Category Archives: digital success or digital disaster

The right intranet strategy in 6 steps

Posted on February 29, 2016 | 2 comments

In my first post in this series ‘What are the benefits of good governance?’ I said that intranets are now at a jumping off point to become digital workplaces. With an increasingly complex set of information, collaboration tools and applications developing your intranet, setting your strategy in the right direction is critical. Your governance framework needs to support this strategy and manage everything in your intranet.

1. Understanding

You need to develop a clear strategy that will set the direction and pace of improvement for your intranet. Firstly, you need to have a good understanding of what type of organisation you work in and where it is going. Once you know and understand the strategy of your organisation, you will be able to set the right direction for your intranet, ensuring that it supports the organisation’s strategic priorities.

2. Alignment

If you want your intranet to be relevant and valued, this must happen. It must also align with other strategies for business areas and functions that may affect your strategy e.g. IT and Communications. The strategy will set out the scope it covers and help you to develop the right governance framework you need for the intranet.

3. Governance

The strategy also needs to show that governance on a day-to-day basis will be at the heart of your plans, to help keep your strategy on course and in the right direction. It will be the firm foundation for you to build your improvements needed for the intranet to meet your organisation’s needs in the future.

4. Priorities

You can group the activities needed around the quick wins you can gain in the short term; the bigger achievements in the medium term that may take more resources as well as time to meet; with strategic benefits you can deliver in the longer term. Be realistic about the amount of benefits you can deliver so you do not raise expectations too high. You also need to be clear how you will measure these benefits to demonstrate the changes. This is critical to your integrity with stakeholders’ views and opinions on you and your intranet.

5. Understanding

You need to aim for a strategy that ts with your organisation’s values and purpose, not just its priorities. It is no good trying to get everyone to run before walking. You need to understand what the intranet needs most and how you can deliver that. Getting that right makes it much easier to apply the best governance that is most appropriate and will help.

6. Communication

Lastly, your stakeholders have to agree and adopt your strategy. To increase your chance of success, make sure you present your strategy in a way they can easily understand. Your approach should be to invest as much time connecting with your stakeholders as aligning your strategy with their plans and policies. Follow this approach and you will be more successful in gaining approval for your strategy and requests for funding with business cases.

Book cover - Digital success or digital disasters If you can’t wait for my next post, you can find out now about how to develop the right governance framework. For practical best-practice examples try my book ‘Digital success or digital disaster?‘. Read the introductory chapter to find out more.

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Posted in digital success or digital disaster, digital workplace, governance, intranet, strategy

Tagged Digital success or digital disaster, digital workplace, governance, intranet, strategy

What are the benefits of good governance?

Posted on February 1, 2016 | 1 comment

This is the first post in a series of posts helpng you to find out what the benefits of good governance.

Intranets are now at a jumping off point to become digital workplaces. Organisations are no longer just talking about ‘digital’. They are now starting to take steps, sometimes slowly and tentatively, towards transforming their online content and apps into something that is better coordinated. People are connecting better now with their digital workplace or intranet whenever and wherever they need to be. This is helping them to be more productive and effective at work.

While this is great news for you, there is also pressure to make the right decisions. You need to choose the right direction and invest in the right technologies, skills, and resources. This could be called your ‘once in a career’ opportunity to turn all your long-held dreams into the digital reality you have wished for. It can also place a great amount of responsibility on you to get it right.

So, what do you need to do? How can you turn this into the proudest moment in your career rather an underwhelming disappointment? For your intranet to transform successfully into that wider digital workplace where people can collaborate, have mobile access and apps on demand, you need to consider what steps to take.

In my next post I will start to explain how a strategy supported by governance will give you the strong foundation you need to improve your intranet. The strategy for the intranet will set the direction to help people to be more productive and effective with their work. Your governance framework will keep you moving in the direction you have set for your strategy. It will support it by giving people the consistency they require.

Combined, these will encourage people to use the intranet more. They will be confident with the integrity of the content and applications that help them. To achieve this, your intranet needs to become (or remain) a critical business tool that supports your organisation’s key priorities. It has to benefit the people who access it for their work whenever and wherever they need to.

