Why SharePoint 2010 needs to have a good mobile user experience
May 21, 2012 at 8:46 am | Posted in benefit, communication, digital workplace, governance, intranet, mobile, news, SharePoint 2010, standards, strategy, value | 1 CommentTags: benefit, communication, digital workplace, governance, intranet, sharepoint 2010, standards, strategy, value
Why is SharePoint 2010 so widely used? I believe it is because it offers for the first time one technical solution that meets many business needs rather than just one.
If you want to improve knowledge sharing you will have many tools to consider. Again if you need to manage your documents you will have a wide choice of vendors. But if your business has more than one need or can see how solving one will create other requirements then a solution like SharePoint 2010 comes become more attractive to consider.
What if your organisation needs employees to use your intranet while away from their place of work? There are huge savings in office costs and increases in productivity if employees can use the intranet to help them with their work while they are mobile.
Before we can consider if SharePoint 2010 can help meet these needs and provide these benefits there are other important steps to take first.
Mobile strategy
Why is your organisation considering mobile access to your intranet? You need to develop a strategy aligned to your overall business strategy that sets out how providing this need will help to improve the performance. Without a clear, agreed, mobile strategy in place there is little chance of creating a successful business case for a solution that can help employees. You need to research which content and tools are most needed while employees are mobile.
Mobile champion
Who should be responsible for sponsoring the implementation of your mobile strategy? You need to find a senior representative who will champion this or, better still, a board or steering group of senior representatives from business functions across your organisation. Make sure the role is clear, and you have the authority to make the decisions needed, supported by funding.
Mobile audience
Who needs to use a mobile device for their work? You need to be clear which employees will benefit from having a mobile device. It probably will not be everyone. Even if it is, you will have to prioritise who has the greatest need. Factors like the number of employees involved, time spent away from their place of work, what contribution they can make, will help decide the greatest need.
Mobile governance
As well as having a champion for the use of mobile devices your governance framework needs to include the standards for owners of content and tools to follow so mobile devices can be used by employees. Roles and responsibilities need to include meeting the needs of mobile users for content and tool owners. The content and tools must not be a complete duplication of what exists already.
Mobile devices
Will you let employees bring their own devices to work or will you provide your own? That decision is critical and will depend on your organisation’s corporate values, type of employees, security (more below on this), funding and speed of adoption. Once that decision is made you can then focus on what devices your organisation provides or you recommend employees have that offer the best experience for what they need to do while mobile.
Mobile security
How can you be sure the right people only are using your intranet? It is vital you have a representative from your Legal team involved as well as from IT. You need to find the right balance of secure but easy access. It is no good if it takes ages to authenticate who you are before employee can access your intranet. But you do need some intelligent software working in the background to ensure you know who is accessing content with a mobile device.
Mobile platform
As I said at the beginning most organisations are either considering using SharePoint 2010 or are in various stages of rolling out to meet their needs. One of these is increasingly the need to provide content and tools that is needed by employees while mobile.
The problem with SharePoint 2010 is the ‘out of the box’ experience can be a bit underwhelming. It is a text only version which most mobile users of internet sites will feel is like going back in time. It may be improved by the next release of SharePoint but can your organisation afford to wait that long?
Digital Workplace: work anywhere, anytime, with anything
February 27, 2012 at 9:44 am | Posted in benefit, best practice, collaboration, digital workplace, engagement, governance, intranet, standards, strategy, usability, value | 2 CommentsTags: benefit, best practice, collaboration, digital workplace, engagement, governance, intranet, Mark Morrell, standards, strategy, usability, value
I will be at the IntraTeam 2012 conference in Copenhagen this week presenting on 5 ‘Must Have’ Principles for a Great Digital Workplace and running a workshop on How to Build the Right Governance Model for the Digital Workplace. For Twitter users follow #IEC12.
The digital workplace is a phrase that I have written about before and is becoming more frequently used for intranets that are developing beyond being a traditional communications tool. For me a digital workplace can include:
- employees working from any location (or mobile) as their place of work
- IT infrastructure providing the same or similar experience wherever someone uses the digital workplace
- employees collaborating, searching, and completing tasks as well as reading the latest news
- employees choosing how to do ‘things’ – RSS, mobile, etc. – that help them
- organisations measuring the benefits and encouraging employees to use the digital workplace
I define a digital workplace as ‘work is what you do, not where you go to’. To have a successful digital workplace it is vital organisations have the right strategy, culture, environment and infrastructure to exploit the benefits fully. It needs to become the natural way of working so employees are more effective and productive and your organisation is more efficient and successful.
Find out how five principles can help you to work in a digital workplace, how to use my experience to help you and how to contact me for further help.
Have the right SharePoint 2010 governance
February 22, 2012 at 9:24 am | Posted in best practice, collaboration, engagement, governance, intranet, plan, SharePoint 2010, standards, training, value | 2 CommentsTags: best practice, engagement, governance, intranet, sharepoint 2010, standards, strategy, training, value
Based on my experience and knowledge gained when I was the BT Intranet manager and helping other organisations implement many SharePoint 2010 features I can help you too using my checklist.
SharePoint 2010 may be “the best sweetie shop in town” for all its range of features for people to use but the need for effective governance raises for intranet professionals a different set of challenges. The strategy for SharePoint 2010 governance has to be very different to other publishing or collaborative tools.
