Author Archive for Stephan Schillerwein

Vorschau auf Top-Trends für Intranets in diesem Jahr

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Stephan Schillerwein
on August 23, 2010
in Intranet Management
. 0 Comments

Den fundiertesten Überblick über die Entwicklung von Intranets weltweit gibt Jane McConnell’s (NetStrategy/JMC) jährliche Studie “Global Intranet Trends”. Noch läuft die diesjährige Studie (Teilnahme ist noch möglich, s.u.), einige exklusive Voreindrucke sind jedoch bereits verfügbar:

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Social Media hat sich zum Standard entwickelt: 70% aller Teilnehmer setzen intern Social Media ein, das sind 10% mehr als letztes Jahr.

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Mobile Intranets kommen nicht von der Stelle: die Umsetzungsrate ist mit nur 7% auf gleich niedrigem Niveau wie letztes Jahr.

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Collaboration noch nicht “at your fingertips”: Funktionen zur Erleichterung der elektronischen Zusammenarbeit gehören zwar mittlerweile zum Standard, in ca. jedem zweiten Unternehmen steht jedoch die IT-Abteilung als Gatekeeper zwischen den (potentiellen) Benutzern und dem tatsächlichem Einsatz.

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Grenzen verschwimmen: der Blick richtet sich immer stärker auch nach aussen, so sagen bereits 40% aller Teilnehmer, dass sie sich offiziell auch an externen Plattform beteiligten.

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Auch “exotische” Funktionen gewinnen an Bedeutung: abseits der vieldiskutierten Ansätze existieren weniger bekannte Funktionen, wie bspw. “Prediction Markets” (”Vorhersagemärkte”). Letztes Jahr mit nur 3% Adaptionsrate noch ein völliger Aussenseiter ist dieser vielversprechende Ansatz heute bereits bei 17% aller Teilnehmer im Einsatz oder in der Pilotphase.

Diese Angaben beruhen auf der Auswertung der ersten 300 Teilnehmer der Studie. Die Studie läuft noch bis zum 1. September 2010. Die Teilnahme daran ist bis dahin noch möglich. Teilnehmer erhalten den finalen Report kostenlos (der sonst zu 550.- € verkauft wird).

Registrierung unter: Global Intranet Trends Report

5 Thesen zur Zukunft des Intranets als universelles Arbeitsmittel

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Stephan Schillerwein
on May 4, 2010
in Uncategorized
. 2 Comments

Ich wurde gebeten, am Intranet Summit (19.-20. Mai in Frankfurt) den Eröffnungsvortrag zu halten. Die Konferenz steht dieses Jahr unter dem Motto der Weiterentwicklung des Intranets vom heute häufig stark auf die Informationsbereitstellung beschränkten Instrument hin zu einem universellen Arbeitsmittel (das z.B. als eWorkplace oder Web Workplace bezeichnet wird). Dieses ermöglicht u.a. Collaboration, Unterstützung von Wertschöpfungsprozessen, Applikationsintegration, Social Networking und vieles mehr.

Die zahlreichen Best Practise Fallstudien, die auf dem Intranet Summit 2010 vorgestellt werden, beleuchten viele dieser Facetten des Intranets der Zukunft (u.a. bei E.ON, Sixt, BASF, Burda, WWF, HP, …).

Vor diesem Hintergrund wird meine Präsentation den Fokus auf die Rahmenbedingungen des Intranets als universelles Arbeitsmittel legen.

Hier ein kleiner Vorgeschmack auf meine 5 Thesen dazu:

(1) Gute Intranet Manager müssen neue Wege gehen
Die Grundprobleme von heute, sind die noch viel schwerer ins Gewicht fallenden Probleme von morgen - bspw. die mangelnde Unterstützung von oben. Hier sind neue Ansätze gefragt, um das Intranet in eine andere Liga aufsteigen zu lassen. Einer davon ist bspw. die chinesische Philosophie des “Reifen lassen”, die für die Herausforderungen eines Intranets bessere Antworten anbieten kann als kurzfristige Zielorientierung.

