Secretaries: Communication and Information Hubs

secretary Recently I had the chance to give a workshop to 50 secretaries. Their question was: Could you tell us more about the newest collaboration tooling, specifically social media? Of course!, I said.

So we split the group in two and off we went! With the workshop I hoped we could abstract from daily secretary work and look at their information and communication processes. Secondly we would relate that to their current toolset and see if new collaboration and social media tooling could improve the way they communicate and handle information.

Boy, did these ladies catch on! First, I was really curious if we they would want to and be able to abstract from their work processes. Well, they did. They handles loads of different types of information. And mostly the tool they use to manage this information is... email. It wasn't hard for them to come of with the pro's and con's of this combination either. Secretaries don't work for themselves, they work for a manager and one or more departments. However, secretaries also work closely together as well. The subset of secretaries they interact with directly is small (max. 10). On the other hand relevant information isn't easily spread over the whole group. We found they hardly ever have the same information at the same time about new procedures, decisions or tools.

Then we went through the new tools one-by-one. Tools like Sharepoint, Wiki's and Blogs. I loved the way my slides were picked up by them. They started explaining how they worked, if they knew them. They related to the kids they have, who are already using them for personal reasons. And - and I liked this most - they directly started to translate the new stuff to their work. 'Hey, we could use this for ...'. And we didn't even get to that slide yet.

But in the end we did and I challenged them to change the way they communicate and handle information based on the new ways of looking at communication and information, and the new tools I showed them. They decided to set up a blog as a central platform to connect secretaries to each other, make sure all secretaries have the same info and the same time, and share experiences. Not all but many also decided to use our microblogging platform as a easy way to share daily experiences and point to relevant information.

The blog has been set up, the first posts have been written and we'll evaluate the success of this initiative in 6 months.

Secretaries are the communication and information hubs of organizations. I hope this step made them even more important and effective.

Popular posts

Keep the Intranet Small

Image
This tweet by Jonathan Phillips ( @digitaljonathan ) triggered to finalize this post, that's been burning in my draft box. I've always been intrigued by how unsuccessful many intranets are. And there are all kinds of good reasons for intranet failure. One of the things that is hardly ever mentioned is: Shouldn't the intranet be smaller? Usually intranets are huge. Lots and lots of pages with lots and lots of content. With complex navigation. The intranet  evaluation surveys almost always show employees only use the news page and people finder. But still we build and maintain nice big intranets. Not only stats point to smaller intranets. There are others reasons as well. I came up with a few. If you have more, just leave a comment. Here's my list: -            user requirements: users don't require large intranet -            search/navigation: searching and navigating a small intranet is easier than in a large intranet -            mobile: the content of the
Read more

Enterprise 2.0 Research

Image
There's not too much fundamental research on Enterprise 2.0. Deloitte recently published interesting research done on enterprise 2.0 implementations and their return-on-investment. In the EU research has also done as well. Study is being done for the European Commission and it was carried out by Tech4i2, IDC and Headshift. What was the goal of the study? Goals of the study To provide a clear definition of Enterprise 2.0 is, describe the market and the positioning of EU industry, also in comparison with US and Asia; To analyze the take-up of Enterprise 2.0, the organizational requirements, and the role on the transition to a knowledge based low-carbon economy; To collect evidence on its macro-economic impact, as a market opportunity for the European Software industry and as a productivity tool for European business; To identify and analyse both the direct and contextual challenges, including the need for Next Generation Access and the legal barriers; To analyse an
Read more

Innovation in Turbulent Times

Image
I love reading articles about innovation. And every now and then you read one that is very interesting. "Innovation in Turbulent Times" by Rigby, Gruver, Allen (in HBR, June 2009) is one of them. This article takes fashion companies as an example for continuous, year-by-year innovation. And how successful fashion companies are usually led by two people: a left-brainer and a right-brainer. "If you don't have highly creative people in positions of real authority, you won't get innovation. Most companies in other industries ignore this lesson." They extend this to show that successful non-fashion companies have the same kind of leadership. And this kind of leadership is usually also characterized by a long-term relationship. I think this concept can also be extended to teams and projects as well. More often than not, people are good at one or the other: thinking up great concepts or ideas, or, making them. In teams and projects we can learn from this as
Read more