Category Archives: social media

I wrote a book about governance: ‘Digital success or digital disaster?’

Posted on May 11, 2015 | Leave a comment

Book cover - Digital success or digital disastersWhen an intranet loses its usefulness over time, and people become disengaged and end up working around it rather than through it, I often find that the strategy and governance have been neglected.

Even a strong and appropriate strategy will founder if the governance isn’t in place to execute it.

I see governance as the foundation of a great intranet, and by ‘great’ I mean an intranet that is useful, useable, and supports the organisation’s goals and people’s needs.

I often blog about intranet governance, but my brand new book offers a lot more than I could ever drip-feed via short posts.  Writing a book has helped crystallise my thinking around governance, and delve deep into my past experience as an intranet manager, and as a consultant.

Take a look at my book now – it’s called ‘Digital success or digital disaster?’ and I mean for it to be relevant to intranets, collaboration, digital workplace and mobile workspace governance, while focussing on intranets.

I’m so pleased to have it published through Intranätverk, it’s been great to work with Kristian Norling and his team.  Seeing the final book on my tablet has made the months of writing all worth the effort.  I’m thrilled to be able to offer you my experience, guidance, and tips and hope you’ll consider my book a toolkit to better governance and a better intranet.

Please take a look at what the book offers you and your organisation – this is a ‘business book’ that should help organisations of every size, but I also hope it’s of interest to individual practitioners and ‘lone intranet managers’. I think this book can support you.

* Digital success or digital disaster? – Book available now.

* Follow me on – let me know what you think!

Leave a comment

Posted in application, benchmark, benefit, best practice, beta testing, blog, career, collaboration, communication, community, content management, digital success or digital disaster, digital workplace, engagement, governance, help, homepage, intranet, mark morrell ltd, mobile, mybook, navigation, news, Office 365, plan, podcast, publishing, research, , search, SharePoint, social media, standards, strategy, training, usability, user testing, value, web accessibility, wiki

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Turn company jargon into a knowledge gold mine

Posted on June 17, 2014 | 1 comment

I have worked with many clients to improve their intranets.  I find that each client has its own language and specific terms that are known by more general terms with intranet professionals.

This can be an abbreviation, acronym, or term used within parts or the whole organisation.  While it may help conversations online within an organisation it can often be a barrier to other people not familiar with these terms.

I call this jargon.  The risk is people don’t ask every time they hear company jargon and take an educated guess what it actually means.  Sometimes this is right and helps build up future understanding but many other times it will slow progress or even cause mistakes to happen.

The more jargon used, the harder it is to understand what is meant, and can lead to projects overrunning, costing more, or having a poorer outcome than expected.  Some of these costs will show through to the bottom line.

What I don’t understand is why more organisations don’t recognise this and do something about it.  Creating a corporate wiki that is open to every employee to create and edit is a quick, cheap and easy way to turn company jargon into a goldmine of knowledge.

Publishing all the jargon – acronyms, shortcuts, abbreviations – as items in a corporate wiki helps people to understand more easily and quickly what they are.  It also helps to prevent mistakes being made and time wasted through misunderstandings.

It will also be a wonderful tool for any newbies being inducted into the organisation’s approach, culture and ways or working.

Why not turn all that company jargon into a knowledge goldmine and create a wiki that can contain them for every employee to view, add or edit to?

 

1 Comment

Posted in best practice, collaboration, community, engagement, help, intranet, social media, value, wiki

Tagged , , , , ,

Improve collaboration to increase employee engagement

Posted on June 3, 2014 | Leave a comment

This week I will be running a workshop on mobile collaboration at the World Class Mobile and Social-Enabled Enterprises event on 5 and 6 June in Frankfurt, Germany.  While I will be focusing on how to make it easier to collaborate while mobile, this post covers the wider area of collaborating online.  Most importantly how it can increase employee engagement and how that benefits an organisation.

Many people are now very savvy about how they use the internet to share knowledge, build up contacts, help solve a problem.  This especially can apply to new recruits who choose your organisation to work for.

There are four factors you need to consider when improving how people collaborate online that can increase employee engagement:

  • Easy to use tools: remove any barrier that may prevent people using these tools.  If there is one, people tend to use it as a reason not to use it!
  • Improve the culture: make it easy for people to share problems and want to share their knowledge and be recognised for doing this.
  • Change how people work: empower people and allow them to collaborate when they need to – this means considering mobile and remote working rather than always working at one place.
  • The bottom line: be able to measure the benefits to your organisation – increased sales, more productivity, higher customer service.

My first-hand experience at BT and from working with clients is you can increase employee engagement because people want to work for an organisation that values collaboration.  It is your approach which is critical!

You can out more information on how to improve collaboration to increase employee engagement to help you

Leave a comment

Posted in benefit, collaboration, engagement, intranet, social media, usability, value

Tagged , , , , ,

Mobile collaborating: easier said than done!

Posted on May 28, 2014 | Leave a comment

In one week I will be participating at the World Class Mobile and Social-Enabled Enterprises event on 5 and 6 June in Frankfurt, Germany.

If you are thinking of coming to one of the best mobile events in 2014 please use this code WCMSSPEAKYOURLASTNAME in the special requirements section on the registration form.

