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What is a social intranet or an intranet 2.0 ?

January 28, 2011 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 2 Comments

Summary : Everybody’s talking about social intranets or intranet 2.0 but none have a clear idea of what it can look like. Between the myth of intranets being replaced by social networks and traditional owners of the intranet fearing the end of the top-down model, ideological and functional debates may last for long. A social intranet does not mean that social networks will assume the whole power but that the elements of a traditional intranet, information, people and business applications, will be socialized. It’s not about adding new tools but generalizing new services and functionalities across all the components of the intranet. And, at last and even before all, it’s a work tool that’s here to serve a corporate vision. Changing the intranet is useless unless work, internal and external relationships as well as the related behaviors and positions are revisited.

Many organizations are rethinking (or thinking or rethinking) their good old intranet that is obviously affected by the weight of years and wonder how to integrate the famous “2.0 layer” in what is supposed to be a social intranet (or intranet 2.0). But, even if the word are in every mouth it does not mean that the idea of what it exactly mean is clear. There are many options depending on the maturity of the owner of the project, the realistic nature of the roadmap he’s assigned, and the change tolerance of the organization. Depending on the context, some of these options will be more or less relevant.

In the previous paragraph I mentioned the “social layer”, what states that the 2.0 side is a new dimension of the intranet and not an isolated bubble. So, it’s not about building an intranet on the one side and a social network on the other side. Why ? For 90% of employees, using a social network at work is not a reflex and it the network is not close to the center of gravity of their work environment, there are lots of chances no one will use it. Moreover, social activities need stimulation and stimulation often comes from a corporate information, a business related data…in fact from sources that are usually on the traditional intranet.

I suggest that such an intranet relies on some pillars that are. :

Socializing information

What I mean by socializing information can take one many forms :

- allowing users to choose the sections of the intranet he wants to read in particular and display them on his home page or a dedicated page.

- allowing users to share any content of the intranet with colleagues (via their internal “twitter”, in a community etc…) with respect of rights and authorizations. (But let’s be honnest = today, even without such tools, secret information circulates by email).

- allowing users to share external content and bring them in the internal flow, and let rating and curation mechanisms make it climb to the head of the organization or spread horizontally.

- allwing users to react to any content either where it’s published or by pushing it to a blog or a community to start a conversation.

- allowing users to promote any content by rating it, approving it (“like”) to make it more visible on the homepage or share it through one’s activity stream.

- allowing any corporate department to deploy on-demand microsites (with predefined templates) what makes corporate communication more granular and close to employees.

It’s the least any enterprise can do, most of all because it’s in the scope of the traditional top-down communication that will not disappear but needs serious improvements to become more user-centric and interactive.

Socializing people

Sharing, reacting, discussing and collaborating are good things…but knowing with whom is even more important. Of course, there are people we know and who’ll quickly join our “network”, but there are also all those we don’t know today but we will need one day. So, before telling users to connect and do things together we should make it easier for them to find and identify one another.

Everything starts with a rich profile like those we can find on any social network. It will made of official information from the traditional IT systems (position, hierarchical belonging, competencies…), employees being free not to display all of it, but also of information provided by its owner (past experiences, topics of interest) and even bu his colleagues (endorsements, tags…). Of course, the owner validates anything others want to put on his profile. Last, the profile also includes employee’s social activities : communities, blogs, wikis updates, shared bookmarks…

This information constitute a stream other users can subscribe to to follow the activities of one person in the same way they can follow a specific section of the intranet or the corporate communication. Anyone can choose what appears in his one’s own stream.

This rich profile should not compete with the official directory : it’s the directory. To be more precise, it’s were the directory is accessible to users. (Note to IT people : don’t forget to choose solutions that can sync with several directories at the same time : it’s very useful when there’s not a single directory and it shows a unified view of all your directories even if your standardization project is late…)

From Google Wave to Social Networks : the social napoleon

November 20, 2009 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

For a long time, and because many thought they could import the social web’s behaviors in the enterprise as is, the projects aiming at bringing the social dimension within employee’s work tried to structure the enterprise the way the web was. That means people will looking for “communities” that were supposed to fill “social spaces”, each community being a project itself. It lead to a very paradoxical situation since it lead enterprises to organize spontaneity.

