Vancouver Convention Centre, venue for the Social Intranet Summit

Top 5 Reasons to Come to the Social Intranet Summit

#1. Top-notch mix of cross-disciplinary intranet experts. Dion Hinchcliffe (Enterprise 2.0 Analyst for CBS, ZDNet, ebizQ) for high-level strategy. Stewart Mader (author of Wikipatterns) for hands-on practical advice. Eric Karjaluoto (author of Speak Human) on the importance of design. More speakers will be announced soon!

#2. Learn how real companies are using social intranets to transform collaboration and knowledge sharing. Hear case studies presented by real organizations, like EA and Oxfam America.

#3. Learn more about SharePoint 2010. SharePoint is loved by some, hated by others. It can be a key part of your social intranet — if you know what you’re doing.

#4. Full-day pre-event workshop for ThoughtFarmer customers. Do you use the ThoughtFarmer solution for your social intranet? Attend a full-day pre-event workshop on Wednesday, October 27th for advanced, hands-on training specifically for ThoughtFarmer customers.

#5. It’s in Vancouver, and Vancouver is awesome. It’s got the highest concentration of coffee shops, sushi bars and graphic designers in the world. And where else can you go sailing, golfing and skiing — all in the same day?

Register now and save $450! Early bird registration ends September 3, 2010.

The firm I spoke with this morning started their intranet journey with us a couple of years ago when they replaced a stale intranet powered by SharePoint 2007. Their SharePoint intranet was a place to store content, a document repository of sorts, but there wasn’t much conversation and it certainly wasn’t a collaborative environment; it was difficult to use and wasn’t providing much value to the company’s project teams.

They evaluated several products and chose ThoughtFarmer to provide staff with an environment where everyone in the organization could contribute, collaborate around projects, and hopefully have their intranet become a knowledge hub for the company.

After the roll-out of ThoughtFarmer, the economy took a nose dive and they lost staff due to lay-offs and a lack of project work. As they lost projects and staff, the professional services firm’s focus on utilization and working billable hours increased. As anyone who’s ever worked as a consultant knows, time is money. Working on billable work is what drives the bottom line in knowledge-worker consultancies.

This shift towards focusing on productivity and staff’s billable utilization had an impact on how the intranet was used. People were not spending as much time with the intranet, not sharing the types of project success stories and communicating with each other on non-related project work, as “no-one wanted to be seen on the intranet.” With all of the activity stream information, status updates, and social visibility features on the intranet, people became concerned that using the tool would be a sign of non-billable work, a sign that they were playing around on the intranet and not doing their “real job.” The ability for their work to be observed and tracked by senior management and executives was scaring employees from using the intranet in the way they’d originally intended. They were afraid to “work in public” on the intranet.

What real work looks like

As a result, news items or team blog posts that were to be posted or interesting content that people wanted to share was now being sent to the intranet coordinator to post to the site, even though everyone had permissions to do so in the “anyone can edit anything” environment they’d created. The reason: the intranet coordinator was seen as a safe person who wouldn’t get in trouble posting content to the site, because that was their job. They were allowed to be on the intranet, after all.

The purpose of their hard times intranet shifted from a collaborative space to a communications space. Official company news items published internally are still read heavily, so too is the CEO’s blog published through the ThoughtFarmer blogging features. “Everyone wants to hear what he has to say,” said my interviewee. But the communications was less of a many-to-many model of Intranet 2.0 and more of a few-to-many broadcast model, a more classic centralized intranet model of communications.

Their business development and sales efforts appear to be working and they are optimistic that their financial recovery is well underway. The future of the intranet will again be more collaborative, as project teams take on new work and again have the challenges of making tacit knowledge explicit and engaging staff geographically distributed across the country and time zones. And we’re happy that while they weren’t able to realize their vision of collaboration during their hard times, the intranet was able to shift its focus and provide value as a communication platform when it was required. It adapted to their business needs and managed to help the company communicate in the way they saw fit.

What’s interesting about all of this publicly viewable work, about the social visibility that intranets like ThoughtFarmer affords, is what it says about the social norms of the workplace and the definitions of what constitutes “real work” and what’s not. And how that changes dramatically when there’s a lot on the line, like in the midst of an economic downturn when jobs are being lost and uncertainty and fear rule.

What opportunities were lost due to people keeping their heads down and hiding from the intranet? What could they have done differently during hard times to better connect people in the organization to stimulate business development efforts? How could forging those connections through the intranet have helped?

