Angie Cullen

When building a business case around a social Intranet, there are a few key components to consider.  Here are five suggested features that you might ask your potential vendors to demonstrate.

Forum Collaboration
By using a forum or threaded discussion  tool, you can engage your employees around specific topics and challenge them to start talking about topics that matter to them. For instance, Project Managers might discuss the project they are working on along with the status of that project, IT employees may share valuable technology updates, and HR personnel may share links to recruiting best practices.  Be sure that the tool  allows employees to create a profile and specify the topics they are interested in. This also provides a way for employees to get to know their colleagues and share information.

Social Tagging and Ranking
Although search engines are getting smarter by the minute, nothing replaces the ability for an employee to indicate whether an article or piece of content was useful to them in their job. Especially if the search engine takes that ranking into account in ordering their search results (e.g. articles they ranked higher, should be placed higher in the results). In addition, if employees are able to add their own keywords that helps influence search results, they will be able to find information that is more meaningful to them much more quickly.

Document Storage & Collaboration
With a document storage and collaboration tool, employees can find and share documents easily.  This tool will allow employees to create, open and edit documents by placing them in a centralized location that’s easy to access. Having this tool will allow multiple users to work and collaborate in real-time, based on the permissions that are set by the owner, on a document simultaneously.  A document collaboration tool can also help you cut down on storage costs. Employees will no longer need to email a status report, PowerPoint deck, or Excel spreadsheet to the entire project team (these multiple copies take up storage on the email server). Instead, they can simply email a link to the single copy stored on the Intranet and use check in/check out functionality to edit that single document.

Expertise Finder
Employees consistently rank the company directory as one of the most used functions of their Intranet. An expertise finder takes that directory one step further and allows users to identify employees that hold specific knowledge or expertise. This is paired with the ability for employees to create their social profiles and self-report their skills. Similar to tagging content, employees should also be able to tag other employees with terms that they could use in the future to find that expert again (e.g. tagging someone as “Intranet administrator”)

Knowledge Base or Wiki
Your employees have a great wealth of knowledge and given the opportunity many of them want to share it. Be sure to ask your potential Intranet vendors whether they offer a knowledge base or wiki functionality that would allow your employees to quickly, easily share nuggets of knowledge that may assist other employees. Keep in mind that it must be easy to use and be integrated with the search functionality so employees can use a single search to locate people or content.

These five key components  are just a few of the items to consider when reviewing potential software solutions for a social Intranet. Be sure to ask each of your vendors to demonstrate the functionality and consider inviting a few of your end users or members of your Intranet Governance Council to the demos to get their input, as well.

Have additional features that you think would be critical to a social Intranet? Feel free to leave a comment and let us know what you think is important or what has turned out to be a popular social feature for your employees.

Sean R. Nicholson

As a follow up to my 99 Great Intranet Resources post, I have also created a list of 99 great Enterprise Content Management Resources on Twitter. If you’re looking for the folks who know, speak, live, learn, and love ECM, these are your folks! Know someone that I missed from the list? Definitely let me know. Shameless self-promotion is also allowed if you think you should be included, just make sure your tweets back up your request.

You can check out the list below, and feel free to leave a comment if there’s anyone else I should add.

Sean’s ECM Twitter List

Angie Cullen

When developing your Intranet, it’s best not to develop in a vacuum. You may not be the best person to make decisions on how employees will use the intranet to do their job.  Be sure to identify employees that will be involved in the maintenance of the portal and get everyone involved in the design process. Create an Intranet Governance Council that will include at least one member from each department throughout your company. Bigger departments might have 2 or 3.  Let the members of the governance council represent their department and tell you what employees in their department need to be able to do their job more efficiently.

Be sure to let the members of the governance council know that while you value their input and opinions, the final decisions regarding design and functionality are the responsibility of the Intranet team.  In other words, everything that the members of the governance council submit on their wish list, might not make it in to the final product. By setting this clear direction and making the members of the council a part of the design process, you can leverage their excitement and promote collaboration, while ensuring that the Intranet design meets the needs of all departments and employees.

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

Sean R. Nicholson

In April of 2009, I published a blog post listing the Must Have Resource for Intranet Professionals in 2009. Included in the list are the valuable resources located at Intranet Strategies by JMC and, in particular, the annual Global Intranet Trends Report. This comprehensive resources consolidates feedback from organizations of all shapes and sizes and analyzes the trends impacting Intranets in the coming year.

If you are an Intranet professional and are interested in participating in the 2010 Global Intranet Strategies and Trends survey, JMC Services is currently seeking applicants. To understand how to apply, please visit this page and follow the instructions:

http://netjmc.com/survey/sign-up-JMC-global-intranet-survey-2009-2010.html

Participation in the survey affords the participant a complimentary copy of the 2010 report to share with their organization.

