Intranet-Digital Workplace Trends Survey Open

The Digital Workplace Trends Survey opened June 15th. We did a soft launch that went very well, with over 50 organizations already participating. Next week we will be ramping up. Find out how to take part.

If you participated in 2010 or signed up by email for 2011 and have not received your personalized link by email, be sure to get in touch.

I’d like to thank the volunteer testers and the numerous other people who helped us shape the 2012 in-depth exploration of the Intranet-Digital Workplace.

Among the topics we focus on this year:

• Mobile Strategies & Approaches
• Collaborative & Social Aspects
• Search
• Governance & Management
• Business Value
• Future Scenarios

Stay tuned for more updates as of next week! We invite all practitioners to join the survey and get a free copy of Digital Workplace Trends 2012.

Pilot testers busy on Intranet-Digital Workplace Trends 2012

Pilot testers have been  on the job for a couple of hours. They are testing the up-coming Digital Workplace Trends survey. Very helpful feedback already after less than an hour. Thanks Vera! Eagerly waiting for more.

We will open the survey officially on Monday June 13th. Stay tuned!

Participate!

What is your vision for intranet & digital workplaces in 2015?

This year’s Digital Workplace Trends survey (open in the second part of June) will be taking a look at some future scenarios. Organizations often need to provide goals and plans for 3 to 5 years out. Knowing what other organizations are thinking about can help!

(Sign up for the survey now. Participant requirements here.)

What scenarios would you like to add to this list?

What comments do you have about this list?

Cloudtop – always on, always there
Accessing information from everywhere, and no longer dependent on a single device. Cloud-computing and web services (e.g. service-oriented architecture, software as a service) are making this possible. People are no longer tied to their physical location or devices. They can access the information they need when they need it. Staff, clients and partners can share spaces in the cloud for smarter, faster collaboration.

My Apps – the ultimate user-centric intranet
The overall intranet as we know it today is extinct. Instead, people select what they need from a collection of apps. They define their own mashups. (Mashups combine information from different sources into a single application.) The intranet has become a highly customized collection of apps where people download what they need to do their jobs to their computers, tablets or smartphones.

Smart systems
Decision engines (search engines that use input from the user) and smart systems make the user experience highly relevant. For example, the search results go beyond filtering and actually evaluate and rank the results based on the user’s past behavior.  Another example: the system is aware of when the user last read a policy document and alerts the users the next time they embark on a process where the policy has changed.

On-demand teams and expert networks – corporate crowdsourcing
Teams are formed quickly based on people’s skills, availability, current workload and location. Through real-time access to experts, a team can find and consult experts as their project advances. Presence indicators (including skills and expertise) are integrated into business process applications.

Super search
Advanced search technologies allow searching structured and unstructured information from difference sources and applications across the enterprise. Semantic search, faceted search and search-driven menus give people greater relevance and control over the vast amounts of information inside and outside the enterprise.

Tell me what you would like to investigate via this year’s survey.

This survey is your survey, so please contribute!

Sign up now. Participant requirements here.

Type of workforce and intranet services

I’m often asked  “How can we reach people in the field?” or “How can we extend the reach of our intranet to all employees?” or “Does it really make sense to offer intranet services on a smartphone?”.

This year’s Digital Workplace Trends report will provide guidance on these challenges. After consultation and feedback on this blog and in several LinkedIn groups (NetJMC&Co, WIC, Intranet Professionals) we have settled on 5 types of workforce we will use for this year’s Digital Workplace survey.

We’ll be looking at how organizations serve these types of workforces:

1. Floor / front line / non office-based
Examples: manufacturing, shop floor, sales floor, restaurant
People work on site in a single location, computers are not primary work tools
Probable: access to shared computers/kiosks

2. Frequent travellers
Examples: salesforce, consultants,
Different locations within a working day or week
Probable: individual laptop, tablet, smartphone

3. Field workforce
Examples: field workforce, logistics, transport, service engineers
Almost always on the road, different locations within a working day or week
Probable: dedicated, customized, individual device

4. Desk / corporate workplace
Examples: bank, call center, office staff
Individual computer/laptop belonging to the organization
Computer is primary work tool, available during most of working day

5. Home-based
Examples: Worker based at home most of the time
Individual computer/laptop belonging to the organization
Computer is primary work tool, available during most of working day

Thanks to many of you for your input, specifically Brian, Chuck, Franklin, Greg, Jonathan, Luke, Mike, Petra, Riikka, Roel, Shawn, Sherry and Susan.

Social media: new emerging benefits or concerns?

For this year’s intranet/digital workplace survey, we plan to use the list of benefits and concerns about social media that we’ve used  for the last 3 years. It makes a good benchmark for comparison as mentalities and experiences evolve.

