infoarch

Giving a guest lecture is great fun, I find. I recently had the chance to interact with about 60 college students. They were in their second or third year. The topic of the lecture was social media use within company. So, Enterprise 2.0 or Social Business. My slides can be found here (in Dutch...). I kicked off my lecture with some open questions. I'd like to share the answers to one question with you. I was curious what social tools they use themselves to get things done in their lives. With all the talk about millennials being digital natives (or aren't they ), easily moving in the social space, organizing their life and work with these tools, etc I thought I'd see if this if the case in practice . I shared what I got from the students on Google+ . In sum, this is what they told me. Of the 60 students: 40 use Twitter Almost all use Facebook Just over half use Hyves (Dutch social network) 1 uses a bookmarking tool 2 blog 0 have a wiki (although all have ex...

Recently I blogged about why intranet is so hard . This struck a cord, it seems, because it received several good comments! At the end of that post I promised to write about the easiness of intranets as well. My post about intranets being hard didn't want to imply it's impossible or frustrating to develop, implement and maintain an intranet. The fact that it's hard intrigues me and keeps me interested in intranet. However, intranet can also be easy I think. I'll explain why here. I'm really curious if you agree/disagree. Intranet deployment is usually a complex exercise. Lots and lots of requirements from different people and roles are collected. And these are squeezed into one overall intranet concept. Then building and deployment begins. But what is an intranet? It's a collection of webpages, containing content, linked together. Sometimes added with a couple of web applications, like a people finder. Yes, the Digital Workplace. So, why don't we j...

A while back I read Wikinomics , by Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams. I really enjoyed it. So when they published a new book, Macrowikinomics. Rebooting Business and the World , I was curious, bought and read it. The book Wikinomics was about the power of mass collaboration for business. But this new model of collaboration goes beyond a business or technology trend. It's a "more encompassing societal shift". So, this new book wants to show how wikinomics and its core principles can be applied to society and all of its institutions. Principles What are the wikinomics principles? The 6 principles summarized for you with a quote. Collaboration - "... the collective knowledge, capability, and resources embodied within broad horizontal networks of participants can accomplish much more than one organization or one individual can acting alone. Of course, hierarchies won't disappear from the economy in the foreseeable future. Nor are we likely to see large top-...

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!

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...

Recently Jan van Veen and I had the privilege to talk with Jacob Morgan about the work we (and other colleagues) are doing in social media. You can find transcripts of the interviews here: Implementing Enterprise 2.0 at Océ, Part One: Business Drivers Implementing Enterprise 2.0 at Océ, Part Two: Making the Push Implementing Enterprise 2.0 at Océ, Part Three: Change Management Implementing Enterprise 2.0 at Océ, Part Four: Operational and Financial Impact [... more will follow soon! ...] Others interviews about our work can be found here . You can compare them and see if we're making progress! ;-)

Note: This post was written with my friend and colleague Rob Veltman ( @robveltman ). We carpool together and regularly talk about innovation and culture. Rob is an innovative product developer always challenging himself and his colleagues to ask the right questions to solve problems and make wishes come true. Rob is deeply interested in new product development, processes for (breakthrough) innovation and sustainability. Introduction How could we contribute to a more innovative organization? We ask ourselves this question regularly, help each other to come up with new ideas in this area and try to lead by example. We would like to share with you an aspect of our daily practice, which is the observation that our colleagues can experience hesitance in being innovative. We will propose a solution to overcome this hesitance. Situation Knowledge companies consist of very smart people, educated in different disciplines. Their knowledge workers are confronted with all kinds ...

Title of presentation: Wikipolicy: institutional policy & social software by Rienke Schutte , Hogeschool Zuyd , Knowledge community Knowledge Organizations and Knowledge Management. Related article about the Wikipolicy . In 2008, the 'Hogeschool' (English: college) initiated a project entitled “Policy Workshop 2013”. The result of this project would be a policy framework for their organization. The new policy should bring together insights, opinions and wishes of students, staff and stakeholders. A wiki was one of the instruments to achieve that goal. Objectives of the project: powerful, stakeholder oriented vision strategic direction shift towards a co-creative organization Plan of action (in 2008): wiki with 4 main topics (platform: Wikispaces ) conferences for managers, teams, external experts (educational/non-educational) work meetings flyers weekly blog members of the board Café 2020 (SURF - foundation scenario's) formal conclusions by management Evalu...

This is my presentation for the KM Made in Holland meeting about 'enterprise wiki's @ Océ: Pres. Enterprise Wiki’s @ Océ Km Made In Holland View more presentations from Samuel Driessen . Got some interesting questions: about culture and wiki's and getting people to collaborate in wiki's how are disagreements about content in the wiki handled? what would happen if the wiki platform was taken away? Will work come to a grinding halt? Tags van Technorati: wiki , knowledge management

Recently I was honored to be interviewed a couple of times by Bill Ives about the 'Enterprise 2.0' implementations the company I work for ( Océ ) has done. I thought I'd list them here for your (and my) convenience. Implementing Enterprise Micro-sharing at Océ Implementing Enterprise Wiki's at Océ Creating Enterprise Information Architecture at Océ Implementing Enterprise Social Bookmarking at Océ These interviews have also been published on Bill's blog . Being interviewed is very helpful. For one the questions of the interviewer really make you think about the work you've done. Bill did a great job asking questions and I loved the way he structured the interview in posts. Not the basic question-answer type interview. Another great thing about being interviewed is the external reference it gives you. Of course I've been blogging about my work, but having your story on a couple of big blogs, such as the AppGap , the FastForward blog and Bill's own blog...

