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In little over a month the next edition of the SocialNow conference will be held. Organizer and good friend Ana Neves has been working hard on putting another great program together. And I'm honored to be the host of the conference again! So I hope to see you there. SocialNow is a special conference. I wrote about previous editions (and I still need to blog about the last one...). SocialNow is special for different reasons: For one it's a well-organized and thought-through conference. The conference organizer works in this field, knows what businesses are looking for and what conference visitors need to get value-for-money. The conference has a unique format. There is not one conference in which you get great keynote talk and discussions combined with real demo's of tools based on actual user stories in a business context. The conference is not only for people/companies looking for a new internal social tool. I find that the demo's also help you define a...

As I did yesterday , I'm sharing my (rough) notes with you all. Please find them below. Others are live-blogging the conference. Please follow them as well. I pointed to their blogs yesterday. Dave Snowden , The organization as a loosely coupled network About systems, cognition and the patterns of those. Three functional types of systems: Ordered: Order is cool, but after success we get seduced by it. Chaotic: no boundaries or structure Complex adaptive system (co-evolution): We’re moving away from content to linkages that are defined by people. These systems work in very different ways. Illustrates this with the ‘7/8 year old children party’ . Refers to the Cynefin framework , a sense-making framework. Some remarks Dave made related to the framework: If you’ve done two interviews you already have a hypothesis that is hard to give up. Complexity requires more management than in the ordered domain, but the management is different. It’s about creating sa...

I'm attending the 2015-edition of the IntraTeam Event in Copenhagen . It the 10th time it has been organized and it's my first time at the event. I'm writing along with the talks that I attended and will share my rough notes with you below. These are the notes from day 2 (- Day 1 was the workshop day. As I had to give a workshop I don't have any notes on Day 1. The slides for my/our workshop can be found here ). James Robertson , How design thinking is transforming Intranets could do more with design. There are several tools to design intranets like: Cardsorting Tree testing (for instance by using  Treejack ) Wireframing Usability testing James stresses that we should designing intranets that engage. Intranet should not only be useful (as he thought in the past), but also be beautiful. Employees look at it every day. It should delight employees. He shows several examples of intranets that do this: Accolade Calgary Board of Education (based on Sharepoi...

Personalization of intranet homepages has been a big topic for years now. Recently s ome results from a survey were shared and analyzed by Andy Jankowski , I was most surprised by the data about personalization (and left a comment there). According to the research from the Worldwide Intranet Challenge personalization has a negative impact on the way employees value their intranet. My intranet I know there is research that says only 20% of the employees personalize their intranet when they can. But the above-mentioned conclusion is contrary to all my experiences. When we do intranet strategy and design work for companies, almost all ask for some form of personalization. This doesn't have to mean they will use it, I think. I think employees says this when they ask for personalization: the intranet is fundamentally mine, so I want to be able to tweak it in such a way that it fits my daily needs, not Communication's or IT's needs. Levels of personalization What k...

I’m on my way back from my visit to Stockholm. I was honored to speak at one of Kristian Norling’s Intranatverk conferences . I’ll share my insights from the conference in another post and start with sharing my slides and the story around the slides with you. Please find my slides here: The importance of Why for intranets and digital workplaces #intranatverk from Samuel Driessen Surprise My talk was about the importance of Why for intranets and digital workplaces. The reason to talk about this topic is my surprise about how often organizations don’t answer the why question and just focus on the what, when and where of intranets. (Research on Swedish and Finnish intranets underlined this. I’ll share more about this in a following post.) I think this is problematic and leads to intranets and digital workplaces that don’t have (enough) value. Endless debates When we talk about ‘why’ we could easily get into endless philosophical, demographical or cultural discussions. About ...

We started out the workshop with sharing who we are and how we cope with email. Surprisingly most says they cope with email quite well and don't experience email as a huge issue. But all would like to use email in a better way and get others to do so as well. All participants have some kind of collaboration tool inside their firewall (not saying it's used well or not). Luis Suarez finds many high-level manager balk when they hear the word 'social', so he uses 'open' more. He stresses that email is a great way to share information. Which is true, says Luis. But you must add: in a silo. And his 'war' on email is not about killing email but repurposing it. Luis asks why colleagues of the partipants are reluctant to use (internal) social/open tools: time no big value loss of control relevance of information convenience availability security resources governance no fame what's in it for me? over-sharing extra tool not business critica...

On March 18 and 19, 2013 the next edition of the Dutch Intranet Conference will be held. We hope to meet you there! But let me give you some idea of the program and main topic of the conference. In the intranet space lots of discussion is about choosing the right technology and selecting and providing the right features for your organization. Also, we talk about intranet governance. What is the right governance model for my organization? How can we keep our intranet interesting and vibrant? Soft skills What I hardly hear is the skills intranet-related people need to do intranet right? What skills does an intranet manager or owner need? For this reason we thought we’d focus the keynotes on this topic: the skills of the intranet manager and more specifically, the knowledge worker. Because that’s what most modern intranets are for: to support knowledge workers in their daily work. Keynotes We invited 3 keynote speakers to give their view on this topic. These are: Euan Semple : The inter...

