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There are quite a few books about ‘collaboration’. Recently one was added to the list: ‘Collaborating in the social era’ . I had the pleasure to read Oscar Berg ’s new book twice. Once in ePub format and then in paper. And I must say I enjoyed reading the book and highly recommend you read it too. Reason to read the book The first reason I enjoyed it is because I’ve been following Oscar’s writing ( blogging ) for years now. It’s great to see his writing has been collected, structured and extended into this book. Intranatverk did a great job publishing it. The second reason is the fact that many books you read about collaboration are theoretical. They give us general and more strategic things to think about. And these kinds of books have their own right. I enjoy them as well. On the other hand, after finishing those books, I can feel lost. What steps can or should I take? Oscar’s book is not about that. For one, it’s clear that Oscar is not only a consultant, but has done ...

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The 2nd day at the Enterprise 2.0 Summit starts with a panel discussion about 'Models for the Social Business Transformation' (track 1). Panelists are Luis Suarez  (IBM), Jerome Colombe  (Alcatel-Lucent) and Nicolas Rolland (Danone). Jerome starts with a presentation about his experiences at Alcatel-Lucent. This company is in a huge transformation. The transformation was done in less than 2 years, and started just after Ben Verwaayen started at Alcatel. Engage has become part of their DNA. They set up a platform called Engage. Now with 60.000 profiles (80% of the org.) and 4.000 groups. There are two official community managers, but the rest is managed by the employees themselves. People decide for themselves what they do with the platform. They analyze what's happening in the platform with social network analysis. Benefits for Alcatel were: It restructured the internal communications Commitment to convince and help colleagues (engagement of whole of larger pa...

McKinsey has been following the social business movement for some time now. And they're following to see if it can live up to the expectations. Recently they published the results of their 5th annual survey under 4200 global executives. The polled them how their organizations use social tools. The finding of the report are interesting. There's clear progress: social tools are being used more and more and in more effective ways. When adopted across the networked enterprise and integrated in work processes of employees, clear benefits are seen. There's a boost in financial performance and market share, which relates to the results of previous surveys. However not many companies are fully networked, meaning they are internally and externally networked. One of the most interesting things I read in the report was the fact that executives believe if organizational barriers to social tools diminish, they could transform the core business processes. This is a big stateme...

It's been years ago since I read 'The Cluetrain Manifesto' . I think I maybe only read parts of it, back in 2001 or so. After leaving Oce I didn't have a copy of The Cluetrain anymore, so I decided to buy my own copy and read through it from beginnning to end. Now there's a 10th anniversary edition making it even more interesting to do so. Man, what a ride it was. This book is just great. And amazing for the fact they captured what is going on right now so well. This book is a must-read for a social media enthusiasts. But also for all who just started using social media and are trying to understand if this social-thing is a hype or a trend. I'm not going to summarize the book for you. But I wanted to share some nuggets with you. If you haven't read the book, I hope this will trigger you to go and do so. Please let me know if you do! Start here and read through the 95 theses! If you like these and want to know more, read the book . "... everyt...

Maybe I shouldn't depend on email as much as I do, like Luis Suarez is telling us . But there's something about email that surprises me. When I send emails to people, ending with a clear question and deadline, many don't reply at all. Why is this? A week or a month later I have to get back to them and ask them again (yes, I keep track of the emails I need to get a reply on ). Then they usually send a reply back right away... So it is possible to get a reply back quickly. I know people are busy. I am too. And I don't assume everyone will be waiting for my email and send back a reply in less than a day. I don't mind if I have to wait. As long as you know the reply/answer will come around sooner or later. Walking up to the person or calling him/her helps of course, if possible. So, how do I handle email? I basically apply the Getting Things Done rules: if I can answer within 2 minutes, I reply right away. Most email fits in this category... If it takes longer I pl...

Thought I'd share this with you now that the recording is also online. I gave a talk about enterprise microblogging at the Enterprise 2.0 Summit 2010 in Frankfurt. Please find the slides here . The talk was also recorded and can be found here . Comments and questions about the slides and the talk are more than welcome!

Jane did it again! Her Global Intranet Trends for 2011 report is out. And it's loaded with all kinds of information about the intranet. Fact and figures, stories and trends. As in previous years I'll pass on some of my highlights from the report. For two reasons: to show you what a great resource this report is, and, to get you to buy it. I think it's worth your money. There's something strange about the intranet. The intranet has been around for a long time now. Some say the intranet is 'so passé'. Social media is the new intranet. At the same time when I read this report I wonder: if the intranet has been along for so long, how come so few companies get their intranet right? Why isn't it the case that we just copy the great practices of other intranet concepts and technologies to have our own great intranet? Of course I know the answer to at least part of this question. But still, with resources like Jane's survey you should be able to make a very go...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Just to let you know: I will be giving a talk at the Enterprise 2.0 Summit in Frankfurt am Main in October. Please find the full schedule here. My talk will be about our microblogging experiences and my vision on how the information and communications processes supported by microblogging relate to more formal business processes . Hope to see you there!

I love pointing to new good blogs! Regularly friends and colleagues start a new blog. My friend and colleagues Jan van Veen just made the leap. He started his blog called 'Corporate Internal Communications' . Jan is an expert in (internal) Communications. He's also very interested in what the Internet, especially social media, is doing to Communications inside and outside companies. Jan and I have been collaborating heavily in this area. I hope you all go over to his blog and subscribe to it. Leave a comment to welcome him to the blogosphere! His first post is about the end of the intranet . His second is about how simple publishing on the web has gotten . Good to have you in this space, Jan. Go for it!

I've been looking around at how companies use blogs. I see several types of blogs: A company blog, sometimes a blog per country (written in the local language) A page with an overview of official company bloggers. Usually these blogs are focused on product or market areas. Some of these companies have several more bloggers, but they are not listed on the official blog page. These bloggers often clearly state they work for a certain company, but 'the musings on my blog are strictly personal'. For some reason I find this strange. Why aren't these blog posts (with disclaimers) also listed on the page with official blogs? I think this has something to do with the old style of 'managing' communication. The official company blogs are basically controlled posts, somewhat different from official press releases (they have comments...!), but still pretty much the same. In this model it would also mean that all our talk about our work and the company we wo...

As you may have notice in my tweet behavior I attended Intranet 2010 this week. Just like last year , it was a great ride! Great location, interesting keynotes, interesting participants, good food, etc. I haven't been to many conferences that are so well organized and are simply great from beginning to end. Jan van Veen , my colleague who is manager Internal Communications, and I also gave a breakout session. It was titled 'Social Media for Internal Communications'. I inserted the slides below. I would like to thank the Entopic organization for organizing this conference again! And to all participants: We enjoyed your questions, compliments and interactions! Pres Oce social media for internal communications intranet 2010 congres View more presentations from Samuel Driessen .

Will you be at the Intranet 2010 conference in Utrecht, The Netherlands on March 16? If so, I hope to meet you there. Last year I gave a breakout session . This year my colleague Jan van Veen and I will also be giving a breakout session . It is titled 'Social Media and Internal Communication'. We promise it's going to be interesting and we are looking forward to your questions and remarks!