(2) Produktive Wissensarbeiter fallen nicht vom Himmel
Tools haben wir alle schon zur Genüge. Woran es jedoch mangelt ist das Wissen um den richtigen Umgang damit zur Bewältigung der Herausforderungen des Informationszeitalters. Soll das Intranet das wichtigste Werkzeug der Wissensarbeiter werden, müssen diese auch auf ganz anderen Ebenen als bisher Unterstützung erfahren. Wie ein Schmied in einem mittelalterlichen Dorf zur Technologisierung und Produktivitätssteigerung der ganzen Gemeinschaft beigetragen hat, so müssen Intranet Teams das Unternehmen erst zur produktiven Wissensarbeit befähigen.

(3) Mangelnde Usability erstickt das Verhältnis Intranet & Unternehmenskultur im Keim
 Die Beziehung zwischen einem Intranet und der Kultur seines Unternehmens ist delikat. Zudem haben erst wenige Organisationen das Potential des Intranets für die Kulturentwicklung erkannt. Doch bevor hochtrabende Träume von der kulturellen Veränderung des Unternehmens mithilfe des Intranets gesponnen werden, stehen ganz profane Basisarbeiten an: Design und Usability des Intranets müssen durchgängig auf ein derart hohes Niveau gebracht werden, dass jeder Mausklick zum Ausdruck von Werten wie Respekt, Kundenorientierung, Servicebereitschaft und dem Streben nach Exzellenz wird.

(4) Nutzbare Informationen setzen ein neues Architekturverständnis voraus
Unaufindbare Informationen sind nutz- und wertlose Informationen. So, wie der Weg von der Steinzeithöhle zum Burj Khalifa nur über eine sich ständig verfeinernde Architektur möglich geworden ist, so führt der Weg zu nutzbaren Informationen nur über eine sich weiterentwickelnde Informationsarchitektur. Statische Navigationsmenüs und der “Verzicht” auf Anreicherung unstrukturierter Informationen mit Metadaten sind vor diesem Hintergrund nicht mehr zeitgemäss.

(5) Überlegene Intranets brauchen sorgfältig ausgewählte Technologie
Solange ein Intranet nur rudimentäre CMS-Grundfunktionalitäten benötigt, fährt man gut mit einer nicht auf Technologie fokussierten Vorgehensweise. Mittlerweile sind jedoch wichtige Technologien, die typische Problembereiche von Intranets adressieren, so weit ausgereift, dass ein Ignorieren der verfügbaren Möglichkeiten zu klar suboptimalen Lösungen führt. Eine neue Herangehensweise ist also auch hier gefragt, um einen soliden “Unterbau” für das Intranet als universelles Arbeitsmittel in die Realität umsetzen zu können.

Weitere Informationen zum Kongress und Anmeldung unter: www.intranet-summit.de

Intranet Case Study: Chr. Hansen A/S

Published
by
Stephan Schillerwein
on March 18, 2010
in Intranet Management
. 4 Comments

The Company
Chr. Hansen A/S is a global bioscience company that provides products to the food and health industries. They are headquartered in Denmark and employ about 2’200 people in 31 countries. Every day, half a billion people consume products that contain some of Chr. Hansen’s natural ingredients.

Best Intranet 2010 in Denmark
Chr. Hansen’s intranet won the “IntranetPrisen 2010”, awarded by IntraTeam at the IntraTeam Event 2010 on March 3+4 in Copenhagen.

Some highlights at a glance:
•    The intranet – called C-Net - is aligned to the mantra of the CEO about “taking out complexity”
•    Every employee can put a story of the homepage
•    Satisfaction with intranet search is on a good level
•    The intranet feeds content into the appealing screen saver that every employee has on his/her desktop

The Business Environment of C-Net
The intranet is owned by Corporate Communications. Together with a number of other headquarter functions (HR, CSR, …)  they form what is called “Stakeholder Relations” inside the company.
There was a major reorganisation following the acquisition of the company by a capital fund. This also impacted the intranet team as development competence was outsourced. This created a number of problems and led to a failed project in 2006. After that, the decision was made, that a new intranet was needed, including a complete overhaul of strategy, technology, organization and content.

Results had to be delivered in a straightforward amount of time. The intranet team opted for an agile process that was adapted from Scrum to get up to speed fast and to minimize the risks that come with large projects.

The Intranet today

Linking the intranet to business objectives: Lars Frederiksen, President & CEO of Chr. Hansen keeps repeating the statement that the company has to “take out complexity” of everything it does, for both their customers and themselves as an organization.