That’s the reason why, and even if the above mentioned way made sense in some cases, it appeared that facilitating what was really spontaneous was what made the most sense. And, in my opinion, there’s nothing more spontaneous that people’s day do day job, processes and routine they follow even unconciously. Of course, that’s less impressive than trying to mobilize, if not create, a community from scratch (even if it means wasting energy to make communities that don’t exist live), but it ensures that the most obvious communities are adressed, those that are sometimes too obvious to be seen : the communities of people who need other’s help to do the job they’re asked to do. The problem is that these communities are very versatile : they may last a few minutes, a few hours, even be permanent.

There used to be two ways to face this kind of need.

The first is to allow on-demand groups, community, “social spaces” (call it as you want) creation by employees. It’s rather about governance.

The second is more functional and is translated into the integration of microblogging functionalities in social platforms to allow people to exchange and mobilize outside of the formalism of a structured space (yes…sometimes even a blog or a community is too formal) when people does not have a rich content to share but rather one or two lines.

The purpose is to work like what I call a Service Oriented Organization : allowing someone facing a problem to mobilize the right system (people + tools, + way of doing things) in order to solve it and go back to their work.

From the more structured (opening a group, a community, writing a blog post) to the more unformal (microblogging), every problem has a well dimensioned tool, what favors adoption. It’s because employees are often ask to kill flees with a baseball bat and are not allowed to use a flyswatter that they give up and complain.

That’s the best way to make sure tools are serving a need instead rather than trying to create needs to make people use the tools.

Adressing the “fluid” layer of these interactions is the purpose of Google Wave. I won’t explain what Google Wave is since so many experts already wrote exhaustive posts about it.

The tool is still yound and its success will depends on its ability to integrate with more traditional tools, what is challenged shared with all social tools. A good example of its potential is shown by Timo Elliott, with a Wave / SAP intégration. That’s only the beginning and it seems promising.

This is a good evidence that the social part of the information system is made of many layers :

• the need is too narrow to build a social group. Above all if the IT dept approval is needed.

• the need is about fluid interactions so even a blog is too structured.

But :

• If people were about to work 3 months on that process, a more structured space should have been open because the Wave should have become quite unreadable and informations hard to find for new joiners.

And, last but not leas : I can believe that all the people in this story join the discussion as needed. But it supposes that they know each other what is seldom the case in a merger. They even may have forgotten a fourth skilled person who was not in their radar. Hence the need for a social network to identify the people that need to be invited in the wave. Why ? Because their identification is made possible by a rich profile, fed by both people themselves and datas extracted from their social activities, publications etc… what takes us back to blogs, groups, communties etc…

So, the social part of an information system is more like a napoleon than a monolithic brick. Each layer is necessary to adress a specific part of a global need. If one misses, the whole chain breaks.

Filed Under: Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Management & HR, Software & Tools, Web & Usages Tagged With: blogs, collaboration, Communities, Enterprise 2.0, google, google wave, social networks

IT interests : good news but too much compartmentalization

October 30, 2009 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

I recently came across this this chart about what IT departments are currently thinking about. What inspires me some thoughts.

First point, as mentioned in the post where I found this document, there’s nothing really new. Many of these issues have been discussed for years, some are more recent but even when names change, the topics themselves don’t.

Second point : cloud computing is on the top of the list. That’s the evidence, but did we need some more, that the topic is really a true current concern. But we have to be careful and don’t make numbers say what they don’t : being interested in something does not mean adopting it, it even may mean finding arguments to find it. As a friend of mine who works as a plane pilot, often says : “The reason why I’m interested in plane crashes is because I want to avoid them, not because I want to have one”. Behind, nothing emerges (I don’t consider the difference between 47% and 51% as significant).

Third point, the most interesting one in my opinion : the link between many of these topics. BI and BPM : don’t you think that one the the current challenges is to enrich BPM with BI ? Aren’t wikis, blogs etc.. and collaboration tools the two sides of one only thing ? By the way, to enrich BI, isn’t it necessary to harness the value contained into the unstructured information carried by blogs, wikis and social networks ? Good news : social networks come one rank behind. As for content management, isn’t it the formal alter ego of social medias ? Here again, two sides of one global issued.

