What’s a ThoughtFarmer intranet like in real life? Find out tomorrow when two ThoughtFarmer intranets are featured on Digital Workplace 24. DW24 is a 24-hour live online event that showcases some of the world’s most interesting intranets and digital workplaces. Best of all, it’s free! See ThoughtFarmer at the following times:

Tour 1: Sparky, ThoughtFarmer’s Own Intranet

• When: Tuesday, May 14th, 9am Pacific / 12 noon Eastern / 1700 UK
• Who: Gordon Ross, VP & Partner, ThoughtFarmer
• What: Sparky is the collaboration engine at ThoughtFarmer. It’s a mission-critical intranet with very heavy use: an average of 47 actions per employee, per day.
• More info: Screenshots of Sparky

Tour 2: Connect, URC-CHS’s Intranet

• When: Tuesday, May 14th, 2pm Pacific / 5pm Eastern / 2200 UK
• Who: Claire Coleman, Web Manager, University Research Co.
• What: URC-CHS tackles problems like malaria and HIV. ThoughtFarmer helps their 800 people in 40 countries find the right information at the right time.
• More info: Case study on URC-CHS’s ThoughtFarmer

Register now for Digital Workplace 24 >>

We recently hosted the annual ThoughtFarmer best intranet competition. We received a number of gorgeous, innovative, and collaborative social intranet entries, and we wanted to share the results with you!

If you entered the competition, please make sure you attend — we’ll be doing a live draw for the iPad winner. All entries are eligible.

Our co-founder and VP of Sales & Marketing, Chris McGrath, will share the latest and greatest from ThoughtFarmer intranets around the world.

Industries that we’ll look at include:

• Financial services
• Not for profit
• Legal services
• Engineering
• Design & consulting services.
• And more…

Categories that we’ll look at include:

• Best-looking
• Most Innovative
• Best collaboration

You can see the results from our 2012 Best Intranet competition here. If you can’t make it, we’ll also be sharing a recording after the webinar. Hope to see you there.

Webinar details:

• Date: Wednesday, May 8th, 2013
• Time: 8:30AM Pacific / 11:30AM Eastern / 16:30 UK / 17:30 CET
• Format: 30 minute presentation followed by a 15 minute discussion period.
• Audience: Clients. However, if you are an analyst, an intranet nerd, or you are just interested in seeing more of what ThoughtFarmer has to offer, feel free to join us.

Register Now

Here at ThoughtFarmer, we take the “eat your own dog food” approach to software development (how this icky-sounding metaphor became an industry standard, I’m not sure. I much prefer “drink your own champagne”). This means our company uses our social intranet in every aspect of our work — not just software testing. As early social enterprise adopters, our own intranet, “Sparky”, was recently featured as an intranet example in the Nielsen Norman Group’s (NN/group) report on Intranet Social Features. We thought this would be a good opportunity for you to “take a peak under the hood” and see how the people who design, build, sell, and support ThoughtFarmer actually use their own intranet.

ThoughtFarmer”s social intranet “Sparky” – View of the homepage

Taking a look into Sparky, we find ourselves in a unique position. Gordon Ross, VP of ThoughtFarmer explained in the NN/group report. “We usability test our new features, both recognizing that while we are the authors of it, we’re not perhaps ideally the target users. We have a few clients our size (small) and in our general industry (creative/design oriented). But for the most part, we sell to larger organizations and testing is important to get out of the self-referential developer-oriented ‘works for me’ way of building software.”

Based on being a small-ish company, NN/group was curious just how much content we had created since the intranet’s inception in 2006. As it turns out, quite a lot. In the past seven years, our staff of 30 have made over 10,000 pages, 10,000 documents, and 11,000 comments. This not only makes sure we catch bugs and are committed to the user-experience, but also enables us to get a lot of work done.

We use ThoughtFarmer heavily. In March, for example, Carolien looked at more than 2000 pages and made 260 edits and 41 comments

To illustrate this point — this blog post is currently (as I’m typing) a forum post under the “Ideas for Blog Posts” forum. Once our marketing team has commented on and edited the post, it will move from the idea forum to the editorial calendar. From the editorial calendar, it will be published to our public ThoughtFarmer website.

Another situation where we find the intranet highly useful is writing responses to RFPs. If you’ve been involved in the RFP process, you know that they can be complex, involve a number of contributors, and travel through several stages. By using ThoughtFarmer, our team can collaborate on each requirement, keep a constantly updated main version of the document, and easily access and search past RFP’s for reference.

We use our social intranet to write RFP responses.

Employees reviewing and commenting on an RFP in process

NN/group also questioned how corporate culture plays out in a social intranet — a question we hear often. Many executives are concerned about letting employees loose with social features. Gordon responds to these concerns by explaining, “Our intranet is a valid reflection of the communicative norms that play out in our office everyday. There is no digital dualism in our office. There is only one company that has different modes of expressing our feelings, working together, and being together. Staff that post funny animated gifs to the intranet are just as likely to say something silly in a meeting or crack a joke in a conversation at lunch. Perhaps some of our staff who lack the confidence of speaking in front of a larger group find a voice through the intranet that they might not have otherwise. And those who lack confidence in their writing skills are perhaps still hesitant to write, knowing that the audience for their communication may possess better skills and may be judging.”