The intranet strategy has identified a number of fields where C-Net can directly contribute to this, e.g. by reducing the amount of emails, by moving paper based tasks to the intranet or helping create a more transparent organization.

Another manifestation of this approach is that not the full spectrum of identified requirements was implemented with the first launch of the new intranet as the organization and people weren’t ready for all of them. Setting them aside for later incremental roll-outs helped people find their way around the new intranet more easily and thus made their life simpler.

Based on the success they had with this, the intranet team has now launched an internal campaign to make C-Net business critical. The campaign addresses everyone in the organization that is involved in processes or tasks that could be optimized by being transferred to the intranet (e.g. existing paper forms, workflows, document management tasks, etc.).

Good and bad experiences with User-generated Content: Every employee can put a story on the homepage of the intranet. If you think that this is the perfect recipe to wreak havoc and upheaval, here’ what Christian Skjaran’s, Intranet Manager at Chr. Hansen, experiences are: “There have been absolutely no abuses or cases of inappropriate content since the relaunch of our intranet in February 2009. If you’re thinking of opening up your own intranet, I can only encourage you to give it a try!”

Another option for employees to contribute didn’t work out as well: when people could upload their own profile pictures in the employee directory there were quite a number of images of comic figures and pictures in which people’s faces were not discernable. This was not of much help in communicating with people you had never met personally before and thus the process was centralized. This shift was supported by people being offered to have their picture being taking in some of the main locations of the company.

In countries with strict privacy regulations each employee was asked individually whether it would be okay for them to have their picture in the directory. Only a few people objected.

Getting the right mix of Editors on Board: The main portion of the content is managed by 130 editors from across the organization. Great care was taken not to just get “anyone” appointed as editors, but to really getting the right people to contribute. 5 editor personas were created for that purpose (a persona is a fictional character created to represent the different user types within a targeted group): researcher, production worker, sales person, office worker and manager. After that, editors were consciously chosen within the range of the personas to represent the company and its content requirements as best as possible. Currently the majority of the editors are still from the “office workers” persona group, but this is to level out in the future.

I especially like the way they went about to educate editors. Often this is done by just teaching people the tools. At Chr. Hansen great emphasis was put on highlighting existing problems (creating awareness first) and then showing new ways of working that help optimize the situation (offering solutions).

Groundwork for Intranet Search: “Before the new intranet we had a really crappy search engine in place. Now people are quite satisfied with search results, even though we use nothing more fancy than the standard search engine built into SharePoint 2007”, says Christian Skjaeran. This might come as a surprise to those familiar with that search engine, as it hasn’t got a reputation of being world-class. Beside the low expectation people had based on their experience with the old intranet, there is a number of things that were done in order to improve search quality by improving content quality:
•    Reducing the quantity of information
•    Having a librarian to go once over every piece of content that remained and tag it
•    Use of “Best Bets” based on zero-hits search words
•    Having a “Masterdata Team” in the organization that decides on global terminology use

Incited by the noteworthy outcomes of this project, they are looking into having a dedicated Search Manager role as soon as resources allow.

Intranet Insider World Tour 2010 in New York – so wird “Enterprise 2.0” Realität

Published
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Stephan Schillerwein
on March 8, 2010
in Events
. 1 Comment

Es ist mir eine besondere Freude, heute einen Gastbeitrag von Reto Stuber hier publizieren zu können. Er ist Geschäftsführer von Schreibenslust.com und als Online Media Consultant & Writer in New York für internationale Firmen im Einsatz.

Wenn es um das Thema Intranet geht, schlägt mein Herz höher. Die Begeisterung liegt in meiner Vergangenheit begründet. Ich hatte das Vergnügen, bei einem großen Schweizer Telekommunikationskonzern aktiv diese Ecke des Unternehmens mitzugestalten.

Die Worldwide Intranet Challenge – jetzt kostenlos mitmachen

In der Zwischenzeit hat sich mein Fokus von der internen Sicht her erweitert und ich beschäftige mich intensiv mit Projekten im Bereich Social Media und Online Marketing.