Most people know the history of the intranet . And if you’re older you will have experienced its history. Many organization that have had an intranet for years are looking for ways towards a modern and future-ready intranet. But what is the future of the intranet? Many intranet experts and organizations are thinking about this question. Are we eventually going to be apply to wear the intranet? From intranet to social intranet  There’s lots of talk about using social media within organizations. In short this is also called the ‘social intranet’. The intention is to have an intranet that is more than most are used to: news, procedures, who-is-who and the restaurant menu. A ‘social intranet’ should make us forget the old intranet. The old intranet that often hardly supports the way employees do their daily work.  From intranet to digital workplace  For this reason the new intranet is also called the ‘digital workplace’ more and more. A new name to help us forg...

What is the best way to benchmark your intranet? How can you learn from other intranets? Comparing intranets There are many ways to find intranet inspiration. Among others you can: Have your intranet assessed by an intranet expert Read a good book about intranet Visit organizations that have a (beautiful) intranet Visit a conference or workshop about intranet Join online or offline intranet networking groups This list doesn’t mention listening to your users, because I assume you're already doing that… Digital Workplace Survey 2013 Another way to learn from others is to join intranet surveys. The most well-known survey is Jane McConnell ’s. Jane is a well-known intranet expert. Jane’s internal research on intranet has been going on for years now. The scope of her research used to be intranet and has broadened to the digital workplace. Many organizations participate in her research. The survey is broad and deep. Filling out the survey takes about an hour of ...

“Why can't we use LinkedIn for our intranet? At least it works, our intranet doesn't .” Maybe you considered this or heard it in your organization. The question intrigues me and I think we will hear it more and more in the coming years. What do you say in response to this question as internal or external consultant, Communications or IT manager? I'd like to share my thoughts in this post. Dissatisfied about IT The intranet is changing rapidly. The internet provides all kinds of free tools, like Dropbox, Yammer and Google Drive. More and more people are getting used to sharing (versions of) documents, online collaboration, sharing short messages, setting up and maintaining a personal profile, etc. Employees are often dissatisfied about the internal IT-tools and content-focused intranets. These tools cannot compete with the functionality we have on the internet. Free tools as intranet More and more employees are openly, and sometimes secretly, using free internet too...

Many companies are looking into social tools for their internal organization. Lots of others just select what related companies have chosen. Hoping this is the right choice. As with selecting content management systems, many struggle to select a social platform. There are so many tools out there and they all say they can help you support internal networks. How to choose the right one? Is there a right one? Does the success of a tool elsewhere mean it will also be successful in the company you work for? The Social Now conference in Porto (June 26-27), organized by Knowman , addressed these questions. And it did so in a unique way. Basically the idea was to have social tool vendors present based on a concrete company case that wanted to move forward in knowledge sharing, idea management and collaborative project work. The vendors were asked to share their approach in 20 minutes and then an expert panel helped the company ask the right questions to the vendors. Many brave vendo...

And finally my last post about building your social intranet. The final step might even be the most important one. It’s a step that is often skipped. For some reason people still think you just have to give technology to the organization and the employees will jump on it. Over and over again this has proven to be false (although the technology adoption barier is very low in most internal social platforms). The last step is about cultivating your community. A social intranet is not alive in itself. It needs to be keep alive and fibrant. Potentially a social intranet supports most of your organization: the network-side of the company. If so, it is extremely important to make sure it can actually do so and continues to do so. This is even more important because sharing and collaborating with your employees is different than with your friends. Some say: Well, it works automatically on Facebook, so it should on our internal networking platform. I wish it were that easy. (And I don’t th...

In the last couple of weeks I wrote some posts describing steps that help you build your social intranet. I’ll round up this series of post in two final posts. The last two steps towards a social intranet are: measure and cultivate your community. This post will address measuring. As we know from many intranet studies measuring is almost always forgotten . Not many organizations have metrics to know how well their intranet is received and used. In my experience the same goes for social intranets or elements of social intranets like microblogging. This is often directly related to the fact that these intranets don’t have a goal to start with… I advise you to make sure you measure as much as possible. This is the way to check whether the goals you set are being reached. It also helps you sell the social platform within your organization. Managers will like to know what the return on investment is. Sceptics might be convinced to join if you show them hard numbers. Etc.  ...

