infoarch

Wow, 2010 flew by! 2010 has been an interesting year for me. The biggest thing has been my new job, a new challenge. After 10 good years at Océ, I started working for Entopic and am enjoying it. I'm curious what 2011 will be about. I want to thank all of you for reading this blog, interacting with me offline and online. I hope we can continue our conversation in good health next year! I wish you and your loved ones Happy Holidays! I hope you all have a wonderful Christmas time and a Happy New Year.

Techcrunch ran a very interesting series of posts about the history of social networking . They were written by Mark Suster ( @msuster ). I think you should go ahead and read all the posts, but I'll pass on some highlights here to get you started. Marks posts are about the “6 C’s of Social Networking” – Communications, connectedness, common experiences, content, commerce & cool experiences (fun!). He stresses that social networks exists before they were hyped in our time they just work better now "and there are more people doin’ it." And a bit further on: "Yes, social networks of 2010 have much better usability, have better developed 3rd-party platforms and many more people are connected.  But let’s be honest – they’re mostly the same old shit, reinvented, with more people online and trained. But less considered is the fact that the success of the Web 2.0 companies versus the Web 1.0 ones were enhanced because they coincided with hardware that allowed us to c...

Commoncraft does it again ! They released another video explaining something no too easy in an easy way. This video is about social media and the workplace . It mostly focuses on explaining how companies can join in the conversation. And how not only comms but all employees can be empowered by being trained and giving them clear social media guidelines . I enjoyed it and hope you will too. It's great stuff when you need to explain to company decision makers what social media is about and how to use it.

Jane McConnell raised an interesting question about the relationship between social media and culture . She asked: Will cultural differences impact adoption of social media? Will culture “eat” social media for breakfast? or will social media “eat” culture? I find social media interesting because I see the relationship between social media and culture as bi-directional. The (company) culture has to fit social media (culture) for successful adoption. But I also see culture change due to social media use. I think this has to do with the underlying concepts of social media, like relational networks, information is social and humans as social beings. These concepts fit us people very well, because they are deeply human. Tapping into these concepts when rolling out social media is a key to success (and positive cultural change). Rolling it out as technology (non-human focus) is a key to failure (and negative cultural change). Als o refer to this interesting post about cultural differences ....

Luis Suarez recently pointed me to this. IBM set up an Expert Network on Slideshare , giving us a way to see all the slides produced by IBM-ers. Adam Christensen has a post explaining why this was done . This got me thinking. I think this is a smart move.  Isn’t this a great way to implicitly show the expertise of IBM-ers? Of course LinkedIn tries to do the same, the other way around. You set up your profile. And you can connect Slideshare to your profile. Problem is, nobody says that profile is correct. And clicking through to the proof (e.g. your presentations) is not that easy. Furthermore you can´t see if that person is the only expert in that organization or the organization as a whole has expertise in a certain area. I think if you’re looking for someone from IBM to help you out, the Expert Network on Slideshare will get you to the right man/woman much more quickly. What do you think of this move? And do you think such a network in Slideshare is a better expertise locat...

Just wanted to write a short post to create some buzz for Jane McConnell ’s latest Global Intranet Trends 2011 report . I hope you all go and read it. Jane posted a couple of highlight posts about the report. I’m reading it now and will write one or more posts about it. I love reading the report. You get a great overview of the state of affairs in the (social) intranet landscape. It’s also a great way to benchmark your intranet or an intranet you’re working on. This year Jane also published a free executive snapshot . It gives you a good idea of the quality and richness of the report. I hope you go ahead and download/buy the report. And also participate in the survey next year!

Johan Hillebrand, Head of Internal Communication at ABN/Amro. Two main challenges Communications has: information overload (too much email…) and they couldn’t find information. Another thing that was mentioned was: stop paper communication, move to digital. They decided to take on these challenges by building a new intranet. Goals for the new intranet: Fewer channels Offer relevant information Centralize content They choose to have the intranet look a lot like their internet site. No complaints about confusing the intranet for the internet yet. (They launched a couple of weeks ago.) They kept the look and feel very simple. They combine general and local news. They assume people have 10 minutes to read news and cluster that in a box. ABN has a separate social media platform (not integrated in the intranet). It's called Arena. It was built by one of their contractors. They plan to integrate it into the intranet in the future. But the look-and-feel is the same. They piloted withi...

Helen McCarthy, eCommunications Manager at Nestle. Nestle is a huge organization. 280000 employees at Nestle (100000 in factory), 449 factories, operations in 83 countries. Nestle runs their old portal on SAP. Of course they also have email, fileshares, etc. What they needed was collaboration, up-to-date content, reduced information overload, transactions/workflows, global vs local communications, ability to target, confidentiality/security. They set up a new portal based on SAP. One landing page, showing relevant information to the employee. But the employee couldn’t decide if he/she wanted something else targeted to him/her. The targeting was too restrictive. The technology was as well. So, they had a Kit-Kat break! ;-) They now want to model their intranet around their internet site. Their internet works and won awards. It was built on Sharepoint and so the intranet will be as well. They're aiming for the iPad as the standard of usability. Nestle's intranet will have the em...