Als ich dann letztes Jahr einen Anruf von Andrew aus Australien erhielt, schloss sich der Kreis: Die Promotion seiner Worldwide Intranet Challenge WIC verbindet alle diese Disziplinen. Ich empfehle jedem Intranet Manager, dieses kostenlose Angebot unter die Lupe und dann in Anspruch zu nehmen.

Das Dilemma der Intranet Manager: Sie wissen, was das Beste wäre. Aber der Benutzer nicht.

Aber darum geht es heute nicht, vielmehr möchte ich auf die Intranet Insider World Tour aufmerksam machen, die diese Woche in New York stattfindet.

Das Intranet wird viel zu oft noch stiefmütterlich als reiner Informationskanal verwendet. Dabei sind die Möglichkeiten weit vielfältiger: Was standortübergreifende Kollaborationstools, Wissensdatenbanken, Cockpits und Social Media Ansätze für Vorteile bringen, wissen die Intranet Manager längst.

Doch die schönsten Tools nützen nichts, wenn der durchschnittliche Anwender den Use Case dahinter nicht sieht - oder die Verantwortlichen daran scheitern, diesen zu kommunizieren.

Intranet Insider World Tour – so bringen Sie das Unternehmen 2.0 zum funktionieren

Die Intranet Insider World Tour will hier in die Bresche springen. Sie zeigt auf, wie Intranet Manager Ihr Intranet auf die nächste Stufe heben können. Dabei werden folgende Fragen adressiert:

  • Was sollte Ihr Intranet im Bereich Twitter, Social Networks, Podcasting, RSS, Tagging, Online Video, Wikis und Blogs für Möglichkeiten bieten?
  • Enterprise Collaboration: Wie sieht das aus? Was benötigt es dazu?
  • Wie können Sie mehr Stakeholder und das Management involvieren, um wirkliche Fortschritte zu machen?
  • Wie können Sie Ihr Intranet energetisieren, um es kollaborativer, Mitarbeitergetrieben und „Realtime“-fähig zu machen?
  • Wie könne Sie große Patzer und Fehler im Intranet Design, Usability, Auffindbarkeit, Governance, Policies und Messbarkeit vermeiden?
  • Was sind die besten Strategien und Techniken in der Wirtschaftskrise?
  • Wie sieht das Intranet der Zukunft aus?

Ich werde live von der Konferenz berichten. Wenn Sie dabei sein wollen, einfach anmelden und mit dem nächsten Flieger in den Big Apple jetten! Wir sehen uns :-).

Recipe for Failure… the Senior Management Blog on the Intranet

Published
by
Stephan Schillerwein
on January 29, 2010
in Enterprise 2.0 / Social Media and Intranet Management
. 11 Comments

I was just reading a not publicly available case study on how not to do it when it comes to internal CEO (or CxO) blogs. The case study is about a big company (that shall remain unnamed*) that failed in an effort to establish blogging for their senior management on the intranet. The goal: to promote open exchange in the organization.
Here’s the approach they took – I urge you not to try this out in your own organization:

  • Assume it will just work (after all, this is Web 2.0 stuff…)
  • Provide one blog for all the senior managers to use together (to ensure hampering of personal identification)
  • Allow anonymous commenting in an environment with negative and unconstructive potential
  • Don’t address the issues raised in critical comments (to ensure them reappearing again and again)
  • Don’t brief your senior managers on how to make use of this instrument
  • Tell them that it is okay for the communications department to write the postings in their stead (to ensure loss of spontaneity and authenticity)
  • Don’t change the programme if you see that it doesn’t work, but rather leave it on its own to die in silence (to ensure a good starting position if you ever think of giving it another try)

I think that the value that can be derived from bad practise in the field of Intranet 2.0 approaches is quite substantial. As obviously defective the points listed above might seem, they keep coming up in projects again and again. In a way they (or at least some of them) seem to reflect a kind of “natural behaviour” in organisations today. So, having examples that prove that it is not going to work this way will hopefully help ease some of the discussion we all lead when introducing Web 2.0 approaches in the enterprise.

*Disclosure: I have no financial involvement with the company this case is about and they are not a client of mine or the organizations that I represent

Intranet Konferenzen 2010

Published
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Stephan Schillerwein
on January 19, 2010
in Uncategorized
. 1 Comment

Martin White hat eine Übersicht der dieses Jahr im Themenumfeld “Intranets” stattfindenden Konferenzen zusammen gestellt: Intranet Conferences 2010


Ich selber werde im 1. Halbjahr 2010 vor allem auf diesen Veranstaltungen mit dabei sein:

Do Intranet Managers look through coloured glasses when judging their intranet’s impact on business?