So, at first sight, there’s a kind of coherence that is a good news. On the other side I’m afraid that all these issues may be thought independantly, without any articulation between one and another just when they must be thought jointly if we don’t want to see things that are complementary by nature confront each other. Keep in mind that operations are expecting such a coherent and integrated approach from the IT depts instead of technological projects isolated the one from the other which lack of coherence have negative impacts on adoption and value creation.

Filed Under: Software & Tools, Web & Usages Tagged With: BI, blogs, bpm, business intelligence, cloud computing, social networks, Software & Tools

Real time web is not a cure-all (and twitter won’t kill blogs)

July 10, 2009 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 2 Comments

We can hear that microblogging is killing blogging and that, globally speaking, the future of web is real time. An hasty discourse I don’t subscribe to. It does not seem to me that a trend is replacing another but that they are complementary.

This applies to the general public web but also to the corporate web.

This complementary nature can be explained by postionning a given message according to two axis : consistency and temporality.

Consistency

No long demonstration is needed to explain that it’s hard to deliver a message and a consistent information in 140 characters. If all the information had to comply with the 140 chars rule, we would be informed of many thing without really knowing anything. In the other hand it’s hard to fill out a blog post when the message is short, terse. In this case, the title is often meaningfull alone and the body of the message brings nothing new. That’s what made a part of the blogosphere switch to the twittosphere. Not beacause one is better than the other but because its format fits more with the needs of most of people (remember that pure “creators” on social medias are only a few per cent).

Temporality

Some messages are here to stay and make their place in the worldwide informational inheritance. Some others only have an instant value and won’t deliver it if they don’t spread quickly. When one writes blog post, he aims at his regular audience, but indexation by search engines gives the post a kind of permanence. Then the long tail makes its job. Even of the indexation of the messages on twitter improves, its archives only have a few interest. If a message is missed, there are many chances it won’t be of any interest one day later : either the information will become valueless or it will become available for everydoby through more conventional channels. In the worst case, if something has a real value, it will keep on resonating (being retwitted) long enough in order it will still be able to be caught a few days later.

So a two speed web is emerging. Consistent messages that have to remain and deliver a complex message, and short and instant messages on a faster track.

It’s easy to realize how real time can reach its limits while traditionnal blogging does not have the needed reactivity in some circumstances. The complementarity between both allows to cover the full range of needs.

Some may say some messages meet both conditions. That’s why many people use twitter to mention blog posts. What reminds us the need for articulating both.

Filed Under: Management & HR, Web & Usages Tagged With: blogging, blogs, Communication, consistency, information, internet, microblogging, real time, real time web, social computing, Social Networking, temporality, twitter, web

Blogs are management tools

April 4, 2007 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

Bain and Company recently published a survey about 2007 trends in management tools. It’s factual and analytic, don’t expect to find here passionate speech about the anything 2.0 revolution.(download here).

One notable thing is the entry of corporate blogs in the list of the assessed tools. It find it very important that this kind of tool is now considered by specialists as management tolls.

The bis disappointment is that, when saying corporate blogs, they only mean external blogs to interact with public. If you consider blogs as management tools, you have to explore their use on the intranet.

Perharps they’ll include 2.0 intranet suites in their next survey.

Filed Under: Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Intranets and digital workplace Tagged With: bain, blogs, corporate-blogs, intranet, management

Do managers have to spend all their time managing interactions ?

January 4, 2007 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

Indeed another way to ask this question would be : “must people be given tools to organize themselves their interactions or is it the manager’s job to control everything”.

In fact you can see both situations in organizations. In some you’ll have few control, tools like wikis or blogs that allow people to communicate and organize themselves in communities of practices, a management based on self responsability, collective intelligence, flexibility, innovation… In others you’ll have…exactly the opposite, that’s to say very directive management, no autonomy (that’s to say no faith in people), strict procedures and now way to communicate and exchange freely.

In both ways the organization is the result of what’s thought being best for performance. So I’m asking what is the role of a manager : develop business, develop people, or mainely manage relations between people. Mainly ? Yes, because if you’re strict on people’s autonomy, you’ll need to hire more and more managers, not to think about business but juste to manage interpersonal relations. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Intranets and digital workplace, Management & HR, Misc. Tagged With: blogs, interaction, internal-blogs, management

What emails can’t do, and how much they cost

November 5, 2006 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 2 Comments

How many emails a day do you receive? And how long does it takes to read it all? 2 hours? How many of them are useful ? 50% ? Considering every people in your company have to face the same situation try to calculate according to the hourly salary how much does it cost in wasted time.