I believe there are three approaches which can give your organisation the right governance it needs with SharePoint 2010. You don’t have to use just one. You can combine some of each to find the right blend for your organisation. What works best for you will depend on a number of different factors. Among them:
- Restricting use – stop some features from being used
- Encouraging best practice – guidance and training
- Preventing problems – check content before it is published
Each of these approaches can support your governance strategy for SharePoint 2010. The key is to understand what you need to use SharePoint 2010 for.
Find out how to build SharePoint 2010 governance and how to use my experience to help you.
The SharePoint 2010 checklist for everything you need
February 16, 2012 at 4:52 pm | Posted in collaboration, engagement, governance, intranet, mark morrell ltd, SharePoint 2010 | 3 CommentsTags: best practice, collaboration, engagement, governance, sharepoint 2010
If you are deploying SharePoint 2010, you have probably considered the technical aspects, how it will support workflows, document management and sales for example; all key elements to drive the business. But have you considered how content will be migrated, accessed, maintained, enhanced and improved in the platform, while encouraging collaboration?
I have combined my strategic thinking with implementation skills and first-hand experience of implementing SharePoint 2010 to build the definitive checklist. It gives you everything you need to check with and you can contact me for more help.
This SharePoint 2010 checklist will encourage adoption and best practice, helping business’ information compliance and security goals are met. It has everything you need to check you have an effective content strategy for SharePoint.
It will help if you have some form of intranet governance framework – strategy, plan, roles and responsibilities, standards, etc. – in place first. But don’t worry if you don’t or you want to improve it.
For more information on SharePoint 2010:
How to gain the full benefits of SharePoint 2010
How to develop a SharePoint 2010 strategy
How to build the right governance model for the digital workplace
January 17, 2012 at 11:57 am | Posted in digital workplace, governance, standards, strategy | 3 CommentsTags: digital workplace, governance, standards, strategy
The digital workplace is becoming a higher priority to more organisations in 2012. We have Jane McConnell’s Digital Workplace Trends 2012 report that gives you great research on what is happening. The London 2012 Olympics is forcing some of the most traditional organisations like banks to consider the digital workplace as employees work away from Canary Wharf for ‘flexi fortnight’ while the Olympics take place.
But how is the best way to manage this? How do you reduce that ‘dead time’ when people can’t work while out of the office? Why do employees have to go to their office building to work? How can you save your business money?
All these questions mean you need people with experience and strategic thinking to be involved in the strategy for a digital workplace.
I will use my experience with BT and helping other organisations develop digital workplaces to run a workshop at IntraTeam 2012 in Copenhagen on 28 February. This session will cover what is needed to have the right governance model for your digital workplace.
It will give you an overview on what is needed for the digital workplace to be managed so it brings benefits to the organisation, individuals and collectively, everyone. It should mean that ‘things feel better’ and encourage everyone to use the digital workplace.
By the end of the workshop you will understand the right level of governance needed for your organisation, balancing rewards to be gained while avoiding any risks.
Areas to be covered include:
- Ownership – who is responsible for developing the strategy, implementing the digital workplace and ongoing management of it?
- Consistency – what is the appropriate level of governance across your digital workplace?
- Standards – what are needed for a digital workplace?
- Integrity – do people have confidence when using information and tools in the digital workplace?
- What are the next steps you need to make?
I hope you will join me.
Digital Workplace Trends 2012 report
January 11, 2012 at 10:16 am | Posted in benchmark, best practice, collaboration, digital workplace, engagement, governance, intranet, research | 2 CommentsTags: benchmark, best practice, collaboration, digital workplace, engagement, governance, intranet, research
If you are going to spend any of your own or your organisation’s hard earned cash this year then it will be difficult to find a better reason for spending it than on Jane McConnell’s excellent Digital Workplace Trends 2012 report. It is packed with great research, trends and insights on intranets and the digital workplace that will help you focus on what need your top priorities in 2012. It is impossible to do the report justice by covering it in any depth in a blog post so I’ll pick out three key findings that interested me most.
1. The intranet or digital workplace is the ‘way of working’ in the organisation.
Jane says “the essential place for accessing all or most of what people need to work” is the digital workplace for employees. As I have been saying during 2011 ‘work is what you do, not where you go to’ and recommended how you can achieve this with my digital workplace principles. This is a big ‘win-win’ for organisations saving costs and employees more engaged and a priority for 2012.
2. Internal social collaboration has become well-established
Jane says “social collaboration is well-established at enterprise-wide level or within some parts of the organisation”. It is good to see organisations accepting the benefits will come from this approach. I have said that engaged people who are able to communicate and collaborate more easily with other employees using these tools will prosper with the right culture and governance.
3. A fully functioning, high-level digital board making decisions
Jane says “the digital boards makes decisions for both internal and external digital channels ranging from the intranet to external web sites, and include collaborating and social networking”. This is great to hear. At last more intranets and digital workplaces AND the people who manage them are being recognised by their organisations and taken more seriously. The digital workplace strategy for how they are managed is critical.
Very few organisations achieve all three criteria so for most it is an aspiration which can be the focus for their improvement priorities in 2012 ready for the Digital Workplace Trends 2013 survey.
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