Reasons to blog – it’s not really about community

A frequent reaction to people who suggest internal company weblogs is “Why?” 

Why should we add another communications channel when we have e-mail, phone, Microsoft Project and pieces of paper? 

People have written books about this. But it’s always worth stressing the concrete, practical tasks you can achieve with this sort of technology. For a short version, James at Step Two Designs has summarised why his business uses internal blogs: 

• “summary of all the proposals that we send out, so everyone knows what’s in the pipeline
• updates on projects as they are unfolding
• new ideas and interesting tidbits that we come across
• updates on business development activities, including monthly financial reports
• internal broadcast messages and requests for help”

These types of example probably say more to a manager than a thousand words of theoretical text about “communities”, “collaboration”, and of course “Enterprise 2.0″.

An argument in favour of taxonomy

We’ve been talking about the usefulness (or otherwise) of taxonomy in automated content management at Content Formula recently.

At its most basic level, taxonomy allows pieces of content to appear in the most relevant sections of a site.

For example if the Financial Times wanted to publish an article about a European government bailing out an energy firm with a big complex loan, the editor might decide to make the content appear in three different sections of the site – Europe, Finance, and Energy. Instead of publishing it three times, he simply needs to tag it correctly for it to appear in the three sections.

Among the disadvantages of taxonomy are that it can be over-complex where simplicity is required. And when you create a taxonomy it must mean something to the reader, and ultimately must speed his or her journey to the information they’re looking for. Creating meaningful (semantic) taxonomies isn’t always easy.

But this sentence from Nielsen’s Alertbox today is a great argument in favour of using taxonomy to make sure content can be found in the right place, at least in a big intranet:

“…at JPMorgan Chase, the intranet homepage is viewed 620,000 times per day, so even one superfluous headline that required one second to scan would cost the company the equivalent of 22 full-time employees in lost productivity.”

The rest is here.

David Harbottle

How mature is your intranet?

I’ve just got back from IBF Live – an annual conference run by the Intranet Benchmarking Forum. The forum brings together a collection of intranet managers, communications people, IT people and others from FTSE 100 and Global 200 companies.

For me there was one overriding theme of the conference: intranet maturity. As with many things in the typical organisation, the corporate intranet is on a maturity curve so it’s only a matter of time (and effort, of course) before things will improve. There was a general consensus amongst delegates at the IBF that our intranets are generally poor – right at the start of the curve. But you have to go through this pain in order to progress. People were frustrated with the role that senior management plays in driving their intranet; how politics prevents progress; how their intranets have become vast and chaotic dumping grounds; some people complained that people did not visit the intranet or were not contributing to it.

But the vision of the mature intranet is definitely there. So what does a mature intranet look like? There are a few examples out there. Cisco and IBM are often touted as having model intranets, the best in the world. In fact, both these companies recently claimed that ROI studies on their internal webs had shown values in excess of $1bn. Here are some of the features that these mature intranets have in common:

• There is a sharp focus on usefulness, not just useability and information
• Senior executives are active sponsors, clearly seeing the value of the intranet and pushing it
• Employees are smarter with technology and are active and direct contributors of content to the intranet.
• Employees are the judges of the intranet and as such, influence its development
• There is a blurring of the lines that normally divide content, data and applications – the intranet becomes the interface between the organisation and its people

Dan Hawtrey

Is there a place for employee participation on intranets?

Most people are aware of the buzz surrounding things like weblogs, “citizen journalism”, and even podcasting. They’re often used as examples of how the web is allowing greater participation from its users. But is there a place for any of this participation on a serious business intranet?

We’re currently looking at ways to develop plain old bulletin boards with two of our clients. The aim is to give employees a secure place where they can ask and answer questions, report the latest competitor sightings, or just sell their stereos. Such a board can be particularly useful when potential contributors are all over the world.

Bulletin boards are basic, but practical and useful. They’re a good way for companies to dip their toe in the water and start encouraging employee participation via an intranet.

At the other end of the scale, the BBC is usually cited as the organisation that’s been most adventurous in this direction (follow this link to find out how). Employees run hundreds of internal blogs, participate in dozens of wikis and thousands connect via a network called talk.gateway. Participation on this scale has its drawbacks, but it has great potential for eliciting new ideas and pushing collaborative projects forward. So there’s a huge range of possibilities from the very basic to the elaborate. And there’s a place for all of them on an intranet, as long as the aims are clear.

There’s no shortage of opinions on how best to use these evolving resources to improve communication within a business. Here’s an article asking whether or not you should allow employees to blog on your intranet. Business Week describes how business can use Wikis to replace e-mail. And here’s a list of bulletin board providers frequently used in business.

David Harbottle