Prediction Markets on the Intranet

I had a long discussion on prediction markets today. I'm convinced that internal markets are a great tool for intranets: Test products, test ideas brought up through innovation management, give employees a sense of participation, gambling and of a chance to get in the spotlight ( - "I was right").
Mandatory prerequisites are:

• a decent usermanagement that does not add any hurdles
• an integrative intranet-environment
• a media landscape that offers more participation opportunies (wikis to start, discuss and sharpen ideas, polls to get through the first steps of idea-casting, posting and commenting-opportunities)
• an open and supportive company culture
• some sense for competition
• a moderator/admin who can get things going

The preprocess - how to find the right questions to treat on the markets - is even trickier to me than the market itself (especially regarding innovation management, bringing up, evaluating and trading ideas). I'm still looking for great examples in that area.

Scopes, Layers, Points of View - in my next life, I want to be a consultant

It's so easy to recommend strategies, suggest plans, coordinate and organise. But only as long until the consequences for everybody become obvious.
I spent more than a day - starting yesterday evening - in discussions about topics I discussed at least five times. with three different groups of people. That makes 15 times. Everything was clear, everybody agreed - and then it started over again. Within minutes - it just took one email - a well defines and nicely setup project was turned into some indefinable mist lacking strategy, management and any plan.
It took me five pages of emails, almost an hour of talking and a sleepless night to
clarify the scope of the project and the scope of the discussions
develop a clear layered model to illustrate what my project touched and what it would not touch
stay cool, calm, nice, friendly - but very sharp and distinct
get people talking and thinking and clarifying their own ideas and coming to the decision that they probably meant something else or were adressing only a small scope - and not the project in total

I feel I should get some prize for it or be a famous, well booked and well paid expert in my business, who could just add another overwhelming success to his track record.

But since I'm still here to live up with the consequences, it will probably just start over again next week.

Identify Project Drivers

Online projects are still very often process-, technology- and it-driven. No wonder: everything is new and exciting, still, new technologies emerging at least every half year. Compared to this dynamic environment, the business perspective is boring: it' still abou selling, publishing, informing - the targets remain the same they have always been for a brick and mortart company. Opposed to both these perspective, i like the approach you tend to incorporate when you deal a lot with design and usability-issues: don't care about processes and business targets either, but just focus on the user experience:

• Tell the user a story, give him a reason to be on your pages.
• Imagine (or better research) what the users want to do in order to live this story.
• Make sure the story fits to your business targets.
• Design processes that satisfy your and your users' needs.
• Design a system that supports these processes.

Sacrifying the user experience to the beauty of an architecture diagram or the simplicity of a process is a bad habit. Maybe it will make your system run smoothly and save some work for the 5 or 10 people who are maintaining it. But did you ever compare that to then pain of several dozens of business users or the frustration of several thousand end users?I like the user experience driven approach to projects, but be warned: it will make you look stupid in the beginning when you are starting your discussion with IT.

Design

I tried to present some designs for the new intranet in a project I'm currently working on to the boss of the communication department. I just wanted to get some feedback on colours, use of logos, the general look and feel and maybe some discussion on the top level menu.
Not even the first sentence was finished as we were in the middle of a discussion on content details, wether to put tables of content on the top or on the bottom of a page, on how to remodel the voluminous pieces of content that made up large parts of the intranet and on about which new interaction schemes should be designed and how that would influence the organisation.
As regarding the look and feel, she just made an ugly face at the beginning, but at the end of our discussion she said something like "Well, the longer, I look at it, the better I like it, somehow."

We think we're focused clear and precise when we go into a presentation. "I want to discuss our new designs with you, just to give you an overall impression of what it could feel like." - But even artifical terms like design allow such a wide variety of understanding.
Two me, we need two things to cope with that:
1) More definitions, which means more artificial terms. Concerning design, that could be Information Design, Interaction Design, Identity Design, Graphic Design
2) Nobodx will listen while we are trying to explain that stuff. we should have explanations ready and we should be prepared to discuss it with everybody, but it is even more important that we are prepared to understnd who is talking to us about what, to categorie the inputs todeal with everything at it's time, but to stay focused enough to get now the decisions we want now.
This could be something like agile presentation mode.