I wonder how many other companies struggle with convincing employees that their intranet is a legitimate place to get work done, a credible source of value and productivity within the four walls of the organization. Are the consumer-like design patterns of activity streams and status updates that make social intranets appear like Twitter and Facebook undermining the credibility of the tool, or is there something else at play here?

photo: Bevin Hernandez keynotes at Enterprise 2.0 – credit: Alex Dunne

In a two-part blog post, we’ll take a look at the history of their social intranet our.outreach and then share some of the usage data gathered across the last 18 months on the intranet. We’ll start with how Penn State made the business case and their famous launch and then look at activity on the intranet and what trends have happened over 18 months of organizational change.

Making the Business Case for a New Intranet
Every year Penn State University Outreach hosted the Day of Connection. Staff from across the 1800 person department at Penn State would come together in a day-long conference to listen to keynote speakers, share stories and experiences, and connect with co-workers from the various program areas under the Outreach umbrella: Continuing Education, World Campus/Online Education, Youth Programs, Cooperative Extension, and Penn State Public Broadcasting. The Day of Connection was designed to educate, inspire, and connect Outreach staff, offering a unique opportunity to forge links across a wide-ranging and geographically distributed organization.

It was a special event for participants, many of whom had never met each other before or only heard about each others’ work through meetings, newsletters, emails, and traditional means of communication. But while the Day of Connection left employees feeling energized and engaged, it was limited in its reach: approximately 400 people could participate and it was only one day of the year. And it was costly: travel, facility, and coordination costs were significant to organize the one day event.

Following the January 2008 Day of Connection, Outreach’s Vice President Dr. Craig Weidemann tasked a group of Outreach HR and Internal Communications employees to review the format and goals for the next Day of Connection. The team analyzed results from a 2006 internal communications survey and the follow-up survey for the 2007 Day of Connection. They also reviewed the direct and indirect costs over the past 5 years for the Day of Connection.

One of the key findings from the 2006 survey result showed that employees wanted to use technology to enhance their productivity at work. At the same time, the existing intranet scored low in their evaluation of communication channel effectiveness. On a 4 point scale from 1 = Poor to 4 = Good, here’s how their internal communications efforts stacked up:

• one-on-one meetings with immediate supervisors: 3.21
• all-staff meetings: 2.71
• newsletters: 2.66
• email listserv announcements: 2.53
• intranet: 1.99

My Outreach: the Penn State Outreach intranet prior to January 2009

The team returned to the VP with a proposal to move Day of Connection online via a renewed intranet, aimed at reducing costs and increasing reach and access.

By moving online, Outreach would be able to invite all staff to participate instead of selected Day of Connection participants and experience the benefits of allow employees to connect the other 364 days of the year. Effects would be lasting, coordination costs would be reduced, and other communications initiatives would benefit.

The intranet launch positively addresses many of the challenges of a traditional Day:

From internal document on our.outreach: “A Serendipitous Collision!” – January 28, 2009

Intranet Return on Investment: 365 days of connection

The renewed intranet was sold on the return on investment of turning Day of Connection into an online event. All funds previously allocated to the annual Day would be turned into a many-to-many, collaborative intranet environment where knowledge sharing and connection would become a regular occurrence in Outreach, not just a one day event.
The project got the go-ahead, a new employee was hired to project manage the effort, and the team set out to create the new Outreach intranet.

Defining the Intranet’s Goals

The team crafted goals that were designed to address the previous shortcomings with the Day of Connection as well as take into account the findings of the previous communications research.

“The intranet will engage employees to connect across Outreach with peers, management, and leadership, encouraging collaboration and knowledge sharing. These connections will provide greater service to our learners, our communities, and each other. It will:

From internal document on our.outreach: “A Serendipitous Collision!” – January 28, 2009

Launch of our.outreach

The launch event on January 28, 2009 was the culmination of 7 intense weeks of work by Outreach, including the Christmas holiday break. The our.outreach team launched a multi-pronged marketing campaign throughout the organization, including postcards, posters, technology training sessions, welcome packages, videos, and day-of launch party celebrations. For more details on the remarkable launch campaign, please read Best Enterprise 2.0 Launch Ever? Penn State’s ThoughtFarmer Roll-Out on the ThoughtFarmer blog.

Penn State Outreach’s re-launched intranet, powered by ThoughtFarmer

After the party

As remarkable as the launch of our.outreach was in its scale, scope, and inventiveness, the true success of the intranet could not be measured in one day. January 28, 2009 was the beginning of a new way of communicating, collaborating, and learning at Penn State, one which had never been attempted before. But the real results would be uptake in usage, new connections formed, knowledge sharing, and changed behaviours amongst staff.

In our next article, we’ll look at 18 months of activity on the intranet since the January 2009 launch and share some of the usage statistics that Penn State has gathered, detailing their adoption efforts.

This is the latest of our Intranet Case Studies.

For this post, I thought I’d show it visually with a 90-second demo. See below.