The last couple of weeks I've been blogging about my experiences with social intranet. I started out by defining 'social intranet' , then moved on to the first three steps towards a social intranet: listen , define goal(s) , and choose a roll-out strategy . It's great to see the posts are being shared and appreciated! Step 4 is about choosing a platform for your social intranet. I'm not going to give lengthy advise about how to do this. I hope to do that in a separate post. My short advice is to choose a platform that is truly social. People and their networks should be at the core of the tool. This is more than having profile functionality. And it's also more than being able to share and publish content. You can also choose platforms, plural . Based on my experience most organizations don't have one platform, but several platforms. And isn't this often the easiest way forward? Why try to push everything into one platform, if it just doesn'...

OK, we defined the goal(s) of our social intranet . Now we have to get commitment from high-level management, right? It depends. I don’t think this is the only way to go, although we have learned to do it this way: write a plan, get budget by getting commitment from management, get IT on board and start rolling out. This type of planning always lead to long projects. I think internal social media concepts and tools challenge us to think differently. Mostly the tools are really cheap and everybody can set them up and configure them. A Yammer network for instance is up and running in 30 seconds. So, why don’t you go ahead and do this? Not because setting up the tool is the only thing that much be done for a successful roll out of social tools. I’ll get back to that in a bit. But you can do this because you can. The big question is: Are you dare-devil enough to do it? Or is this impossible in your organization? In many Dutch organizations this way of working is allowed and even encoura...

How do you build your social intranet? In my previous posts I shared my slides with you and a definition of social intranet . I also wrote about why I think listening is the first step on your way to a social intranet . My step 2 is defining the goal of your social intranet. Of course, most of you would say. It’s quite logical to have a goal before you set up an intranet. For this reason I thought I might skip this step. But I’m keeping it in the list anyway. In my experience this step is left out or it has been defined without really listening to the organisation. The goal is implicit instead of explicit. Leaving this step out results in an intranet that is completely isolated from the business (and thus most employees). Defining an intranet goal without really listening to the organization leads to an intranet with vague and broad goals. Like: Improve efficiency of employees. Or: Improve internal communications. These goals are not wrong but hardly have any relatedness to the c...

In a previous post I shared my slides about building your social intranet . I also gave a definition of a social intranet. This post is about the first step towards a social intranet: Listening. Most IT-projects start out with collecting functional requirements and by defining the goal and strategy of the new tool. Both are important, but I think the goal and strategy should come in second place when working towards a social intranet. And collecting functional requirements should be more implicit. My advice is to start out with listening. Listen to 3 things: The organizational structure and -processes. With this I mean, how is the company run? How is it structured and defined? What does the hierarchy look like? Why is this important? Well, your intranet should relate directly to it to have the potential to be successful. This doesn’t imply the intranet will be highly structured. Because when you look closely at the organization you’ll see that about 20% is defined in pr...

How do you build a social intranet in your organization? I get this question a lot. At the Intranet Conference 2012 in Utrecht I gave a talk about 'building your social intranet'. I've shared my slides below with my answer to this question. I define six steps towards a social intranet. In a couple of posts I'll share my story and experiences on this topic. As always, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this topic. Building your social intranet View more PowerPoint from Samuel Driessen Let me start by defining what I mean by a 'social intranet'. Based on responses from the audience, the definition of social intranet is not very specific. Some say it's internal social media. Others said it's internal Facebook. A simple definition of a social intranet is an intranet that has been extended (and integrated) with social tools. This definition is OK, but it's pretty tool-focused. To me a social intranet is an intranet that is focused on and ...

What’s it like in the digital workplace? James Robertson recently published a report to answer this question . He took a storytelling approach and gave us insight in what working in a digital workplace looks like. In this way he hopes to make the digital workplace more concrete. This is necessary because James there's lots theoretical and abstract talk about it. James’ report wants to bring the digital workplace closer to us. I enjoyed reading the report. In several steps James takes us through the digital workplace. He shows how a new employee would use the workplace during the week using all kinds of concrete examples. Like a personal welcome message, a pre-populated tasklist, information about working methods, mobile intranet, accessing operational information about e.g. hotel bookings, an overview of company numbers and real-time performance data. James rounds up his report by listing 6 keys to the digital workplace (Identity, Awareness, Trust, etc) and also poi...

Recently I published two posts about Jane McConnell's Global Intranet Trends Report 2012 . I shared some of the interesting information that can be found in it. In this post I'd like to reflect a bit about the findings. The usual suspects Last year I wondered if any progress was made in the intranet space. Some improvements could be seen. But the topics like intranet governance, search and measuring gave lots of organizations a hard time. This hasn't changed much this year. Even though most intranet managers know these are the topics that can get your intranet from good to great, not very many spend a lot of time on them. Or, and I think this is mostly the case, the intranet managers simply don't have the time and money to spend on them. The intranet is a nice-to-have tool, but not essential to the business. Share more stories A big topic for next year's survey could be: How have some moved from a good to a great intranet or digital workplace? What advice ...