Sean R. Nicholson

In the second article in this series, we’ll focus on understanding Content Management and how it differs from Document Management and Knowledge Management. If you recall from the first article in the series, Document Management is all about how we create, manage, route, retain, and destroy the container that we refer to as a document. Content Management, on the other hand, focuses primarily on the information stored inside that container and how you can effectively add/edit/delete the information in the document.

Keep in mind that while some folks use the term “document” generically to refer to Microsoft Word documents (primarily because they use the .doc extension), a document can also be an PDF file, an HTML file, a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet…really any kind of container that holds content.

Distinguishing Between Pure Content Management And Enterprise Content Management (ECM)

Note: Before we dig into the details of Content Management, we need to establish that the focus of this article is to define and discuss pure Content Management separately from Enterprise Content Management. ECM blurs the lines between Document Management, Content Management, and Knowledge Management which, when brought into the conversation,  makes it difficult to discuss each of the separate components on their own merits. So, for the duration of this article, take a step back and let’s just focus on the Content Management component, apart from ECM. In the final article in the series, I’ll bring it all back together to discuss ECM.

So What Is Content Management?

In it’s simplest term, content management is simply editing a document to add, replace, remove, or modify the content. When you open a new Microsoft Word document on your desktop and type a few lines of text, you are engaging in content management using MS Word as the content management tool. You then save the document and store it on your computer, network location, or document management system. Through this process, you have engaged in both document management (the creation and saving of the document) and content management (the adding of information inside the container). Simple, right?

Content Management becomes much more challenging for organizations when you ask many people to collaborate at the same time on the same document. Issues arise such as the following:

• How do you keep one person from overwriting the content that another has added?
• How do you keep people from corrupting documents by editing them at the same time?
• How can you control the quality of the content to ensure proper spelling and grammar?
• How do you audit when someone last edited the content?

The existence of these, and many other issues has driven the creation of tools that allow organizations to collaborate around content, aka Content Management Systems. By introducing functionality such as user accounts, authentication, check in/check out, change tracking, and rich text editors (aka “WYSIWYG”), Content Management systems have addressed many of the concerns created by mass collaboration by limiting what individual contributors are allowed to do with the content and tracking when content is being edited. By leveraging this added functionality, organizations can minimize some of the risks of mass-collaboration and can maximize of the benefits that content management tools offer.

Different Kinds Of Content Require Different Editing Tools

In their early days of distributed content management, CMS tools focused primarily on editing Web pages. These Web Content Management systems allowed non-technical users to create, edit, and publish content to corporate Web sites and Intranet portals without having to know HTML, JavaScript or any other coding languages. As a result, organizations were able to empower their business users to take ownership of the content in their Web site and Intranet portals without having to engage IT for each and every change. In addition, the use of user accounts allowed organizations to control which roles were allowed to create content, edit it, and approve for publication.

Because of the proliferation of these tools and the rapid organizational adoption of them, the term Content Management System became synonymous with Web Content Management System. But as organizations saw the value of these systems and a variety of different types of content were introduced into the enterprise, new content management tools were needed.

For instance, digital assets such as images, videos, Flash movies, and audio files presented new challenges. To maintain the quality and appropriate use of these corporate assets, Digital Asset Management Systems were created to all organizations to manage the assets in a similar fashion to managing documents, while allowing some content management functionality through plugins with popular editing software like PhotoShop and Flash.

Document Management and Content Management Come Together Through Business Process Management

As the ability to edit different types of content has grown, organizations have recognized that the content management and document management can be intertwined to improve on business processes. Business Process Management tools provide organizations with graphical workflow solutions that allow for the creation and routing of documents from one user to another. upon arrival in their workflow queue, users can edit or review the content using a content management tool and then finalize the document or route the document to another user or queue for further processing.

Business units like Accounts Payable, Human Resources, Contract Management, and Decision Support have optimized document and content management by applying automated business rules that allow the document to be management in a specific manner based on the content.For instance, in situations where an invoice has a low total amount (say under $500), an organization can auto-approve the payment of the invoice without a high level of risk. In situations where total invoice amount exceeds a threshold, the workflow can route the document appropriately for a content review to ensure proper auditing.

Bringing Content And Documents To The Users Through Knowledge Management

The process of creating documents and managing their content continues to become more difficult as the volume of information in the organization grows. Effective organizational content and document management strategies are going to have to find ways to get the right information to the right user. To do this, business process tools and content management systems are going to need to leverage knowledge management principles to evaluate content and route content appropriately.

In the next article in the series, we’ll take a look at how Knowledge Management principles can be used to ensure that content is being effectively reviewed and used in the organization.