Interesting infographic from business network Focus
It’s usually the ‘unexpected’ that creates the biggest difficulties for most organisations. Whilst traditional hierarchies and structures often make it difficult to respond quickly, now, social technologies and more open, networked, cultures are enabling organisations to develop timely and effective solutions when things don’t quite go as expected.
The Center for the Edge, part of Deloitte LLP, highlighted the impact ‘exceptions’ have on the day-to-day work of many organisations. Once something falls outside of the established business process, a huge amount of time and effort is wasted following rigid reporting lines, limiting both the speed at which issues can be addressed and the pool of expertise that can be called on to help provide an answer.
More often than not, the answer to the problem already exists within the organisation, or its extended network. The key to a more effective response system could therefore come from the wider adoption of some of the ‘social business’ tools that enable greater networking and collaboration. Mico-blogging feeds or Q+A forums can be used to ask questions of and get answers from the whole organisation within minutes, whilst detailed personal profiles can enable users to search for and connect with the exact people and specific skills they need to create and deliver the most effective response.
As with any new organisational initiatives, it’s not just about the technology. Alongside the tools it’s important to develop an appropriately open and supportive culture – one in which members are encouraged to acknowledge and share problems early rather than as a last resort, where there is a willingness to accept input and help and a widespread understanding of the value of supporting others rather than keeping your head down and worrying just about your own job.
The technology already exists, the real challenge is in changing the mentality. But a few quick wins and positive feedback from those whose ‘exceptions’ are addressed and it won’t be long before more organisations are looking at ways to connect their members more effectively.
The way people communicate within organisations continues to change. The role of Internal Communications is becoming less about broadcasting the company message and more about encouraging those conversations and collaborations that will most effectively deliver the business’ goals.
The Intranet Design Annual 2011 from the Nielsen Norman Group offers some interesting insights into the way organisations are expanding, changing and re-imagining their internal communications activities, delivering greater value, to more of their members, more regularly. Having seen many of these developments first hand in our client discussions, we’ve picked out a few of the trends we expect to see more of in 2011.
More Companies Can Now Have Better Intranets
More and more companies are now able to develop high quality intranets. This is partly due to the wider recognition of the value of investing in intranets and partly due to the availability of better tools for building intranets. The easier it is to make the implementation work, the more resources that are left for design and usability. This is especially important in smaller organizations, which found it costly and time consuming to make things work with clunkier technology.
However, quality intranets remain a long-term commitment. Many organisations supplement their intranet teams with outside resources — such as design firms and consultants — for their redesign projects, only to cut back resources after launch. Long-term usability requires ongoing commitment, both for continuous design improvement, and for things such as search quality initiatives, consistency and style guide enforcement, and training new users and content contributors.
Mobile Intranets
Mobile access to intranet sites continues to grow in importance. Significantly those sites with fewer features have much better usability than full-featured websites; focus on specific features that are important to employees on the go instead of trying to squeeze the entire intranet onto a tiny screen.
One major difference between mobile intranets and mobile websites is that an intranet team can optimize for the relatively small set of company-issued mobile devices.
Managing Knowledge
As well as providing searchable access to the organisation’s knowledge archive, many intranets are now actively encouraging members to share their expertise more widely and are using social media tools to provide the means for users to identify and connect with people, knowledge and resources across the organisation.
- Knowledge sharing. Providing searchable archives for case studies, reports, creative samples, and other existing information can help people with similar problems avoid having to start building their solutions from scratch. Sometimes, knowledge sharing can be as simple as a Q&A tool to connect employees with questions to colleagues with answers.
- Innovation management. Managing and encouraging innovation by offering users tools for taking ideas and improvements from conception to completion.
- Comments. The simplest way to inspire user-contributed intranet content is to let employees comment on existing information, ranging from news stories to knowledge bank resources. Systems that force people to create content from scratch every time inhibit user participation, commenting features reduce the fear of the blank screen.
- Ratings. Giving a grade requires even less work than writing a comment, and thus rating systems can further broaden user participation. Sites that use ratings can list top-rated resources first in menus or give them added weight in search listings.
- Participation rewards. User participation increases when contributors are visibly rewarded, such as by adding points or badges to their profiles. Because there’s real business value to features like knowledge sharing and innovation management within an enterprise, some intranets went beyond the symbolic value of visible recognition and offered real prizes to employees who gathered sufficient participation points.
Continued Trends
These are fairly established practices that are likely to be implemented more and more widely in the coming months-
- A wide spectrum of technology solutions: there’s no single way to build a great intranet.
- Structures based on organisational tasks and activities rather than legacy silos.
- News as a main homepage feature, but with increasing emphasis on the usefulness of news stories.
- Better employee profile pages. In addition to offering information beyond plain contact listings, profiles are coupled with a more structured way of finding employees with specific expertise.
- Blogs by both executives and regular employees.
- Emphasis on search and on initiatives to improve search quality (which continues to suffer on many intranets).
- The use of pre-designed page layouts and a CMS to establish and maintain content consistency.
