Use It!

It's hard to evangelize the use of blogs and wikis if you have hardly any time to do it your own. It's almost like buying a book on efficient time management and then saying "Well, I don't have time to read it anyway". It's a problem we face, but on the other hand: it gives us the opportunity to think and learn about restrictions and possible requirements we face while introducing these features. Especially with intranet, we need protected areas that are not free to the public, we have big concerns about what to say if we know that our colleagues are probably going to read this. Will they like it? Will they make us look like idiots, because we made some mistake? Or will they make us look like idiots, because we are using the wiki as if we want to become famous for it? In a brief talk I head today with Mathias Schindler, member of the board of the Wikimedia Foundation, he told about some new and not yet fully worked through experiences he had while promoting Wikis to enterprises. It's not easy to - according to the wiki-rules - ignore the rules, if you are about to do this in an environment that usually pays you for resepcting rules. And it's not easy to start something just to get it started - knowing that you can't complete it perfectly, but also knowing that someone has to start the discussion or nothing will ever happen.
Actually, I think this is the way things work: you have to start something somehow. It will be good, as long as there is nothing better. If everything that is done later, tries to improve the first draft, everything is ok. If it focuses on blaming missing information, mistakes, errors - this is waste of time. That's how opne source software works, that generally how every creative process works. Sometimes it is hard to admit that, but nothing gets better just because we think about it harder. It can only get better if we start to use it, test it, discuss it with others. Well, we can only do that, after we have started it. The new facette that comes into play through social media is publicity. That makes you more vulnerable, but after all it makes you stronger - you get more patches to apply. If the deeply negative and destructive comments are more, don't blame social media. Blame your environment - or the way you handle your staff and your peers.

But just use it.

User Management & Intranets - Best Practices?

The good thing about intranet users is that you know them, that you know how many they are and that you know, which infrastructure they use.

The not so good thing is, that they also know you - and they will come and get you if they dont like what you do. The expectations are a lot higher; everything needs to be simple and great.

That's the way it should be; but dont forget: you cannot gain as much reputation through great features as you can lose through inconveniences with the basics.

Nobody will be proud to say "I'm in, I made it", if they just went through a painful registration process, you can't give them gimmicks and you cannot really reward them - so you have to make a good job.

Thats really challenging when you have to create a new usermanagement for several countries and companies that have acutally not been working together up to now.

It's kind of hard to decide when the challenge is out and the madness begins if you are talking about 60000 users, 9 languages and some really business critical applications.

There are a lot of Best Practices dealing with intranets, features, contents - but I did not find anything helpful dealing with the setup of a big usermanagement - any suggestions?

Communication and Organization

It is great that intranets are developing into something way bigger than "just" a communication media. They are supposed to be collaboration and cooperation platforms, interactive tools and an interface to legacy systems and business processes.
The last one makes a really big difference: this is were you get from talking to acting. That sounds as if communication was nothing (well, it's my job, so dont get me wrong), but what I'm trying to tell is that usually communication sets the agenda and makes the decisions (things are determined a lot by the way they are told; think about new products, organizational changes, new managers) but in the case of representing business processes through the intranet, you learn a lot about the limited power of communication:

• you have to understand the processes
• you have to convince the process owners that they bother to explain the processes to you
• you have to represent the processes in a way that others can also understand them
• you have to create the communicative processes that surround the business processes; thats actually some kind of marketing activity
• you have to question yourself if all this is actually worth it or if the world would not be much simpler and clearer if business processes stay where they are and intranets are communication media.

To keep it short: I definitely think that it is way smarter to combine things and make them visible via one source. The intranet should be something like a trademark - brought to you by your Intranet. It's the first and single access point, and it provides all the information you need. Maybe not in all available depths, but it tells you were to go.

How to research client infrastructure

Today, the deadline for answers to my questionnaire is ending.
I sent out a short form to collect information on monitors, screen resolutions, graphic and sound support, installed browsers and versions, plugins, settings (javascript, active x) etc.

I thought it was clear, but there always seems to be space for misunderstanding: how come that it coordinators tell me in answer #4 that flash plugins are installed, in answer #7 that no file formats are blocked and in answer #9 that employees can not play swf or flv files?

Everytime again it is surprising, but even in the very networked times we have now the only reliable way to find out what is really going is to go there, turn on the computer and have a look on your own.
That eats a lot of time, but it saves a lot of worrying.

Boy and girl intranets

In evaluating all the intranet solutions in our Group, this is one of my central findings:

There are boy-intranets and there are girl-intranets.

That does not only depend on who creates or manages them; the main criteria is how new content is treated.

New content in a girl-intranet is welcomed quite strictly: "Take off your shoes, hang your coat here, do you want tea or coffee? You will sit here; hand on a second, I will be right back".
That's a lot of work, but it creates a clear and tidy surface.

New content in a boy intranet has a more relaxed entree: "Beer is in the fridge, the TV is there - help yourself."
That's less work - but it works only, if the rules are simple and clear.

If you start thinking about exceptions - that's like marrying: can be heaven, can be hell, but it definitely only works if the rules are very clear.

(I will get back on this with some examples)

Thinking about the big thing

The project has not been started yet, so there is plenty of time to set things upo in a decent way.

What's the target: We want to create a groupwide intranet for a company in the banking industry that covers 9 countries (with 9 different languages), 55.000 employees and a lot of associate companies.

Why do we want to do this: Because the existing intranets are old and can't keep pace with modern technology and requirements, because something needs to be done for image and effiency puposes and because we want to promote group- and multimedia content.

what's the current situation: people use the intranet because they have to, they like the simple structure and the word-like appearance, nobody except the communications division is using any cms (it all happens in word-documents), usabillity and menu-issues are not the most sophisticated ones, but people are happy - or maybe they are just afraid of change...

Fancyness vs. Usability

I talked to my boss and she told me our new intranet should be amazing, it should user make say "wooow".

The first idea of course is to create a lot of additional features, user web2.0 goodies, multimedia, interactivity etc.

But will this help solve people's problems? And will make people forget their current problems with using intranet and make them say wow instead? Well, maybe it's the most stunning feature to bring simplicity, easyness and great usability. It would be a big success to make people say "wooooow" because the begin to understand how things work without having to think about it...