Published
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Stephan Schillerwein
on December 4, 2009
in Uncategorized
. 4 Comments

When comparing the results from two recent reports on how business critical intranets are today - one being Jane McConnell’s superb Global Intranet Trends for 2010, the other the latest benchmarking report from the Worldwide Intranet Challenge - it struck me that the findings showed quite different perspectives on intranet value, depending on what stakeholder group you ask.

Read more on LinkedIn: Do Intranet Managers look through coloured glasses when judging their intranet’s impact on business?

Internal Branding and Intranets (and vice versa)

Published
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Stephan Schillerwein
on November 25, 2009
in Uncategorized
. 3 Comments

The first book on Internal Branding in German language has recently been published. It’s titled “Innen beginnen: Von der internen Kommunikation zum Internal Branding” (~”Beginning inside - from Internal Communication to Internal Branding”). I was asked to write an article about the role intranets can play in internal branding and feel honoured to have been able to contribute to this great book.

Some key points from my article:

  1. Branding in relation to an intranet is so far only thought of in a very limiting way: using basic visual brand elements in the intranet design and/or creating a separate brand for your intranet. The by far richer possibilities of using an intranet to support turning employees into brand ambassadors are usually not even considered.
  2. Organisations that take their brand and brand values seriously should have this also being reflected by their intranet. A good point to start is the intranet strategy. Internal branding should become a strategic dimension of every intranet, just as e.g. publishing information, fostering collaboration or employee participation (Social Media) are.
  3. A fundamental requirement for successful internal branding activities in the intranet is that employees feel welcome and respected in using the intranet. Major flaws and failures in design, usability, readability, findability and accessibility make users feel “unwelcome” and thus usually create a sharp contrast to the positive aspects brand values are trying to convey.
  4. Evolution of an organisation’s culture is an important success factor for internal branding programmes. The intranet can help to make visible and experience the desired future state.
    I use prediction markets as an example of how organisations can dramatically change the way they work and which role each person has in a organisation.
  5. There is a multitude of options for campaigning your internal branding activities via the intranet, from “learning worlds” to video-based story telling approaches to value indicators (that e.g. show how well a certain content represents the brand values of the organisation)

“An organisation has as many marketing departments as it has employees”

Internal Branding can be regarded as a whole new area of expertise that puts an organisation’s brand in a much broader concept and enables employees to actually identify with and live by the brand values. For intranets it offers a further chance to be put to the heart of an organisation by supporting internal branding activities in a substantial way.

Further info:

Intranet Strategie, Content-Qualität, Governance und Suche… - in 2 Tagen

Published
by
Stephan Schillerwein
on September 28, 2009
in Events
. 1 Comment

Diese 4 Themenblöcke bestimmen das Programm der am 3.-4. November 2009 in Frankfurt stattfindenden Intranet Strategietage.

Dabei handelt es sich um ein Seminarkonzept der ECM WORLD, das im Sommer diesen Jahres bereits erfolgreich in Zürich initiert wurde und nun auch in Deutschland durchgeführt wird. Interessenten können sich aus den 4 halbtägigen Kompaktblöcken ihr individuelles Seminarprogramm zusammenstellen:

  • Intranet-Strategie und -Management
  • Redaktionsprozesse und Content-Qualität
  • Intranet-Governance und Zielcontrolling
  • Suche und Informationsarchitektur

Infos und Anmeldung unter: Intranet Strategietage 09

Web Darwinism – does the Law of the Jungle apply to Intranets as well?

Published
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Stephan Schillerwein
on August 18, 2009
in Uncategorized
. 1 Comment

At a recent intranet seminar I was giving, one of the participants stated that intranets managers ought to make more use of “Web Darwinism”. But does the intranet jungle provide an ecosystem suitable for making use of this law of the survival of the fittest?

Darwinism applied to the web basically means that those sites that are “strongest” will thrive and survive, while weaker ones will vanish. Strong equaling aspects like successful, heavily used, financially sustainable etc. it becomes clear that even the web isn’t pure Darwinism as countless websites will continue to exist, even if they fail to be(come) “strong”.