Jenni Laajarinne of Amer Sports Corporation is the first speaker today! 6300 employees. Amer Sports is behind brands as Wilson, Atomic, Salomon and Suunto. Her talk will focus on using social media applications to encourage community-thinking. She has a case example of our organization using and internal social media application to encourage community thinking in the year that marked the company’s 60 th anniversary. They have home-grown CMS, created by IT. They have 6 brand intranet and 4 business area intranets. These intranets are pretty autonomous: the look-and-feel is different, the structure is different, etc. They were looking for a fun and exciting way to celebrate the company’s anniversary. They wanted to take the opportunity to celebrate the employee’s passion for sports. They set up an intranet page to share their sports moments. It ran for 3 months (so it should be simple to use for there is no time for adoption!) and there was a monthly prize. Employees could upload tex...

Next speaker: Stein-Ivar Aarsaether, ABB Global Web Management. ABB is a global leader in power and automation technologies. 117000 employees. ABB has a long history (founded in 1883 after lots of mergers). ABB’s intranet is a traditional CMS-intranet, based on Lotus Notes. In 2002 they were one of the top-ten intranets of the year (Nielsen). Problems they have: Hard to find information and services you’re looking for Difficult to keep content updated Lack of collaboration tools They organized an ABB Intranet Conference in 2007. In 2009 they decided to go with Sharepoint 2010. In 2010 they launched the 1 st version. Every couple of months they launch a new version. ABB uses Google Search. A new section in their intranet (based on SP 2010) allows employees to follow feeds of other employees (like Twitter). But it could be more interactive, like Facebook. For instance if you comment on someone’s feed he/she doesn’t see that… Commenting on activity stream in SP is not out-of-the-box...

Wolfgang Jastrowski of Swiss Re is up next. They use Jive for their intranet platform (out-of-the-box). The interesting fact is that they don’t train users. Wolfgang is from IT. They provided the platform and have users decide how to use it. Blogging has not taken off as well as they thought. So they created roundtable to increase blogging. How did they introduce social media tools inside? In 2008 the company realized that collaboration is key. They wanted a community centric collaboration approach. Objectives: Better support virtual teamwork Boost information sharing across functions Accelerate agility and responsiveness Advance innovation and solution creation Etc. In short: they wanted a platform that would support their cultural change. They went live with Jive in Q3 of 2009. They then already had 1500 users. At the end of 2009 they had 10000 users. Their key lessons: Strive for long-term objectives but work in phases and take the time needed Position it as an integrated b...

RichardHare , British American Tobacco is the next presenter. They have 60000 employees. Richard is a Knowledge, Communication and Collaboration Consultant. He starts out with the question who loves their intranet? And who’s users love their intranet? Not many hands go up. Complaints about their intranet: Search takes 20 seconds to return meaningless results Content out of date Difficult to navigate when based on hierarchy … but people still want sites. They connected the roll out of the content management tool to the roll out of the new corporate brand. This helped pull things together. (He showed several local intranets. Most looked the same.) Their intranet only has top navigation, no left-hand navigation. Activity updates in the middle, daily news on top. People-centric navigation. Evaluation of the set-up was done with senior management based card sorting and benchmarking. To define if people can find things and understand what the labels are called. Social media at British A...

Oops, missed the 1st minutes of Neil Morgan , Head of Global Intranet at WWF International (5000 employees). How did they get to their new collaboration platform? Surveyed users by asking questions and watching the way they worked. Based on the survey’s they came up with personas. They found that lots of work was very labor intensive. To address their ‘problems’ they turned to Google. People were already using Gmail, Google Docs, etc. They went for Google Apps: Calendars Docs (e.g. Forms), Spreadsheets Presentations Google Sites (best practices, wiki space, etc.) Neil stresses how really simple it was to set up Google Apps and how simple it is too use. He also shows how well the parts of Google Apps integrate. Search Docs or Search All from one box. Create a document, share it easily and chat about it in the sidebar. Etc. How do they link all these sites back into the intranet portal. They implemented a newsroom approach on the central intranet. They want the sites to think more in a n...

Mikaela Terhil of Wartisila Corporation is on the stage. They provide lifecycle power solutions. Wartsila recently allowed employees to access social networking platforms like Facebook from inside the company. They started by integrating the intranets into one intranet. Then they added social features to the intranet, workspaces and office communicator. Why social features? They wanted to help employees do their work, find the right employees, connect people together, bring expertise and different perspectives together, share knowledge, etc. In short: knowledge sharing and productivity. So they now have: People search > search over all profile information. Employees fill in profile info, blogposts etc are automatically related, you can also follow others Compass profile > this is personal blogs, which is planned but not implemented yet Personal site > collects and shows all your personal information on the intranet (not MySite, but MS profiles) Poll > to get a feel of what ...