- Training for site managers and people in charge of individual areas, in recognition of that fact that user experiences derive from people and not just technology.
- Increased use of video on intranets, including features that let employees create and share video content.
Nov 302010
Some interesting insights into the future direction of internal business communications – courtesy of Step Two Designs’ 2010 Intranet Innovation Awards.
Content is no longer king
Innovative communicators are re-imagining the Intranet.
The most important change hasn’t been the technology platform; it’s been the mindset of intranet and project teams – moving on from the idea of the intranet as an internal website.
Rather than simply focusing on the one-way delivery of static content and corporate news, intranet innovation is now looking at ways to transform how staff work, using new technology to rethink traditional approaches and to focus more on connecting people and resources in order to help deliver business goals.
Social media is ‘standard’
2010 marked the ‘tipping point’ of social tools; site-wide commenting, the integration of blogs, micro-blogging, wikis, and social staff directories, and free-ranging contributions from all levels of an organisation, from the CEO down and frontline staff up.
Basic social tools are no longer ‘nice to have’, they’re now standard. If a site doesn’t have extensive social functionality, built-in from the ground up, then it’s significantly behind the curve of intranet development.
For those facing cultural barriers to adoption, including senior management’s fear of losing control or employees wasting time, the message is clear; an organisation still holding back its employees, intentionally or not, from contributing to and discussing all aspects of the business, risks missing out on a significant route to innovation and growth.
Personalisation that works
Personalisation, where staff can configure the intranet to match their needs, has seen a resurgence on intranets in the last year.
Whilst the idea of enabling staff to set up ‘their’ intranet themselves, is an attractive one, the challenge has often been the ’5–10% rule’ – in typical organisations, only 5–10% of staff will make use of personalisation or social features. This rule has been seen in effect across the globe, in the private and public sectors, even in major technology and consulting firms, and in those with a greater proportion of those ‘Generation Y’ users thought most likely to use new technologies.
To make personalistion work, you need – a proactive culture, features that deliver real benefits and personalised options that are critical to the daily work of staff. It needs to go beyond the out-of-the-box widgets like ‘my documents’ and the weather. Instead, it should deliver features like to-do-lists, project updates, contact searches, selective content subscription etc.
Consider the experience
It’s interesting to compare public websites and intranets with respect to the user experience.
The best websites provide customers with an easy, effective and seamless experience that hides underlying complexity.
No major public website would consider giving customers multiple usernames and passwords, or presenting six different applications with differing look-and-feel. Yet this is often what is created for staff within organisations: a disjointed collection of applications that often feels thrown together rather than designed.
Increasingly, the best intranet sites feature polished, professional and effective interfaces. Regardless of the technology platform behind the scenes, they cross boundaries and breakdown silos to deliver users experiences that are a pleasure for staff.
SharePoint versus all others
Microsoft’s SharePoint has become a significant, and perhaps dominant, intranet platform.
SharePoint is indeed powerful, but it’s not a lightweight intranet solution. Only with enough development time, resourcing, budget and effective communication will it meet many of the more complex business requirements.
Despite this, SharePoint remains on the radar of many intranet teams, permeating through all and any types of business, whether suitable or not. It is worth remembering that it’s certainly not the only solution out there.
Generating support and buy-in
Whether launching a new or replacement intranet, a considerable amount of time and effort should be invested in communicating and engaging with staff on the changes ahead. From user-centred research, to testing, launching and developing the site post-launch, it’s vital to have support and buy-in from all levels of the business. It is particularly important to secure senior management support, without which few projects are likely to be successful.
The key message is: Don’t forget this vital component when planning your site’s development schedule. A failure to engage and communicate with the business will often lead to a failed intranet, whether the breakdown occurs during the development phase, or post-launch.
Read more about the Intranet Innovations 2010 annual report.
Building valuable, long-lasting, online communities takes time, commitment and understanding. In a recent webinar Rob Howard, CTO/founder of Telligent, shared some great insights into how successful communities grow, and the importance of understanding and managing the different stages of their development.
Four Key Stages of The Community Lifecycle;
- On-Board: The starting point of any community; potential members are looking for content, most of which is created by the community’s founders, and for help in gaining access to it.
- Established: The community is becoming self-sustaining, with the members increasingly creating and contributing content, although some reliance on the founders is still necessary. It is the established phases of the community where analytics can be used to understand user behavior and value.
- Mature: The community is self-sustaining, and clear relationships between individuals are being formed. Users can be recognised as particular types (influencers, seekers, moderators, originators, etc.) and are participating fully. Little or no supervision is required by the founders, who can now simply become credible participants able to interact as equals.
- Mitosis: Over time, core community members can become distanced from new participants who don’t share the same values. These core community members seek more focus on specific topics and relationships. Successful communities enable this and allow the community to split into smaller nodes, thus returning to an Established phase and repeating the life cycle process.
The better an organisation understands this community lifecycle and then develops specific strategies to make the most of each stage, the more likely it is to develop engaged, long-lasting communities that provide real value to the business.
