction.

3) SharePoint 2010 was the default choice… for intranets and sometimes it felt like everything else too. 2011 was the year that many organizations bit the bullet and switched from earlier platforms (e.g. OpenText’s survey of over 2000 organisations found 49% used SharePoint 2010 as their primary platform). In Russia it SharePoint was marvellously advertised as the in perfect solution for when “office plankton is driving crazy“

4) SharePoint dissatisfaction grew too. Almost inevitably alongside the success, many SharePoint Intranet managers started to feel that SharePoint 2010 out of the box was already looking dated, particularly its social features. 2011 was a great year for add-on vendors, with Newsgator in particular coming out with some strong case studies. Harmon.ie and Attini also showcased some neat ideas.

5) Office 365 went live. Microsoft launched their cloud-based SharePoint and Office solution, though awareness outside SharePoint die-hard circles seemed relatively low. I hope to see some decent case studies in 2012 (and not just the same old BPOS ones rebranded).

6) Lync lauynchd. To me the most exciting component of Office 365 is the inclusion of Lync, and this deserves much more recognition than it has had so far. The promise of mode-switching collaboration (e.g. chat to voice to document sharing) has been around for a long time, but Lync seems to be the first to really do it seamlessly enough that the technology doesn’t get in the way.

7) Social grew; Yammer was oddly antisocial. 2011 was the year that everyone wanted twitter on their intranets. Yammer was the leading light, with their ease of sign up leading to many ‘unofficial pilots’, though this viral approach meant that Yammer conversations often happened in quarantine from the rest of an organisation’s digital workplace. Despite this, there’s clearly a useful role for microblogging (e.g. study of Yammer use at Cap Gemini by University of Sydney)

The social media theme also trundled on, with ‘internal social media’ becoming ‘social intranets’, becoming ‘social business’. I do see ‘social’ fatigue setting in now so perhaps we could talk about ‘business’ and ‘intranets’ going forward? Many intranet managers seem to have tried the social element and are now either just getting on with it or have hit cultural brick walls. If nothing else, News seems to be finally losing its stranglehold on the homepage, with some good examples of more balanced approaches from e.g. IBM’s new intranet design.

Gamification played up. I’ve had my doubts about gamification on intranets, but it at least got people back into thinking that the workplace could be a pleasurable, even fun experience. Rypple have been working on Enterprise Gamification for some time, and their acquisition by SalesForce has potential to make them more mainstream. However, the cloud based approach makes it ever more likely that companies will rush in with a software deployment rather than getting their heads around the real issues of getting gamification right.

9) Governance (again). This could be a permanent feature on any annual intranet and always sparks discussion in the intranet and SharePoint training courses I do. The governance issue was helped by Martin White’s excellent Intranet Manager’s Handbook coming out, but the shift to user-generated content and consumerization are both sparking new bush fires as soon as others are put out.

10) Adoption is being fostered. This is probably next on the list of recurring themes, though for 2012 love is in the air, with IBF running an “Intranet Love Affairs” campaign and I too will be speaking on “Loving the Intranet: Re-thinking Employee Adoption” at IntraTeam 2012 in Denmark.

The Changing Role of Internal Communications

Sam Marshall — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 11:17:21 +0000

Last week I was invited to join Melcrum’s Social Media group to discuss how the growth of social media impacts the function of internal communications. It was a very lively debate and what follows is my take on the topic, updated based on what I learned that day (I was actually billed to do a ‘download’ but the irony of a one-way presentation on social media wasn’t lost on me, especially given the level of knowledge in the room so we had an open discussion instead).

Clearly the shift is away from internal communications as content creators and owners and more towards comms as facilitators. Many of the big changes have been covered elsewhere – see the table below for a summary. The devil’s-advocate position, then, is that if everyone can publish, will internal communications go the way of the typing pool as being an unnecessary intermediary? One participant in the meeting summed it up beautifully: ” it’s their channel not ours, and sometimes we have to stop comms from using social media to make announcements”

Past	Future
Doing	Curating
Broadcast	Facilitation
Informing	Marketing
Controlled dialogue	Open dialogue
Planned publishing	Continuous output
Mostly written	Rich media
Infrequent feedback	Constant feedback
Few formats	Many formats (mobile, display screen, microblog feed etc.)

I think the counter-argument is that as the volume of content rises, the need for professionals that really understand that issues increases. Just as Front Page didn’t make us all web developers (and if anything made the amateur appreciate that it is harder than it looks), there’s more to it than access to the tools. There will still be a role for ‘broadcast’ IC specialists and for coaching managers in effective approaches, perhaps even tackling the issue of how to scale this up as a more widespread service rather than something one-to-one for the elite.

What is likely is that we may see a more specialised variant of the internal communications professional that is more along the lines of Community manager (see also What Does it Take to Manage a Community?). From a professional development perspective what strikes me is that there are few real opportunities to learn appropriate new skills. Most people seem to learn on the job, but this requires an environment that is forgiving of mistakes, whereas in many cases communicators are also working hard to demonstrate social media success to gain further buy-in. What’s needed is a training ground for these softer skills. Hearing from peers is useful, but you still need personal practice to fully understand the dynamics. And don’t think you can easily recruit for this, because you’ll be competing with well-funded external communities.

There is still an ownership void when it comes to cultivating collaboration too: IT tends to stop short of addressing adoption needs; HR seem to rarely be showing leadership so often it falls to Comms to be the drivers. Although Comms are well-equipped for managing launches, long-term it is not a comfortable strategic fit and it may well be that collaboration branches off as a new sub-species of internal communicator.

Thinking wider, the growth of the digital workplace and BYOD (bring your own device) is going to call for refined skills in understanding mobile and flexible work patterns. This isn’t just about designing for a small screen, but also for more urgent consumption; stripping back to critical tasks and capitalising on the ‘killing time’ use case that Jakob Nielsen described as the “killer app” for mobile.