On the 4th of November the second Knowledge Management meeting 'Made in Holland' will be held at the University of Twente! Last time - the first time - I was there and blogged about the presentations . I really enjoyed it. This time I hope to be there again. And... I'll be one of the presenters! I'll be talking about our 'enterprise wiki' initiatives . Looking forward to it. The meeting is open to all. It's focused on Dutch KM researchers and practitioners. So if you want to come, just leave a comment and I'll get you in contact with the organizers. Tags van Technorati: km , knowledge management , wiki

It's been a while ago I wrote about an interesting piece by Larry Sanger on the Edge blog . That article questioned "the "epistemic egalitarianism" adagium of Wikipedia." In my words: "everybody is equal, an expert is not more (knowledgeable) than a non-expert, together we define what it true." This article by Sanger and my post about it, popped up in my mind when Wikipedia changed its policy so "the unwashed masses will no longer be able to directly edit the profiles of famous living people", as Chris Wilson phrases it on Slate . Of course this move was widely debated. The Slate article gives a nice summary, as does the NY Times . My first thought about this move is nicely stated by Wilson: No matter how you spin this new policy, there's no getting around that it gives more power and control to a small group of people. But if this were a big problem, Wikipedia would have flopped a long time ago. As I've argued before, the encyclope...

It's been some time ago I told Wikipedia is working on its usability . Now we can see the first steps . As I said before: this is very significant for enterprise wiki adoption. The platform underlying Wikipedia is Mediawiki. Mediawiki is a much-used platform in companies. Lots of people find Mediawiki hard to use. Now the interface has improve, adoption by a broader group of employees is near! --- If You Read This and Like It, Tweet This to your Followers: User-friendly Wikipedia, Encourage Enterprise Wiki Adoption [shorturl] #wiki Tags van Technorati: wikipedia , wiki , adoption

My Dutch newspaper ( NRC , Dec. 18, 2008) had a nice short article with very interesting content (- no link available, so I'll provide source link). The Journal RNA Biology is now requiring papers to be peer-reviewed twice. Once on Wikipedia . And once by the journal's own review panel. A summary of the paper must be submitted to Wikipedia first, before the paper is published in the journal. I think this is good for the scientists wanting to publish an article. Who knows what kind of interesting corrections and extensions will be made to the central thought of their paper. And it's also good news for general public as well. Expert information (on RNA in this case) is published publicly and shared with us all. It would be nice to see other journals open up as well! I was also thinking this could or should be applied inside companies as well. In most companies employees write reports and they're submitted to an archive or document management system, after being fo...

Good news! Wikipedia is going to work on its user-friendliness. (Refer to Marie Jose Klaver's post (in Dutch), Wikimedia's post .) My first reaction was: great. Then I read some critiques on this move and thought: that's an interesting perspective. Making Wikipedia easier to use, could lead to lots of clutter and more edit-wars... Why I'm happy is because I'm thinking from a corporate perspective first. We are using the Mediawiki platform (on which Wikipedia is built) for our enterprise wiki's. Although they are much-used in R&D, we see that less-tech-savvy employees would rather have a more user-friendly (mostly relating to a WYSIWYG editor) interface. So, from a company perspective I'm really happy with this and hope this will encourage our employees (and other companies) to use wiki's more often. Tags van Technorati: wiki , wikipedia , mediawiki , enterprise 2.0

What are the key principles for knowledge management? Dave Snowden has been thinking about this topic (a.o.) and kicking against the KM world for some time. Now, he updated his old 3 rules to to 7 principles based on his thinking about KM in the legal profession . They are: 1. Knowledge can only be volunteered, it cannot be conscripted. 2. We only know what we know when we need to know it. 3. In the context of real need few people will withhold their knowledge. 4. Everything is fragmented (also refer to this one ). 5. Tolerated failure imprints learning better than success. 6. The way we know things is not the way we report we know things. 7. We always know more than we can say, and we always say more than we can write down. Great principles to chew on (as Mary Abraham says ). Not only for the legal profession, but for all companies! With respect to 'number 4' I'd also like to point to another great post by Snowden on bottom-up, low-cost knowledge management , starting wit...

While reading this post about wiki collaboration an idea popped up. I am secretary of a couple of meetings. This means I have to write minutes. These minutes are quite formal, written in a template, published with approval and distributed. But before they are distributed I regularly have to ask several meeting participants if I correctly jotted down their point. Well, here's my idea. Wouldn't it be nice if everyone at the meeting had a Google Document of a wiki page in front of him/her? The secretary would have primary responsibility for the minutes. But all other can read along, change and extend the minutes. This makes things must nicer for the secretary and by reading along with the minutes the meeting will hopefully keep to the agenda (point). Or is somebody already doing this? If so, what are your experiences? And if nobody is doing this, what do you think of this idea?

Insightful post on the 'Grow Your Wiki' blog , clearly describing the difference between internet and intranet wiki's. And the difference between ecm and wiki's.

Luis Suarez pointed to an interesting post "Broken business processes contribute to our email overload" . The core of the post is: Socialtext has connected the dots between a few reports to discover that a great deal of our email comes from handling exceptions. Because business processes don't have a system to translate them into practice, we spend more than a quarter of our day emailing about the exceptions to the business process rules. Worse than the volume of email is the amount of mental energy required by each email recipient, ergo worker, to parse each exception and determine what to do with it. E-mail was once intended to increase productivity and has now become so voluminous it is counter productive. Basex determined that business loose $650 billion in productivity due to the unnecessary email interruptions. And, the average number of corporate emails sent and received per person per day expected to reach over 228 by 2010. Email overload due to broken business p...

Grow Your Wiki is a wonderful website and blog to learn how to use a wiki in your company. They have wonderful video tutorials titled "21 days of Wiki Adoption" . I love the 'science fair' idea. This sounds a lot like an idea on 'wiki sessions' I posted on some time ago . Enjoy!