Jane McConnell, founder and principal of NetStrategy/JMC, thought leader
on intranet strategies and trends.
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Strategies Survey.
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Intranet Trends for 2010 report.
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First findings: 5 Trends from Global Intranet Strategies Survey
August 21, 2010If you are involved in intranet management for your organization, join the 5th annual Global Intranet Strategies survey and get a free copy of “Global Intranet Trends for 2011″, published end of October (commercial value 750 USD, 550 euros).
The survey closes September 1st. You still have more than one week to participate!
We’ve looked at the data available as of August 20th, based on the participation of 300 organizations worldwide, and here are some early indicators coming from preliminary data.
5 Trends: what’s happening and what is not
- Mobile optimization is not happening very fast. There has been no evolution since last year’s survey: Only 7% say their intranet is optimized for mobile access, 24% are running pilots or are in the planning stages. This is identical to last year.
- Social media is advancing inside. It is implemented to some extent in 70 % of the organizations, up 10 % points from last year. Out of these, 20 % have had social media for less than one year, and over 25% have had it for 3 or more years.
- Enterprises are looking outwards…. 40% say “We create official, branded spaces on external networking platforms such as Facebook.” But most are still being cautious….and only 11% say “We encourage employees to blog on the internet.”
- Collaboration is now “self-service” for some. Out of 276 organizations with blogs, wikis and/or collaborative spaces, approximately 40% provide a self-service solution where people can do it themselves with no or minimal help desk support. However, from 45 to 55% say that only IT can open these spaces.
- Are prediction markets emerging? 10 % of the participating organizations already have them. Another 7 % are in the pilot or planning stages. Last year, the highest we had were 3% who were testing prediction markets.
These topics and many more are investigated in the 2010 survey and will be developed in detail with analysis and charts in the final report.
Sign-up and get your free copy.
Get in touch if you have any questions.
User adoption: the wave 2 challenge
August 21, 2010I read Michael Sampson’s new book “User Adoption Strategies” with great interest and flagged a lot of gems I found, some of which I will share here. I’ll let you discover the others.
It’s not the early adopters we need to worry about: it’s all the others.
The subtitle of the book says it all: “Shifting second wave people to new collaboration technology”.
I am currently looking at the preliminary data from the current Global Intranet Strategies Survey, of which social media is a large part. Here is a preliminary statistic:
- Out of over 200 responding organizations who have some degree of social media in place internally, nearly 40 % express ‘moderate concern’ about user adoption and just over 15% express ’strong concern’. (Choices were “not a concern”, “low”, “moderate”, “strong” or “very strong”.)
I know from personal experience with my clients that user adoption is a concern for intranets in general, unless they have reached Stage 3 in maturity. In this case they are the “way of working” for the organization and have been fully “adopted”! Most have not yet reached that stage, thus the interest in Michael’s topic.
Michael talks about the “levers for change”: “pain”, “social pressure”, “perceived deviance from the norm”, “better defaults”, “getting pleasure” and “linkage to a higher goal”. This is an intriguing list, and well worth the price of the book to read what he has to say about these levers. (as of page 68)
Another gem is his thoughts on why the “what’s in it for me” concept may be a bad way to think of user adoption. (page 77.)
Michael takes us through the model he propose in detail, with lost of examples. His model is based on 4 stages:
- Winning attention
- Cultivating basic concepts
- Enlivening applicability (my favorite stage!)
- Making it real
The tongue twister “enlivening applicability” simply means you bring alive how the application can be relevant and useful for the person.
“User Adoption Strategies” makes very interesting reading, let alone the fact that you will never see “user adoption” in exactly the same way after finishing this book. At 39 US$, this book is a very good deal.
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Note that the on-going, 5th annual Global Intranet Strategies Survey is open until September 1st. You still have plenty of time to sign up and get a free copy of “Global Intranet Trends for 2011″ (commercial value 750 USD, 550 euros).
Intranet is a process, one step ahead of the organization
August 13, 2010The intranet is a process and should be one step ahead of the organization. This is a phrase I used several years ago and it is taking on new meaning these days.
From Barb Mosher, CMSWire:
“McConnell states it best when she says that the “intranet is a process, not a one-time project”. You can’t build it and walk away. It is always going to a be a work in progress, growing and adapting to the needs of your organization…. “
“Intranet Trends for 2010: How Far We Have and Haven’t Come“, published 6 August.
I published what must be my most famous slide “Intranet is a process“ 2006, and have since seen it posted in people’s offices and referred to in many places since, including the September 2010 JBoye London workshop “Intranets at Work“. (By the way, I highly recommend this one-day event based on the speaker line-up: 2 of my clients and several of my well-respected virtual colleagues. Using the code “jmc” when you sign up will give you a 20 % reduction.)
Why just one step ahead?
The intranet can enable new ways of working but it cannot create them.
I have two examples from recent client engagements:
- A case where new business lines are being implemented and intended to gradually replace the current company-based organization.