Next up is Viviane Dupre of Bombardier. Bnet evolution will be done in a more formal and structured approach. It’s more than intranet; an enterprise 2.0 implementation. They have high level management buyin for the project. A heavily organized governance model. Current version of the Bnet employee portal is from 2004 with less than $100.000 investment. It replaced 100 plus intranets. They have 350 content managers. Minimal governance at the content level. Bnet has been identified as a business critical application. In May 2009 they did a survey. 5000 employees responded to the survey. 64% gave a negative rating of the home page. They also asked what employees actively used on the internet. Like Youtube, LinkedIn. 42% were contributors in 2009. This project was also used to improve employee engagement. By empowering employees, be recognized. Increased employee engagement should lead to increased customer engagement. They wrote up a mission for the Bnet. Stressed enabling and increasing...

Next up is Sean McNiven , SAP . Sean is head of the Social Web. Sean starts out with Web 0.0. Web 0.0 was and is the coffee machine. It’s still their running communication platform. This platform is now also happening on the web. The rules are practically the same, says Sean. So the guidelines are the same as well. Be honest, be respectful and add value, don’t pick fights, separate opinion from fact, be human, etc. A brief history of their employee network: 1995-1997 DMS and structure; 1998 SAPNet Communication, Team Collaboration and self service; 205 Corporate Portal based on Netweaver; 2007-200 Corporate Portal, Relaunch Enhanced UI and Personalization; 2010 SAP Employee Network, SAP Corporate Portal + integrated external tools and social media / Enterprise search. The governance changed considerably over the years. From open/decentral to closed/central in 2007. Now the governance is hybrid: open groups, governed communities, expiry of unused groups. SAP has many modules that integr...

Wow, that’s a whole mouthful! This is the first presentation at Employee Portal Evolution Masters 2010 in Berlin. I’ll be live-blogging through this conference. The subtitle of the conference is Strategic business approach for employee portal lifecycle management and integration of social media in rapidly changing digital environment’. Another mouth-ful! Mark Morrell , Intranet Manager of BT has the honors of opening this conference. The title of his talk is the title of this blogpost. BT’s intranet is about 16 years old. It started in 1994. It’s available to 140.000+ employees including 3rd parties. All information and applications are online. They can access it wherever they want. They use it for collaboration online too: blogs, wikis, podcasts, RSS, Twitter. Their intranet was also a push towards a more paperless office. They benchmark their intranet through the Intranet Benchmarking Forum. And they’re one of the best… Why did they start using social media? Social media is techno...

Lee Bryant closed the Enterprise 2.0 Summit with a talk about Social Business. Where's Enterprise 2.0 headed next? It's in the direction of providing real business value. Enterprise 2.0 has been adopted at least a bit by most organizations. There's a nice spread of use cases, showed by research supported by Headshift . Lee sees Enterprise 2.0 as a Trojan mice for organizational change. Small but impressive changes to the organization. Enterprise 2.0 is still in the early phase, patchy and tool-centric (like the KM wave was in the beginning). We're looking for quantifiable business improvements, like: lower operational costs networked productivity business agility effective management (move away from information hostages: businesses run by writing and moving report up and down the ladder) customer centricity (Listen! But many companies lack a structure to socialize what you're learned by listening) Where is business practice going...

Some notes from the open space about Enterprise 2.0 and business processes: If you don't impact the business process with Enterprise 2.0 you won't unlock value. If you introduce a new tool, you can't make them use it. Tools should fit in their daily routine. If not, users will easily reject it. There were differences about using force to get people to adopt Enterprise 2.0 tooling. Most said, Don't use force, make it voluntary. But it does depend on the type of e2.0 project. For instance, an example was given about social project management. In this case you agree to do project management in this way. But with communities using (a bit of) force is restrictive. Helping people use e2.0 tools and integrating them in their work processes requires patience and lots of training. Sometimes you even have to start by explaining what a webbrowser is. Focus on the e2.0 concepts not on the tools. Most people understand the concepts better than the tools... Enterprise 2.0 pr...

JP Rangaswami couldn't make it... Too bad. So his talk has been turned into a discussion between Frank La Pinta, prof. Joachim Niemeier , Jamil Ouaj and Christian Wuerdemann. Don't have much to blog about this discussion. Not that it wasn't interesting for sure. One important thing to pass on is that the European companies in the panel have not changed their organizational structure based on their e2.0 implementations. The middle management does not have a new role, according to the panel. There was lots of discussion in the audience about this topic via Twitter .