Oct 282010
Great piece on the way ideas develop and the importance of creating spaces and opportunities for people to meet and share, whether it’s face to face or on-line.
Sep 272010
Some further thoughts culled from Ofcom’s recently released Communications Market Report 2010. This time focusing on the use of social media sites.
Social networking now accounts for a quarter of all time spent online
In April 2007 social networking and blogs accounted for 9% of UK users’ total Internet time, according to audience data from UKOM/Nielsen. By April 2010, this had risen to 23%.
Use of social networking has continued to grow rapidly among all age groups.
Younger people are more likely to access social networking sites, but it is by no means exclusively a young person’s activity;
- 61% of 15- 34s claim to use social networking sites, compared to 40% of all adults aged 16+.
- Nearly half (48%) of 35-54s use social networking sites, as do 20% of 55-64s (up 7% over the past year).
However, usage patterns vary substantially between age groups.
- 89% of 15-24s who access social networking sites do so weekly, but just 50% of 55-64s with a profile do so.
All demographics have seen an annual rise of at least ten percentage points in the number of people claiming to have social networking profiles.
- ABC1s (46%, up from 35%)
- C2s (39% up from 29%)
- DEs (30%, up from 19%).
- Women (42%) were slightly more likely than men (39%) to claim to access these sites.
Despite the growth of social networking among older age groups, and the high penetration among younger age groups, its take-up still lags behind total Internet take-up, with around 45% of those who have Internet access at home saying that no one in their household accesses social networking sites.
A fifth of 16-24s’ time spent social networking is on mobile devices
Social networking sites have taken advantage of the growing popularity of the mobile Internet and the increasing take-up of smart-phones. Most sites now have mobile-friendly versions and specific applications (apps) for smart-phones. The importance of mobile social networking is highlighted by Facebook, which claims that more than 100 million users access its site through mobile devices, and that such users are twice as active on Facebook as non-mobile users.
Data from Ofcom’s consumer’s digital day research show that using mobile devices to access social networking sites is particularly popular among younger adults (Figure 4.6). A fifth (20%) of the time they spend social networking is via a mobile device. This compares to the average of 15% for all adults who use social networking sites. The proportion of time spent social networking on mobile devices drops off rapidly among over-45s, at under 4%.
Google, Microsoft and Facebook are the most popular Internet brands
Google has the highest reach of any online brand in the UK, with 87% of active users (someone who used an Internet-enabled computer in May 2010) visiting a Google site in May 2010. This equates to 56% of the total UK population. MSN and Facebook were the next most popular brands, reaching 70% and 64% of all active users (45% and 41% of the population) respectively.
Facebook users spend more time social networking than users of other sites
While Google is the leading brand in terms of reach, Facebook leads in terms of average time spent per person. Facebook users spend substantially more time on the site than users of other social networking sites; 6 hours 30 minutes in April 2010 (an average of 13 minutes a day), down since a peak in November 2009 of 8 hours 39 minutes (17 minutes a day). Bebo was the next most intensively used site, with users spending an average of just under an hour on the site in April 2010. For most other sites the figure was around half an hour or less.
Audiences for many user-generated content sites continue to grow.
According to data from UKOM/Nielsen, many UGC sites’ audiences are growing steadily, although annual growth rates are falling. Photobox (30%), Wikipedia (19%), Blogger (16%) and WordPress.com (6%) all experienced solid growth in the year to May 2010.
YouTube remains the most popular video-sharing site, with nearly 17.5 million unique visitors in May 2010, an increase of more than two million in a year. But it is increasingly difficult to categorise YouTube purely as a UGC site, since it hosts a significant amount of professionally produced content made available by film studios, broadcasters, record labels and other content providers. For example, in November 2009 Channel 4 made its 4OD catch-up and archive service available through YouTube, and in December 2009 Five made similar content from its Demand Five service available on the video-sharing site.
But…apart from photo sharing and social networking, most internet users have little interest in UGC.
Ofcom research into user-generated content shows that social networking and photo-sharing are very popular. But most other activities are minority pursuits that do not arouse much interest in the wider population of people with Internet access.
- 49% upload photos to a website, 9% more expressed interest in doing this in the future.
- 44% claim to have set up a social network profile (double the level of 2007) 5% expressing an interest.
- Commenting on blogs grew from 19% to 27%.
- The number of people expressing interest in setting up their own website fell from 17% to 12%.
All activities except social networking and photo-sharing generated relatively low levels of interest (at least 64% of internet users indicated that they were ‘not interested’).
Young people were most likely to have engaged in user-generated content activities online.
- A quarter (26%) of 16-24 year olds claimed to have made a short video and uploaded it to a website,
- Only 2% of people aged 55+ with internet access make the same claim.
In general, the older an Internet user is, the less likely they are to have experience of a given UGC activity. However, the exception to this rule appears to be contributing to collaborative websites such as Wikipedia; 25-34 year olds were as likely to have done this as 16-24 year-olds (17%).