- A second case where senior management behavior is in conflict with the global processes around which collaboration spaces are being built.
Read more
Vanity pages: how to transform them
August 12, 2010I often hear people say they don’t want “vanity pages” on their intranets. By “vanity page”, they mean a page created by a team or department to show that they exist.
In fact, vanity pages are an important part of intranets. They are one way to get people involved in the intranet. People want and should be able to tell others about themselves and their work.
The problem comes when the so called “vanity page” are reinforcing the enterprise silos. They hide essential information from others, reinforce the blinder syndrome and create major findability issues.
This post offers 3 tips for how to transform vanity pages into a starting point for a user-logical structure for the intranet.
NetJMC&Co – over 500 intranet managers worldwide
August 10, 2010
NetJMC&Co just accepted its 516th member. The LinkedIn group is just over one year old.
It was inspired and started by a group of Paris-based intranet managers (thanks Willem!) who participate in the NetJMC working breakfasts.
The 5 most recent members are from Maine (US), Denmark, Geneva, Ohio (US) and Ireland.
On-going discussions are on:
- Has anyone found a way to convince senior management to invest more money and resources in the intranet?
- Automated translation tools in your intranet?
- Intranet Manager Job Description Help
How to represent “an Intranet” graphically? - Separation of Intranet and public website team – Does your organisation have separate teams for both the Intranet and your public website?
If you’re an intranet manager or strongly involved in your organization’s intranet, consider joining us.
To technology strategists: how to blend enterprise + business + people?
August 3, 2010The workplace web has 3 perspectives:
- the enterprise,
- the business,
- and the individual person.
When I work with global organizations to help them define the business objectives of the intranet, we do it from these 3 angles. The problem is when we push each dimension to its logical conclusion, we end up with a technology dilemma.
What tool or combination of tools can support all 3 dimensions?
Software solutions tend to favor one dimension more than the others. Each dimension has its own fundamental logic.
This post talks about how the traditional CMS favors the enterprise, collaborative software the business angle, and social networking the individual person. This raises fundamental questions about the entry point for the individual user and the governance for the intranet.
Feedback to the 5th annual Global Intranet Strategies Survey
July 27, 2010Feedback from participants in the current Global Intranet Strategies Survey, now into its 5th year.
If you’re involved in your intranet, consider signing up. You’ll get a free copy of “Global Intranet Trends for 2011″ (commercial value: 750 US$, 500 euros). See table of contents 2010. Read intranet manager reviews. The survey is open until the end of August.
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“Once again another excellent survey. Participating in this survey and specifically some of the questions asked has prompted me to investigate some future Intranet enhancements currently not available in my organisation. Great job as usual Jane and I look forward to reading the report.”
NetJMC: Thanks – one of the purposes of the survey is to stimulate thought.
Intranets turning into marketplaces?
July 12, 2010How far should organizations go in letting people pick and choose what they want to see and do on the intranet?
A participant in one of my global intranet workshops recently said, “There’s no point in saying we have mandatory global content that everyone must see. It’s not by putting it on the home page that will make them read it. They’re either interested or they aren’t.”
The person speaking is in charge of internal communication in a large global company. The company in question is in the early stages of a socially-driven intranet. When I say “early”, I mean they have a CEO blog, allow comments on all news items and articles and have just officially launched a social platform where numerous groups and teams are beginning to set up their tents!
My concern is that without a minimum of overall strategy, it’s the users who will suffer. They will not know where to find what. There are risks of redundancies.
But does that matter? Will the best “places” win? The ones where the most users congregate? The ones that offer the most value? Will the marketplace sort itself out?
What are your views on intranets morphing into user-driven spaces where people are completely free to pick and choose what they see and where and how they work on line?
Intranet Manager role: evolve or devolve?
July 2, 2010Will it evolve? Will the intranet manager role grow deeper, go higher and become more strategic in the spirit of “survival of the fittest”?
Will it devolve? Will the tasks and responsibilities be passed on to business managers and users in the organization? I like this definition of devolve: “to delegate something to someone else; to be inherited by someone; a slow degradation”. (Wiktionary)
The Global Intranet Strategies Survey has looked at the intranet manager role for the last 3 years. We have seen that the career path is ambiguous as are many job titles. We have questioned whether intranet managers have the right priorities in terms of knowledge they need. In this year’s survey (year 5) we are asking specific questions about how the role is evolving professionally.
Global Intranet Survey 2010 Now Open
June 20, 2010
The 5th edition of the Global Intranet Strategies Survey has just opened. If you signed up and have not received your personalized link by email, get in touch.
What’s new in year 5?
A broader scope
We start by looking briefly at new enterprise business models. This is essential if we want to understand where the enterprise is going and what business value the intranet should and will be providing.
The internal-external blend
We also explore how the internal and external worlds interact. Today intranet managers can no longer limit their job scope to the internal world: our survey can no longer treat the intranet as a purely internal tool.