Tag 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 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

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Posted in best practice, digital success or digital disaster, governance, help, intranet, publishing, standards

Tagged best practice, Digital success or digital disaster, governance, help, publishing, standards, training

Intranet governance book – print edition

Posted on September 21, 2015 | Leave a comment

When I first started as an intranet manager, many years ago, I didn’t know where to find good practices or guidance. Blogs came along that shared people’s experiences and, over time, accepted approaches used. Social media has brought many intranet managers together in a loosely coupled network, which is different to a decade ago when organisations had a vacuum around them, denying external conversation.

This networking is good and valuable, because you don’t always want to search and wade through off-topic pages. Just like in the workplace, you often want to ask someone. Your personal network extends the knowledge available to you, even more so than Google.

But still, people wonder where to start, how to learn about the different ways of approaching intranet management and improvement. There are only so many questions you can ask on LinkedIn and only so many slightly irrelevant blog posts you can tolerate!

When I was an intranet manager, I felt I needed a practical guide to intranets that I could always have by my side to help me. Something that was based on first-hand experience so I could easily learn from it and how it related to my intranet.

It’s here that I trust my book on intranet (and website) governance fills a need; ‘Digital success or digital disaster?’ is now available in print (paperback) for delivery worldwide. When you order the printed book, the ebook is sent to you immediately. So there’s virtually no waiting.

As I’ve written my book from my hands-on experience within large organisations, and from my recent work with a wide variety of companies, I hope ‘Digital success’ will stand the test of time and be a valuable reference for you. It’s 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’.

Following the guidance given in this book, based on best-practice examples, you can make the right decisions more easily. You will be more confident the decision you make will achieve the improvements you want. Make your life easier and your intranet better by keeping this book with you to help lead the way!

Digital success or digital disaster? – Paperback available now.
Follow me on – let me know what you think!

“A practical, systematic, approach to intranet governance. Every intranet manager would find value in going through this with their team.”
Sam Marshall, ClearBox Consulting

Right requirements + right approach = right technology

Posted on September 7, 2015 | Leave a comment

It can be daunting when faced with the chance to improve your intranet or digital workplace by updating or replacing the technology you use.

I had mixed feelings when I was an intranet manager: good that I could make a difference; bad when thinking how I need to make the right decision!

Here are some steps I recommend you take to make sure you have a good outcome.

business requirements

Make sure you have a complete a set of business requirements. The better informed you are on what your organisation will require, the more likely you are to meet their needs.

Check with stakeholders what they need. What are their biggest pain points? What works well and they want more of?

Present the business requirements in a way that helps everyone to understand what is needed. This helps avoid misunderstandings and delays.

Budget

You now have the business requirements. From these you need to build your business case. This needs to show what the improvements will be. More importantly, you need to demonstrate the benefits – how much and how quickly – to be gained.

How much money is available? Is there a time limit for when the money has to be spent? Who needs to approve your business case?

You need to gain approval and understand what the conditions are that you need to achieve.

Working with it

You have the budget and the business requirements now. The next stage is to work with your IT partners to find the best technical solution. It is usual for your priorities to differ from IT.

You may want the best technical solution; IT want a solution that fits with their technical skills and experience. You may want to stagger the changes so people can accept the changes gradually; IT may want a ‘big bang’ approach because they need to reduce their costs supporting existing technologies quickly.

Proper engagement, clear understanding, agreed priorities and roles and responsibilities help to avoid different approaches becoming huge barriers that prevent progress being made.

Only when you have reached this stage can you use the budget and requirements to assess the possible technical solutions that could help.

Testing

You now have agreed which technical solutions you need to investigate further. This leads to the next stage of testing. You need to be shown how each solution can meet your business requirements. The best way is to test it on your own digital environment.

Agree with the provider of the technical solution what you require and for how long. Develop your business requirements into user stories or journeys that replicate typical examples of how people use your intranet.

Have criteria to show the results and understand the differences between each new technical solution. If you are only testing one then compare it with your existing technology you use.

Outcome

You now have assessed the technical solution(s) by testing the business requirements. You have a winner that demonstrates it can improve how people use the intranet or digital workplace.

But can you afford it? The costs may restrict your choice. Maybe the second best solution is far more affordable and best for your organisation? Decide on the solution that will gain you the most benefits.

Next agree how it will be implemented. What is the top priority? Understand timescales.

Most importantly, have a governance framework and information architecture that supports your strategy before you start implementing your new technical solution. Without these success will be more difficult to achieve!

more information

Book cover - Digital success or digital disasters Find out more information from 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.