On the other hand, maybe there are some new types of benefits? Or new emerging concerns? The items on the lists below are intended to be general, and we have open questions for more specific responses.

Are you aware of new angles we should include, things that do not fit into one of the items already on the lists below? > Continue reading ‘Social media: new emerging benefits or concerns?’

Workforce demographics: what categories?

As we prepare the final questions for the upcoming Digital Workplace Trends survey, I’m looking for definitions of different types of workforces. The reason is that peoples’ needs from intranets and digital workplaces vary depending on their roles, especially how and where they work.

Three years ago, before mobile emerged as a trend,  we used these 3 categories:

1. Rule-based environment – process-oriented, routines to follow. Examples: airlines, hotels, many service industries,….
2. Knowledge-based environment – non-routine, complex interactions, judgment calls. Examples: healthcare, consultancies, R&D companies,
3. Manufacturing-based environment – Raw materials turned into finished goods. Examples: mining, construction, paper manufacturing, ….

Our analysis around these categories, published in the “Global Intranet Trends for 2009″ report showed some interesting differences. (See the end of this blog post for a summary.)

Today, in 2011/2012, we need a new approach

We need to find a small number of categories that…

• do not use the word “knowledge” for only one category since knowledge is important for all types of workforces.
• take into account the physical mobility of workers (office, field, road)
• are easily, quickly understandable around the world by people who speak different languages and who work in very different organizations (government, corporate, etc.)

> Continue reading ‘Workforce demographics: what categories?’

What's relevant for digital managers today?

The priorities for this year’s Digital Workplace Trends survey show that organizations around the world are at an exciting intersection where fragmentation, social energy and business goals are simultaneously colliding and converging. People are rethinking fundamental principles and management of the intranet and digital workplace.

“Top of the top”: new scope, social, business, search

• 72% of the participants rated “scope of the digital workplace” as a “highly relevant” topic, another 25% rated it “moderately relevant”, leaving only 3% who found it “not or less” relevant.
• This naturally raises the question of the entry point into the digital workplace, and, not surprisingly “start page strategies” is the number 2 topic.
• It also raises lots of governance questions, which are also near the top of priorities.
• Integration of core business processes is a “top of the top”. Looks like intranets are getting serious and becoming essential.
• Several angles around social media are also high priorities: what, how, benefits.
• Search strategies have risen significantly after being fairly low on intranet management radar for a couple of years. Interest in meta data is fairly high with 50% calling it “highly relevant”.

Slide 5 in the slide deck below shows a list of all the topics and the relevance percentages.

Social: “how”, not “whether”

There is strong interest in social media. But only some aspects. People want to know what features are implemented, how they are being used by organizations, and what the benefits are. What’s interesting is there is much less interest in knowing what peoples’ concerns are. In the past, this has always been a topic of great interest. So maybe organizations are settling down and focusing on “how” rather than “whether”.

> Continue reading ‘What's relevant for digital managers today?’

Lead don't manage: think community, think operational

I have just published the current version of “Lead don’t manage your intranet” on SlidesShare. This is the Sydney version. I should call it “The intranet manager, the ultimate community manager”.

The music is missing but if you’ve seen the presentation, or even if you haven’t, you can imagine it. The musical framework is constant; the actual content evolves as do my thoughts and firsthand encounters with leaders in the digital workplace.

The Intranet Spring – a soft revolution

We are in the “intranet spring”. Like some countries around the globe, the intranet world is experiencing a soft revolution. Social media are entering the enterprise and transforming intranets. People are being empowered. Regimes of control are falling. Things will never be like they were before.

It’s like Tim Berners Lee, the inventor of the web,  said when someone asked him years ago “what is web 2.0?” He called the term a “piece of jargon, nobody even knows what it means”. He says his vision of the Web was “all about connecting people in an interactive space”. (See Ars Technica 4 years ago and Wikipedia.)

I believe that is what intranets should be – people connecting in interactive spaces. Intranets lost it years ago when they became controlled, top-down places where management and communication managers published polished messages.

Today, organizations are rediscovering what intranets were intended to be. Today, thanks to the emergence of social media in the workplace, people are empowered to communicate directly and to take some control of their own workplace.

Let’s hope this soft revolution is sustainable.

Governance, 3 fundamentals

1. How you develop your governance is more important than what you actually decide. If the right decision-makers are not involved, it will not work.
2. Governance must be embedded into the way of working. If not, you will always be dependent on exceptional people who somehow make things work. Lose them, you lose it.
3. Strategic principles are more important than strategies. They are the foundation for the rest. Strategies change. Principles last.