J. Boye Aarhus '09 Intranet Track: Day One, Session Two

Setting up an intranet governance framework in the context of decentralised publishing by Ernst Décsey, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees
Faced with the challenge of setting up decentralising content publishing using a new web content management system, UNHCR were challenged by senior management to provide publication policies and guidelines to guarantee the quality of material published on the new system.

Ernst presents a comprehensive framework for web governance at different levels. I liked that while it was simple enough to read and understand easily, they took the time to make it relevant to users and to communicate it, the CIO sending a memo to all staff stating the purpose explicitly. It's even displayed to users as they log in:

- primary tool for internal communication
- place to publish and find information
- place to collaborate
- entry to online workplace

There are similarly easy to read sections covering roles and responsibilities, content approval, intranet access and the intranet content structure.

Feeding The Monster by Mark Wyatt, Environment Agency

Mark gave a captivating presentation about the challenges facing the Environment Agency following an intranet content management tool update - and I forgot to take notes.

Starting with the statement that the perfect publisher is different for every organisation, Mark talked about the aftermath of the introduction of a new content management system. With over 700 content publishers and a central team of five content editors, there was an imbalance which left the publisher community feeling a lack of support from the organisation and too much content of low quality. With the situation tending towards the chaotic, they acted to reign in the content managers, reducing the number by 90%.

They took a top-down/bottom-up approach, building support with senior stakeholders to get the right governance in place and highlighting the potential costs of failing to comply.

At the same time, they formed a network of senior publishers - recognising those who produced quality content - and improved communication and collaboration, giving them forums to share good practice and discuss issues. A three-strikes rule for all publishers introduced the threat of withdrawing publishing privileges for anyone whose content failed to measure up.

Mark said the content publishers have welcomed these guidelines, which is understandable since they provide clarity, improve overall quality and ultimately recognise their role as important to the organisation's success. Managers on the other hand struggled to accept the minimum standards, even while they supported the cost benefits.

Armed with these light constraints, the intranet has been brought under control and while Mark felt the system was optimised, he admitted it wasn't perfect.

His best learnings warned against becoming seduced by the pursuit of perfection:
- you can't build a theoretical community
- you can't take a one-size fits all approach
- you can't do it in isolation to the culture and workings and strategy of an organisation

A good perspective on working in the real world.

Web Idol
A tradition at the J. Boye conference sees a group of content management vendors line-up for some abuse at the hands of a panel of expert judges. Hence representatives on stage for seven minutes putting SharePoint, eSpirit, Kapow, Terminal4, 23 Video and SiteCore through their paces.

The biggest surprise I got was when Terminal4 showed their product which has exactly the same user interface for setting up navigation as BAT's bespoke tool SiteBuilder. Coincidentally, their tool, Piero told us, was aimed at occasional users. And the whole experience was very SiteBuilder-like.

Oddly, SiteCore was the only entrant who tried to engage the audience with a story, featuring characters, something meaningful which encapsulated an end-to-end experience. All the other entrants merely tried to demonstrate features. Kapow showed a useful-looking tool for migration, 23 Video a white label tool for setting up video sharing sites which featured some impressive-looking analytics and SharePoint touted its similarity to existing Microsoft Office applications.

SiteCore naturally romped home with the audience's vote, proving that if you want to communicate with people, tell them stories they'll understand. The story supplies the context and there are no awkward "...so what I'm going to do here is..." moments.

J. Boye Aarhus '09 Intranet Track: Day One, Session One

Global Intranet Trends For 2010 - Towards The Workplace Web - Jane McConnell, NetStrategy/JMC

My early morning Ryanair flight from Stansted must've caught a tailwind, because I arrive twenty minutes early, catch the bus into town and arrive to hear the end of Jane's spot, the first public presentation of the results of her fourth annual Global Intranet Strategies survey. I'm already looking forward to reading the report when I get back, but I'm happy to hear very large organisations who are social media pioneers are benefitting from "more effective knowledge sharing", "more engaged employees" and "increased cross pollination and innovation".

Why We Need A Modern Intranet - Miquel Maldonado, Médécins Sans Frontières

First intranet case study of the day comes from Miquel. Médécins Sans Frontières launched a new intranet in August 2009 having decided that a new file sharing tool would not meet their requirements.

The design is clean - the sparing use of colour indicating this is a business tool. They've put a lot of thought into their taxonomy, extending the keywords they initially identified by adding popular tags from users, a nice feedback loop making good use of crowdsourcing.