Amazing, isn’t it.

The main problem with emails is that you’re not sure the right information is delevered to the right person.If I have something to say to a defined person and I’m sure no one would be interested in, I can mail.

But what if I have an information that’s not usefull for me but may certainly be valuable for someone else? The kind of infomation that may be used very quickly because the opportunities won’t last a long time.

If I refer to my hierarchy, the time it will take to “climb” the stairs and then to be validated and given to everyone it will be to late.

If I mail it to “all employees” it will be non productive and nearly a spam.

If I had the opportunity to publish a non intrusive way in a system that notifies only people who are interested in (and only them) that would be quite efficient.

In a lot of cases I think, for everybody’s good, a publishing platform with a smart alert system would be more adapted.

Like an internal blog with RSS alerts on keywords? Why not…

With such a platform you can publish as easily as an email, you don’t bother people that’s not interested in, and information is available for everyone who needs it even if you don’t know them.

Filed Under: Intranets and digital workplace, Misc. Tagged With: blogs, email, intranet, rss

Blogs as a self development tool

August 23, 2006 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 2 Comments

Some people say that blogging is a kind of therapy for them…for most of the it helped them fighting againts shyness since they can express their ideas and expose themselves to public opinion. If their posts meet success they are strenghtened and then they dare more and more…

I was asking myself if, for example, blog based intranets could have the same effect and could improve self-development in an organization. Listening to others, collaborating, daring, asserting oneself in a group, being closer to employees, showing the human side of a manager….those problematics are very important in companies today and, as web 2.0 tools are deeply human driven I think such intranets, in addition to facilitating communication, discussion, KM and collective intelligence could help HR in their self-development projects.

For example I’m convinced that blogging could be a first step to improve self-confidence, to dare to speak and share one’s ideas.

I think I’ll have to digg deeper this subject…perharps we have here another significant contribution of intranets 2.0 as real people-centric tools.

Filed Under: Management & HR Tagged With: blogs, coaching, intranet, intranet-2.0, Self Development

Fired because of her blog: a french “premiere”

July 27, 2006 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

Just when the big question was “is it good for companies to blog?”, “are employees’ blogs a good or a bad thing?” the french blogosphere woke up with a big headhache when we learned that the nice “petite anglaise” got fired beacause of things she wrote on her blog aboute her employer.

“Petite Anglaise” is an english secretary who works for an english company in Paris. Her blog wasn’t a “professional blog” put an intimate and personal one. And the only (few) post where she talked about her job where without mentionning anything about her identity or the companie’s name. She blogged about one or two things she experienced at work not to talk about her job but considering job as a part of her life.

The line was crossed the day a picture of her was published so people could identify her as the secretary of…I don’t think one client would ever have identified her, but her manager did.

I’m not sure this will bring anything on the debate about corporate and employee’s blogs. Just because she was only making fun of the way his senior speaks or about what he wears…so the matter is more personal than professional. Nothing about the company itself, nothing about competence, nothing about work…if she hadn’t been fired nobody would have known what she was talking about. Now everybody knows the name of the company.

So we’re note talking about pro and cons an employee’s blog but about a mistake on an intimate blog. That makes quite a difference and I hope this case won’t give arguments to the “anti-blog”.

Last thing is that we don’t know the internal context: perharps this “blog case” is the official reason put forward and that there are other things about her and her word we still don’t know.

As a conclusion I find the sanction too big for a single post where she made a little fun about a unknown man in an unidentified company, talking only about clothes, accent and old school behaviors. But what is sure is that it’s not unlawful not to have the sense of humor and self-derision. Because the point is a guy recognized himself in the post. It has nothing to do with the company image…until she published her photo. Big consequences for a small mistake.

But not much to learn about corporate and employee’s blogs.

Filed Under: Management & HR, Misc. Tagged With: blogs, corporate-image, employees-blogs, employers-brand, personnal-blogs, petite-anglaise

Blogs are management tools

Do managers have to spend all their time managing interactions ?

What emails can’t do, and how much they cost

Blogs as a self development tool

Fired because of her blog: a french “premiere”

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