Recently, Mike Watt, of Intranet Connections gave me a tour around the new Intranet Connections Version 10, which now includes an online form builder. Having built my own form builder application a few years ago for a Fortune 500 company, I have a deep appreciation for how difficult this module is to architect and implement. The beauty of Intranet Connection’s form builder is that it’s simple, easy-to-use, and doesn’t just build “plain jane” forms that send an email.

Instead, the form builder allows user to create standard form fields, pre-populate fields with database-driven SQL queries, add form validation (required fields) and….wait for it….WORKFLOW! Yes, Intranet Connections has paired their form builder with a workflow tool that allows the creator of the form to create a review or approval process for the form once it is submitted by the user.

If you look around at social Intranets today and the rich feature-sets that offer, it may seem like I’m getting excited over a relatively small piece of functionality. After all, a form builder is hardly the sexiest tool out there. But think about it….how many forms do your employees fill out each day? New employee forms, pay change forms, benefits enrollment forms, password change request forms, time off request forms…the list goes on and on. The amount of time and energy (not to mention trees) that can be saved by converting paper forms to electronic forms is staggering.

Intranet Connections v10 Offers An Easy-To-Use Form Builder Application

If your Intranet doesn’t have a form builder, you might ask your vendor “Why not?”. If you do have a form builder, are you using it to it’s maximum potential and digitizing all those paper forms?

Now…if we could just use that form builder to update the cafeteria menu <G>!

I’d be interested to hear feedback/thoughts/experiences with Intranet form builders. Let me know what you think!

Sean R. Nicholson

While listening to Marketplace yesterday, I heard a great article on a French campaign that is aimed at sparking the entrepreneurial spirit in French workers. According to the piece by John Laurenson, the advertisements feature successful business people in clown outfits and makeup to highlight a new web site at http://www.jesuisunclown.com/ (i am a clown.com). The purpose behind the campaign is to feature successful individuals who have struck out on their own despite others telling them that their ideas were silly.In a time when the French economy needs innovators, the goal is to encourage citizens to risk their pensions and security for the life of an entrepreneur.

The article had me thinking today about employees around the world during these tough economic times and wondering whether employees are encouraged to innovate and share ideas. In the US, we are certainly seeing employees in “hunker and bunker” mode, where they are working hard to keep their jobs in the face of looming corporate cutbacks and downsizing. Unfortunately, when employees are hiding in cubeville, they are usually focusing on just doing their job and not innovating, for fear of looking like “a clown” and risking their employment. The problem with this is that our  global economy needs innovation now more than ever. We need employees to bring new product ideas to the forefront and innovate new service offerings. Managers and executives should be encouraging employees to come up with every new idea possible, regardless of how silly it might initially seem.

As Intranet Professionals, think about whether your Intranet is being used to encourage new ideas. Do you have a campaign asking employees to behave like clowns? Do you have an idea center where employees can submit their ideas and vote on those that they feel would be valuable? Are your executives open to new ideas and are they actively encouraging innovation?

Think about it…products like the slinky, magic eight ball, lava lamps, and mood rings might all probably seemed like silly ideas at the time, yet they have all been significant profit earners for their creators and are still considered by some to be among the top “It” products.

If you’re already finding unique and creative ways to inspire the “clowns” in your organization, please post a comment and share your strategies, tactics, and successes. If you haven’t started an innovation program yet, now might be a great time to start a clown college inside your organization. Your clowns, might just be the key to growing your business and our economy.

Sean R. Nicholson

Having been in the field of information management for quite a while now, I have developed a few credos that seem to prove more and more useful as the volumes of organizational information continues to grow. I used to drive one of my previous team absolutely crazy with this one:

“The only thing worse than no information is BAD information”

Think about it. When you have no information, you seek out answers, solutions, and advice. When you have bad information,  it’s likely that you don’t know it’s bad, so you react to the information. Only after you have used the information and determined that it was incorrect do you (after a few choice words) continue your search for good information.

Take an example of a call center representative who answers the phone and provides the customer on the other end with what they think to be the most current product prices from a document they printed yesterday. Little do they know that a new copy of the rate sheet was published a couple hours ago with significant rate changes that is now impacting their potential sale.

Did they have information? Yes! Was it good information? No!

The reality is that organizations are generating more and more information on an hourly basis. Take a moment and think about all the documents, spreadsheets, presentations, emails, voice mails, and sticky notes you generated on a daily basis just 3 years ago. Now, add modern day blogs, tweets, text messages, forum posts, comments, status updates, videos, podcasts, and wiki posts to your list and what do you get? More information? Definitely! But the larger problem is the fact that the information is now spread out in more places, making it harder for other employees and customers to find it.

In the past customers could simply call a 1-800 line for support and get one-stop service. In the modern day of social media, though, they can call the 800 number, tweet their problems, look for solutions in a knowledge base, email, complain in an online forum, post a video on YouTube of your product malfunctioning, or blog about it. Compound the problem with the fact that your employees are having a difficult time finding the most current methods to resolve the customer issues and you have quite an information disaster in the making. In fact, it’s a situation that could have a negative impact on both customer and employee satisfaction.

For some, the temptation might be to throw their hands up in the air and surrender to the fact that there are just too many channels out there. If you’re curious as to how confusing it really is, just take a look at all the new channels being created in the social media space alone via the Social Media Prism! Now think about what your employee-to-employee and employee-to-customer communication channels are going to look like in 5 years. Believe me…I understand the desire to just crawl back in bed and ignore social media. The reality is, however, that few business ever succeed by ignoring change. Instead, you’re going to need to stop dismissing social media (both internal and external) as a fad and start working on how to resolve the issue.

Unfortunately, I don’t have a magic product that I can sell for $19.99 to serve as the magic bullet. This one’s going to require smart people in your organization rolling up their sleeves and building a solid information management architecture. No, it’s not easy, but it’s going to be a requirement for businesses to survive in the future! A good place to being would be by looking at the following criteria:

1. How do your employees work? Are they being asked to store information in multiple locations (e.g. My Documents, file shares, document repositories, WIKIs, etc…)?
2. Do your employees know where to go for the single source of truth? (hint, hint…it should be your Intranet)
3. Where are you storing your information? In legacy applications that aren’t searchable? In repositories that require no periodic content review?
4. Does your organization offer a single search interface that allows employees to search information in multiple repositories?
5. Is your information governance killing your employees ability to share information (e.g. no blogs, wikis, microblogs, etc…)?
6. How are your customers interact with your organization? Are they seeking answers from multiple sources (e.g. Phone, website, Twitter, etc..)
7. Do your customers know where to go for a single source of the truth (hint, hint…it should be your Web site)
8. Do you have the infrastructure in place to respond to new types of interactions? Do you have corporate accounts for sites like Twitter, YouTube, Blogger, LinkedIn, and Facebook? Does someone monitor searches on your company and products?
9. Are you making it as easy as possible for your customers to get help and resolve issues?
10. Are YOU embracing internal and external information tools that will allow your employees to share information more easily and provide customers with more ways to serve themselves or seek assistance?

If you haven’t started a review of your current information architecture, it’s time to start and because I find the Social Media Prism to be so useful in explaining the external growth challenge that faces organizations, I have also put together an internal information stratification diagram that hopefully will help IT, Intranet, and ECM professionals demonstrate the internal complexities that exist inside the firewall.  Click on the image below for a larger view or feel free to print out a PDF version.

As always….this is a work in progress and all input, comments, feedback are welcome!

Internal Information Stratification Wheel

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