A couple of questions from the floor:

Q: (Regarding user profiles) "How do you indicate 'complete' profiles to users?"
Miquel says there isn't a measure of completeness for a user profile, but it prompts me to wonder whether a Linked In-style percentage measure would encourage greater completion of profiles? Something to try out in the future.

Q: "How integrated is the people directory?"
One of the great strengths of an intranet is its degree of integration. In MSF's case, Miquel says, it's not just blog and community posts which link to people directory records, but document authors too. Most intranets I've seen aren't integrated to this level which impressed me.

Using tag clouds

A key feature of the new design is a tag cloud displayed prominently on the homepage. The terms are all countries, the larger ones representing countries with the most documents associated over the last three months.

This interested me because I'd had a conversation with my colleague Simon only 24 hours earlier about the appropriate use of tag clouds. We had a situation where we wanted to give users of a site the quickest access to policy documents. The problem is the tag cloud signifies popularity by measuring volume, not relevance – the most appropriate for my needs – or usage – the most often accessed. With user-generated content, this is great because it shows us trends. In MSF's case, they're using a time-frame of three months, so the cloud represents currency, the organisation's focus areas during that period.

I was lucky enough to find myself sitting next to Miquel at dinner that evening, so I asked him about it. He said he'd had exactly the same conversation. Bravely, they'd gone ahead with an experiment to try it out and see what happened.

It will be interesting to see the results and get feedback from users. I'd be interested to hear other people's experiences with tag clouds on intranets and whether or not they've helped people access user- and non-user-generated content more easily.

"I haven't been to this airport before Mr. Hare, have you?"

If there's one thing I will take away from the J. Boye 2009 conference in Aarhus, it's the benefit of reading a bus timetable properly.

Having confused destination and starting point, I have just been driven at high speed to Billund airport to catch my flight home. Hearing the above words spoken by a taxi driver normally wouldn't instill confidence, but as his satnav indicates we're only five minutes away, I'm feeling a deal more relaxed than 45 minutes earlier. Then I was standing outside the Radisson Hotel wondering where my bus was. Closer inspection of the timetable revealed I had planned my journey around the incoming schedule instead of the outgoing. The bus I needed had departed an hour earlier.

(The loathed cliché "the devil is in the details" reminds me of an appropriate Danish swearword, one of a few words of the language I picked up in the '90s in several visits for parties and the '95 MidtFyn rock festival, the others being "jordbaer", "kartofler" and "nej ikke er der". Now when I travel to the country, I am confident I will not starve and I can direct people to urinate elsewhere – which is especially useful when camping at MidtFyn.)

None of this can detract from what has been a wonderful couple of days. I've attended slick conferences and professional conferences, but this is by far the friendliest conference I've been to. Janus Boye walks quietly around the sports hall venue, nodding and smiling at everyone, seemingly greeting everyone by their first name and generally creating the sense that he's throwing nothing more than a party to which he just happens to have invited several hundred leading web thought leaders and practitioners. Oh, and me.

I'll post reviews and reflections from the conference over the next few days.

"Carry On Up The Network" - Best Network Event Ever?

The publicity for last night's London Area Communicators' Group October Meetup was intriguing: based around social networking, it would take place in Clerkenwell Theatre and feature a group of actors. Unsurprisingly given such novelty, it filled up quickly.



Arriving early after an energising stroll up from the Thames, I was greeted warmly at the door and asked to complete a profile which I taped up on the wall. After saying hello to some familiar faces, I filled my plate and glass (several times each) ready for the show. There seemed to be a lot of new faces and it wasn't just because I'd missed the social events over the summer and the most recent meetup. Moving the group to LinkedIn seems to have increased its visibility.



Presented by London Area Communicators' Group, the evening was a collaboration between The Big Wheel Theatre Company who performed songs and sketches and Jason Buck who ran a social media/enterprise/web 2.0 workshop.



After several introductory sketches and songs with a social media theme, we moved upstairs, passing through offices where employees were engaged in amusing scenarios, for the workshop section.

Jason gave a brief introduction then we were asked to consider the different attitudes to social media tools which might be displayed by four archetypal employees of a fictional company, as exemplified by the characters associated with Kenneth Williams, Joan Sims, Barbara Windsor and Sid James.

Following the "Carry On..." theme, we were encouraged to cram as many innuendoes as possible into our conversation, something for which I am proud to report our group - "Big End - we give it to you straight up" - won special recognition.



After the workshop, we returned to the ground floor where we were greeted with champagne served by a lady on stilts, which I can confidently state is a first in my experience. There were more songs and a chance to quickly discuss how much we'd enjoyed the evening before departing into the night in the direction of Kings Cross station.