Also with myriads of potentially tiny target groups and niches it can be hard to tell whether a site is strong or not. Think of elephants and ants, each being a strong species.

The intranet jungle is a different habitat

While the web can (at least in some parts) be regarded as the wild open, the typical intranet resembles more of a wildlife reservation or zoo. There are all kinds of protection mechanisms that hinder weak areas of an intranet (e.g. content or functions) from becoming extinct. The range goes from the (financial and emotional) investment made to create that area to politics and regulations that make it mandatory for those things to be in place.

So, what would potentially die when left to itself in the jungle might life a long live under the care of its respective owners in the intranet environment.

What to do with all the carefully cared for weaklings?

The main operational goal of an intranet is supporting employees do their jobs better, more efficiently, with higher quality results etc. Weak content and functions are obstacles to achieving that goal. While you usually can’t just kill the weaklings, one approach would be to move them to places, where they can still be accessed but are out of the way in the predominating number of cases where they are of little or no relevance to a user.

Fast and easy information access being one of the biggest challenges on almost all intranets, mechanisms to provide quicker access to the “short end of the long tail” sure is a critical issue. But also one that so far often remains unaddressed due to lack of suitable solutions.

Iceberg-style Navigation

The approach I want to discuss can be thought of as a pyramid-shaped iceberg. It comes into play whenever any form of navigation – be it navigation menus, search results, shortcuts, tagclouds, … - is displayed. In each case only the top of the iceberg is visible (the head of the pyramid), containing the most important part of the respective content. The rest, which can be as much as 80%, is hidden below the surface (but can still be used by “diving down” to it).

One option how this can be achieved is to factor relevance metrics into every piece of content. This is then used to calculate the importance of the content whenever it is delivered in any kind of navigation. That means, that for instance a navigation submenu is no longer made up of static entries but the most relevant contents to be displayed are calculated on the fly in the very moment that a user is opening the menu.

The metrics used to calculate relevance can be made up of things like:

• Frequency with which the content is accessed
• Up-to-dateness of the content
• Frequency of the content being clicked on in search results
• Frequency of the content being bookmarked or subscribed to
• How well the content is rated by users
• …

Every organization will have to find their individual formula that reflects its strategic intranet goals, content quality guidelines etc. The selected indicators can then be used to calculate the current relevance of each piece of content at any given time.

Whenever a navigation element is delivered anywhere on the site, the entries of the navigation are delivered according to the respective relevance of its potential entries. For instance:

  • Search result lists: only content with relevance above a defined limit is shown in the main result list. Content with lower relevance is made accessible via a link (e.g. “250 more results with lesser importance”)
  • Navigation menus: only high relevance content is shown in the navigation menus, the rest is displayed with lesser prominence in a sidebar of the respective page
  • A-Z Index: similar to how a tagcloud is designed, the title’s size of an A-Z entry could reflect its calculated importance
  • Content teasers.: only content above a certain threshold is eligible to be featured in overviews and lists promoting defined contents
  • Shortcuts (featured links): only the top 5 links of the respective category are displayed based on the relevance of its contents
  • …

Things to consider

Care has to be taken not to create a “lemming effect” by further promoting the anyway popular items. In practice this means to select the above mentioned relevance criteria with circumspection and providing for mechanisms that take this problem into account (e.g. by treating a click on a promoted content different than one on the same content but coming from a source not boosted by the relevancy system).

If you feel that the approach outlined above is suitable to substantially help lessening information chaos on your intranet, please bear in mind that it (naturally) also has its drawbacks:

  • complexity is added to your intranet systems
  • performance is likely to be affected as every navigational element becomes dynamic
  • badly chosen metrics and formulas will do more harm than good
  • users can potentially be confused by (constantly) changing navigational elements (“I’m sure the document was here when I opened this menu just yesterday!”)
  • adequate data needed to calculate the relevancy might not exist for all content on a “fair basis”. E.g. important content might have been hidden away so far and thus not have any user ratings or only few clicks in search result lists. Thus the new mechanisms will continue to hide it away.

I’m curious to hear if anyone has successfully implemented mechanisms along these lines in their intranets, yet.