Book cover - Digital success or digital disasters If you can’t wait for my next post, you can find out now about how to develop the right strategy and governance framework. For practical best-practice examples try my book ‘Digital success or digital disaster?‘. Read the introductory chapter to find out more.

A license to share the ebook with publishers across your organisation is available.

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Posted in benefit, digital success or digital disaster, digital workplace, governance, intranet, strategy

Tagged digital workplace, governance, intranet, strategy

How to make a great start to 2016!

Posted on January 4, 2016 | Leave a comment

The start of a new year gives you the chance to make a fresh approach. One area you may consider is improving how you manage your intranet, digital workplace, collaboration tool or site.

Have you a clear strategy that is aligned with other business area or function strategies? Is it supported by a strong governance framework? Most importantly, do people have a consistently good experience?

I have found having these helps people to be more productive and effective. A consistently good overall experience helps achieve these benefits. People need this every time they go online. Whatever they want to do, they need to be able to rely on it. It needs to give them confidence that it will always meet their requirements.

This benefits their organisation too. People use it more frequently. They are confident they can easily find what they need. They know they can rely on the integrity of the information and applications. Most importantly, it will help them with their work. Organisations recognise it supports their business requirements. They are viewed as valuable, even business critical, in achieving their strategic goals.

How do you achieve this consistently good experience? Is it using a publishing technology? Is it the visual design? Is it the access people have? It may well be that some or all of these do contribute to this.

However, having a clear strategy aligned with your organisation’s strategy, supported by a strong governance framework definitely helps.

Book cover - Digital success or digital disasters Based on 20 years experience, I have written for you ‘Digital success or digital failure?‘. It is a practical, experience-based approach to growing and managing a successful intranet, digital workplace, collaboration tool or site.

Every approach is based on my experience with many practical examples, strategic guidance and quick tips to help you plan or turnaround an unloved intranet, digital workplace, collaboration tool or site.

Buy a copy of my book and keep it by your side so you can refer to it whenever and wherever you need to!

What is the right governance for a digital workplace?

Posted on December 14, 2015 | Leave a comment

My recent posts ‘What exactly is a digital workplace?‘ and ‘What is the difference between a digital workplace and an intranet?‘ generated some good discussions on Twitter and LinkedIn. I want to stay with the digital workplace theme for my last post of 2015 and bring in how you manage it.

What is the right governance model for a digital workplace? We know that a digital workplace is different from an intranet, even an advanced intranet, so how does that affect the way it is managed?

Maybe even more importantly is how you manage the transformation from an intranet to a digital workplace so you gain all the benefits and none of the drawbacks as it happens.

Who develops and implements the strategy?

Digital workplace principles need to be put into your own organisational context. A group of senior stakeholders, representing key business areas and functions across the organisation, can steer your digital workplace strategy. This enables a fuller, more complete picture of what is needed, the right direction to set, and who should lead, to be agreed and accepted.

What should everyone expect from a digital workplace?

Everyone should gain from a digital workplace although they will have different expectations depending on their roles and responsibilities. This can vary from being more productive because all the applications and information are now accessible through to finding news and discussions with people who can help you solve work problems online.

Being able to connect whenever and wherever you need to from whatever device you have also reduces stress, avoids delays and improve your quality of working life.

What standards are needed for a digital workplace?

A governance framework is needed with publishing standards forming a key part. Standards are needed for:

Legal requirements: accessibility, personal information available
Business requirements: usability, design, navigation, findability, ownership and information retention
Employee needs: terms and conditions that encourage people to want to work in a digital workplace
Security needs: confidential information protected, permissions model adopted
Technical support: platform functionality, server support, agreed levels of service.

Gaining confidence working in a digital workplace

Anyone who plans to work remotely, especially if they are the first person in that team, wants to have the same or better experience than where they currently work. You gain confidence when the information and tools you need for work are always available to use. You feel confident that your personal information is there for you (and only you) to use still. You don’t feel any discrimination because you are working remotely from your manager, team, customers and other employees.

Only through consistently good experiences like this will it happen.