Oscar Berg on the stage! He'll talk about Transparency as the double-edged sword . Or: Governing Enterprise 2.0 Risk. Knowledge work, ideas and the like are like black boxes. We can't look into them. We are finding ways to open up these black boxes. Increasing transparency in organizations and between organizations decreases risks and enables value-creation. Oscar points to two cases in which they tried to increase workplace awareness using blogs and microblogs. Oscar remarks that many of the legal issues we are now concerned with are the same as when email was introduced. Usability issues leads to workarounds. Employees start to email everything, label everything as Confidential, copy (locally) to ensure access, share with USB sticks. Lesson 1: There's a real challenge in finding the right balance between security and privacy. Lesson 2: We need a balance between control and empowerment. Governance is good, but it should not tip over in such a way that emplo...

CheeChin Liew (BASF) is up on the stage. Interesting how CheeChin compares the development cycles in the organization with the development of communication tools. The increasing speed in product development cycles at BASF requires different communication skills and tools. Connect.BASF consists of three pillars: networking. Employees can be visible, profiles, in communities. knowledge sharing. Communities (there is overlap with point 1), tags and search etc. collaboration. Blogs, wiki's etc. It is a global platform. Ho did they start? It started in Communications (by Cordelia Krooß ). They convinced to start a steering committee around this topic (@shake ) with a board member as sponsor. CheeChin was in R&D. He had launched wiki's there. E2.0 was not started by IT. IT came in later. This project is now permanent. In the launch phase they focused on IT implementation a lot. They have connect.BASF days with external, inspiring speakers. They do a lot ...

Luis Suarez , Lee Bryant , Alexander Richter and Alexander Stocker will discuss adoption archetypes. The Alexander's kick off with an overview of their research. They point back to the research that was done on Groupware in the past. This is a basis for the research on Enterprise 2.0. Archetype nr. 1: Exploration. Continuously identifying feasible usage scenarios for IT-services which are suitable for any use. Archetype nr 2: Promotion. Coordinated communication and targeted training of IT-services with focus on certain modes of use. Their research shows: Wikis and weblogs have gained maturity, making promotion the dominant strategy in corporate settings. Microblogging has the explanation strategy. Research will continue to see if that changes. Luis takes the stage. Talks about BlueIQ - driving social software adoption at IBM. IBM started with social stuff 40 years ago with their forums. But in the modern sense of social software they started in 2001. Points to the whit...

Next talk/discussion with Rob Howard , Luis Suarez and Frank Schoenefeld . Frank gives a list of 7 pitfalls of Enterprise 2.0. Don't care at all. Frank says: You are obliged to care. Since Enterprise 2.0 is freeform, emergent and easy to use - just let it happen. Frank says: in a closed system entropy/disorder always increases (2nd law of thermodynamics) It's not about technology... Frank says: It is. It's about culture... Frank says: It is not. You can not measure the ROI of it. Frank says: You can if you want to and have to. Information overload kills. Frank says: It does indeed. Shield yourself. With Enterprise 2.0 we've found the holy grail for everything (in the organization). Discussion: Rob disagrees fundamentally with the thesis that it is about technology. The big successful companies have a business objective and then select tools to be successful. Analytics is important (they should map to a strategy). Rob missed 'r...

Next talk by Bertrand Duperrin , Ellen Trude , Emanuele Quintarelli and Mike Thompson (Headshift). Bertrand kicks off by focusing on Cultural issues in general, between Europe and the US and it's implications for Enterprise 2.0: self protection: culture as an excuse local identity protection vs globalization and mergers different attitudes towards autonomy, rules, hierarchy... philosophy of work trust/mistrust vs companies, colleagues... will engage with colleagues organization boundaries that reinforce cultural ones who said legal? Bertrand says this is a major issue and it's a good thing we are discussing it here. Every country with its own culture has to find it's own approach wrt e2.0. Now Mike Thompson ( Headshift ) who collaborated in a large research project on Enterprise 2.0 . This research is still going on. First results can be found here . He says the research shows that it's more related to company culture than coun...

I'm at the Enterprise 2.0 Summit in Frankfurt! I'll be live tweeting through this summit. I'll also try to summarize the talks as they pass by. The first talk is about "Manager 2.0" by prof. Richard Collin (Grenoble Ecole de Management) and Rolf Schmidt-Holtz (CEO Sony). Collin wonders if 2.0 is a good extension in Enterprise 2.0. 'It's just a version number'. It doesn't stress enough the future enterprise will be totally different. A new space is emerging. Not in the economy of good anymore, but in the economy of information. (Before the economy of good there was the economy of territory.) The north point is not north, Dow Jones, but 'you'. Information is the new steam. The industrial age is passe. And it's moving fast. He tells about how long it took the book and the pc to move into our world. And relates that to the speed in which the Internet moved into our world. This has implications for leadership! How should be defin...