I will be running a workshop on mobile collaboration.  I intend to cover the barriers you can face that can prevent people being able to easily collaborate whenever they need to.

I will also show how you can either prevent these barriers or take action to overcome them and still succeed with mobile collaboration.

I hope you will join me!

 

Leave a comment

Posted in benefit, best practice, collaboration, digital workplace, engagement, governance, intranet, mobile, social media

Tagged , , , , , , , ,

Strengthen employee engagement while working remotely

Posted on January 13, 2014 | 2 comments

Happy New Year to you!  I hope you had a relaxing break and have recharged your batteries for 2014.

I was recently asked by Simply Communicate to follow up my 2014 predictions with one for internal communications.  Here it is:

Organisations increasingly face the challenge of how to strengthen employee engagement while their workforce increasingly work from remote locations or while mobile. There is a great opportunity for internal communications to take a leading role with developing a plan that addresses these challenges with greater use of communications channels.

What is different now from previous years is the range of tools and know-how which can be used to successfully have engaged and mobile employees. The key to this will be the rich experience employees will have online as they are able to read communications when they need to, where they need to, and be able to share, feedback, rate the value of the messages with other people who share a similar interest.

An example of this could be combining collaboration tools with traditional online communication channels will help provide that rich experience so a key company announcement video, CEO blog post and detailed background information available is strengthened by a discussion forum managed by internal comms to continue the conversation with quick polls on the awareness and understanding of key messages.

It is how it is implemented and how it is managed within a wider governance framework will help decide how successful it will be. Good luck with whatever you do in 2014!

Read about more 2014 internal communication predictions from simple communicate.

2 Comments

Posted in blog, collaboration, communication, community, engagement, mobile, podcast, social media, value, wiki

Tagged , , , , , , ,

Valuing information tip 3: how to manage collaborative content

Posted on October 7, 2013 | Leave a comment

In this series of posts ‘Showing the value of your information’ I help you with tips and advice.  In my last post I covered  how to make sure your accredited content is up to date so people using it can rely on its value.  I now want to cover collaborative content in this post.

collaborative content

Collaborative content can be owned by everyone, an individual or community.  It can be an opinion expressed in a discussion forum or blog post.  It offers a personal view which may be right or wrong and may change frequently.  Other people can support and build on that view or challenge and change it.

Collaborative content is less stringently managed because it needs lower levels of trust.  Many of your publishing standards are optional for collaborative content e.g. no review date or security classification normally needed. However what you do need to see is the:

  • Name of contributor to a discussion thread
  • Name of blog owner
  • Name of person making a comment on blog post
  • Date (and time) when comments were made on discussion thread
  • Feedback link to raise issues with discussion forum owner e.g. report abuse

how to show its value

This is not so easy to manage!  Normally comments made in discussion threads or to blog posts on the internet are managed by the amount of continuing interest shown by the large number of people updating it.  The content remains on the internet but if fewer people use it, it won’t appear in the top search results or be prominent in discussion forums, unless you dig deep enough to find it.

When a comment in a discussion thread on your intranet is made that type of behaviour can’t be replicated.  Even the largest intranets only have a fraction of the number of users compared with the internet.  A different approach is needed which creates the dilemma I mentioned earlier.

You can remove discussion groups and blog posts if there has been no activity with them after a period of time.  An advance warning of what is planned if no one adds to the discussions can prompt it re-energising.  But if it doesn’t do this what should you do?

If the content can no longer be found then people don’t get distracted by out of date information when trying to share their views or solve a problem raised by someone else.  However it may be that nugget of wisdom is buried within a discussion thread and lost forever because it can’t be found.

A strong governance framework can help you to decide what content to keep, remove, or delete and who is responsible for making those decisions.

Leave a comment

Posted in blog, collaboration, governance, intranet, social media, standards, value, wiki

Tagged , , , , , , ,

Showing the value of your information

Posted on September 9, 2013 | 2 comments

I want to help you to show to people using your information how valuable it is.  Information should be something that can be used to help you with your work and be useful to you.

What is it you can do for people to realise your content is of value, it is useful, reliable, and authoritative?  What pitfalls should you avoid so people avoid your information!

It always surprises me when I see other intranets and digital workplaces how poor the management of their information is shown to people who need to use it.  Most of this is down to poor governance but there are other factors that come into play and show people the content is not valued.

There are also good examples of best practice shown with other intranets and digital workplaces which should be shared and adopted more widely.

As people use an increasing variety of ways to find and use information e.g. laptop, tables, smartphone, and the type of information grows e.g  company policy, news article, blog post or discussion thread comment they still need answers to some basic questions:

  1. Why should I use this information?
  2. How can I rely on it for my work?
  3. Who can help me further?
  4. Can it help others?
  5. Will it change in future?

In future posts I will give you tips on what to do/not to do to help you to show how valuable your information is to people who want to use it.  A lot of these will be very simple and obvious steps you should take.

Please leave me a comment with any good examples or gripes you have over problems you experience with information.  I am not the font of all knowledge on this subject and would love to help you to help others. :)

 

2 Comments

Posted in best practice, blog, collaboration, content management, digital workplace, governance, intranet, mobile, news, publishing, social media, standards, usability, user testing, value

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,