More information

For more information on how to develop the right strategy or governance framework I offer some great, practical advice, to help you in my book ‘Digital success or digital disaster?‘. You can try it first by reading the introductory chapter to find out more.

What exactly is a digital workplace?

Posted on November 16, 2015 | 3 comments

Recently several people have asked me what exactly is a digital workplace. I start by defining the digital workplace as:

“Work is what you do, not where you go to.”

While the digital workplace will vary depending on each organisation’s size, culture and structure, you will be able to all of these:

Work in any location: At home, in your own or anyone else’s office, on the train, or ideally anywhere that suits you at the time you need to.
Complete tasks work online: Make a room booking, checking a person’s contacts details, searching for information you need, or reading the latest news.
Use any device: Use your laptop, a shared PC, a smartphone or tablet anytime, anywhere.
Share information: Be able to use collaboration tools to help other people.
Solve problems: Ask for help from people you may not know in discussion forums and shared workspaces.
Search: From one place across all the places where information is and you have permission to access.

Of course, how your digital workplace is managed with a governance framework is critical to how good and integrated the experience will be. You can find more here on how to get it right.

I will post next about the difference between an intranet and a digital workplace.

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Posted in collaboration, digital success or digital disaster, digital workplace, governance

Tagged applications, collaboration, Digital success or digital disaster, digital workplace, findability, governance, search

Why this ‘Publisher manifesto’ matters to you

Posted on November 3, 2015 | 2 comments

This year I was able to publish my first book ‘Digital success or digital disaster?’. I depended on a good friend of mine, , who founded Intranätverk, to help my idea to become a reality to help other intranet practitioners benefit from the lessons I had learned from my experience as an intranet manager and consultant.

I wanted my book to be a guide you could check on whenever and wherever you needed to. Being an intranet manager can sometimes be a very lonely place in an organisation I find.

The problem is some major publishers give ‘niche content’ a low priority , make excessive demands e.g. copyright of your own written intellectual property, or extortionate share of the revenue.

If we don’t support independent publishers then many books that could be written to help us about the intranet or digital workplace will not be started because there is no encouragement. That will make all our working lives poorer if we don’t have publishers like Intranätverk.

So, please have a quick look at their ‘Publisher manifesto‘ and when you are next thinking of buying a book about intranets, digital workplaces or related topic, check out their site as well as other bigger names.

Thank you (walks off quietly, stage left exit, after finishing his speech)

2 Comments

Posted in digital success or digital disaster, digital workplace, intranet

Tagged Digital success or digital disaster, digital workplace, intranet

3 steps to manage documents successfully

Posted on October 19, 2015 | 1 comment

Governance doesn’t just cover intranets. It covers wider areas e.g. digital workplace and smaller focused areas e.g. web sites. Recently I helped to improve how a client managed their documents.

There was little guidance to show the best way to use the existing file sharing systems. There was no clear connection between policies that affect how documents are managed and how they were being applied on a day-to-day basis.

There were no examples showing how documents should be managed or help, contact points or places to share a problem or knowledge.

I recommended a governance framework containing consistent, relevant, up-to-date guidance to help people make the right decisions when creating and managing a document. It included:

1 Standards

The standards set out how people behaved when:

Naming a function, project site or document
Creating, updating, sharing, approving, archiving and deleting a document
Setting permissions
Understanding their role and its responsibilities

2 Help

Making the right advice available to reduce the burden on the Document Management System owner by:

Online discussion group, open to everyone to ask questions, share hints and tips, and help solve issues raised.
Frequently Asked Questions: create FAQs to answer the same questions being asked regularly that give the definitive answer that people can refer to and save time.
How to guides: Guidance in the form of ‘How to…’ guide that contain practical hints and tips on using the Document Management System.

3 Training

Support people needing face-to-face training on how to use the Document Management System with further online training that helps to reinforce the changes people need to make.

Book cover - Digital success or digital disasters For more practical best-practice examples of good governance try my new book ‘Digital success or digital disaster?‘. Read the introductory chapter to find out more. A license to share the ebook with publishers across your organisation is available