Thanks to Jason Buck, The Big Wheel Theatre Company and Matt O'Neill for organising a great evening.

Intranetters: Transport for London and London Underground

Two excellent presentations at yesterday's Intranetters event: Rod McLean of London Underground spoke about the challenges he's faced and what he's achieved with LU's intranet since joining in January, while Brian Dobson of Transport For London showed a slightly more mature product in TFL's "Source".

Arriving five minutes into Rod's introduction I noticed a lot of new faces. I considered blaming the tube but guessed someone might already have done that gag - and as Rod pointed out, it would be easy to find out whether I was telling the truth from LU's real time update system.

London Underground

First up Rod McLean talked about the work he'd done on London Underground's intranet since joining in January.


The intranet had grown through the use of Frontpage with little organisation or governance. Rod's initial audit resulted in the deletion of over 50% of the existing content (with surprisingly little protest), amounting to some 6GB in volume (check Rod's presentation in the attachments section for a full breakdown). Rod spoke of using Webtrends, Google Search Appliance and PowerMapper to get a sense of "what's out there", but said they had to write their own tool to find out what was on the servers.

As an example of the remaining work, Rod points out a 496 page PDF titled "Jargon Buster" which he notes is a prime candidate for a wiki.

The biggest problem, says Rod moving on to the demonstration, is navigation which he demonstrates by pointing to the tabs across the top of the screen which open different applications, all in new windows. The breadcrumb bar provides isn't as effective at orientating users as it should be and sites are intensely cross-linked, which compounds the problem.

None of this seems to have dulled Rod's enthusiasm for the job ahead. Instead you get a sense of pragmatism at work, dealing with the problems you can in a logical order without becoming overwhelmed by the size of the task.

Transport For London

Brian Dobson has been working on TFL's intranet, Source, since 2005.


Source's navigation is more mature, dispensing with the organisational hierarchy navigation still favoured by LU for more user-orientated titles relating to people's work and needs as employees.

Source's choice of imagery is based on people, London and travel rather than specific transport systems, so there are no pictures of trains or buses, which gives Source a slightly more human face.

Brian says every employee visits Source, though he experiments to engage people interactively with forums have disappointed, most lapsing into "whingeing".

An interesting warning for expertise location tools: "Don't ask people to put in their own expertise: you'll end up with 500 web developers..!"

Brian notes the challenges he still faces, including replacing lots of PDF forms which are printed out and filled in.

Thanks to Rod for organising the visit and to both Brian and Rod for enjoyable demonstrations. Check the Intranetters community for news of forthcoming visits.

Bookmap: Everything is Miscellaneous by David Weinberger

I've just finished David Weinberger's Everything is Miscellaneous. From the opening story about the prototype shop stationer Staples uses to design more effective experiences for shoppers to the final coda about the lack of structure in an ephemera shop, Weinberger tells thoughtful stories to outline his ideas, most of which I hadn't heard before.

Weinberger's point is that multiple viewpoints result in multiple categorisation systems, all of which are equally valid from their own point of view. He talks about the shortcomings of attempts to categorise using Linnaean classification and the Dewey Decimal system as examples, and about the three orders of organisation: of physical objects, ideas and metadata, and the relationships between them.

I'm not blowing the final conclusion, but there are three paragraphs on the final page which seem to me to sum up the power of social computing perfectly:

"It's not who is right and who is wrong. It's how different points of view are negotiated, given context, and embodied with passion and interest. Individuals thinking out loud now have weight, and authority and expertise are losing their gravity.

It's not whom you report to and who reports to you or how you filter someone else's experience. It's how messily you are connected and how thick with meaning are the links.

It's not what you know, and it's not even who you know. It's how much knowledge you give away. Hoarding knowledge diminishes your power because it diminishes your presence."

"What's my motivation?"

No sooner had I composed yesterday's post when David Gurteen tweeted this TED talk in which Dan Pink talks how rewards narrow focus and restrict possibilities in creative tasks:



Dan quotes research by Dr. Bernd Irlenbusch of the London School of Economics: "We find that financial incentives... can result in a negative impact on overall performance."

Engagement "...derives from self direction", autonomy, mastery and purpose:

1. autonomy - the urge to direct our own lives
2. mastery - the desire to get better and better at something
3. purpose - the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves

As Dan points out "...too many organisations are making decisions about talent and people assumptions which are outdated, unexamined and rooted more in folklore than in science."

Now if Dan would just close his talk by telling us the incentives which applied to his law degree...