As you can see below, the culture in our office results in a lot of foodie discussions, hockey playoff predictions, and historical statue impersonations.

Our intranet has a blog to review lunch restaurants near our office.

A mobile gallery, including posing with the George Vancouver statue.

The archive report shows just how much hockey content we’ve created.

Staff commenting on Gord’s City of Vancouver talk.

Today, Sparky is truly a central hub for all things ThoughtFarmer. Just like with our clients, adoption didn’t happen in a day. Initially, staff thought it was a “cool tool”, but had pre-existing tools they were comfortable using. There were early adopters, lurkers, and laggards. However, as content was migrated, documents were uploaded, and comments were added, it started to become a relevant and useful source of information that drew people in. As with any intranet, there is an evolutionary process. Seven years later, Sparky is a part of our culture, and a necessity to getting work done.

Usage has grown steadily over the years as we find new uses for ThoughtFarmer

Ready to experience ThoughtFarmer social intranet? Get in touch for a personalized demo and free trial!

Using ideas developed by communications scholar Manuel Castells and his work Communication Power, this post introduces how we can understand network power inside of organizations and contemplate its effects.

Watch the webinar recording (55 minutes long) or read the blog post (6000 words):

This blog post is divided into six sections:

I. The Way We Work
II. Politics
III. Power
IV. Networks
V. Communication Power
VI. Power & The Social Intranet

I. The Way We Work

As the description of my blog post and its title implies, I’m interested in exploring the topic of power and its relation to social intranets.

It was a few months ago that, in the midst of a particularly intense professional services engagement for one of my clients, sitting jet lagged and exhausted in a nondescript hotel room with a colleague, that I became increasingly interested and compelled to investigate the topic of power.

In looking at my notebook from that engagement, I found the following end of day notes:

• fear of change
• control
• culture
• power
• the dark side of intranet deployment

I had just run an intranet strategy workshop with middle management stakeholders about the future direction of their intranet project. ThoughtFarmer had been selected as the platform and we were there, part way through the project, to provide professional services, consulting support for the new intranet.

Staff had described in a previous workshop that the new intranet project was to be transformational. 

A direct quote from the meeting notes:

“recap: we have chosen a more transformational approach (instead of the static / status quo approach) where the intranet is more communicative, collaborative, engagement oriented”

They had chosen a direction. Of many possible directions, I might add, of where their intranet could go. This seemed to them, like it seems to many of the organizations that I work with, to be the right way to go.

This was a declarative statement. A statement of intent. A statement of purpose. A departure from the past and the status quo into a bold new future.

In their individual minds and collectively through their public announcement of their intentions, they did not perceive the intranet to be an entirely technical entity, a jumble of standards-based HTML and CSS, a collection of PDF documents, a clever mixture of .NET code and SQL queries, all bound together through a model-view-controller design pattern.

“Communicative, collaborative, engagement-oriented” – these were more than technical attributes or properties of a bundle of code.

These words, these descriptors clearly spoke to a political, a cultural and therefore a deeply personal perception of the techno-social system of engagement that they were about to deploy.

So in our next workshop, we continued this strategic conversation, our investigation into this transformative future state and asked the questions:

What would it mean to transform? What is the potential? 

And following an exercise, out came these 10 themes:

• organizational effectiveness
• celebration & recognition
• accessibility
• innovation & creativity
• participation
• interdivisional collaboration
• transparency
• empowerment
• trust
• ownership

We then asked, “What conditions need to be true in order for these possibilities to happen?”

and we got dozens of quotes like

“culture of learning”

“it’s okay to make mistakes”

“employees demonstrate responsibility”

“willingness to share”

“willingness to ask questions”

“managers walk the talk”

And then as any good consultant grappling with the tricky task of assisting a client get from point A to point B, from the current state to some kind of future state, I asked, what are the barriers in the way of these conditions coming to be? 

That’s where things got really interesting. For the 10 themes, we got 30 barriers.

It’s worth looking at couple of them up close to give you a sense of what they were up against.

• people don’t know what’s permissible
• knowledge is power (why would I share? this usurps my power)
• culture of “risk adversity”
• culture of “control”
• Paternal culture / work style
• Lack of authority to decide
• Lack of trust in employee judgment
• Varying interpretation of what’s acceptable
• Managers ill-equipped to participate
• Knowledge – I don’t know what or how to participate
• Effort – I’ve got my own priorities
• ROI – what’s in it for me
• Fear of retribution, no voice
• Hierarchy; what’s my role, who can I speak to, what am I permitted to say?
• Authority / power trip

And instead of all those words, they perhaps could have simply answered with one word: us.

The way we work.

The way we communicate.

The way we collaborate.

The way we lead, manage, and recognize.

The way we are.

And it was the journey into the darker side of bureaucratic life, literally engaging in the “dark matter” of the organization to use Dan Hill & Bryan Boyer’s expression, that I decided it is about time that we started talking about this. 

For after all, it is against this backdrop that all of the breathless value propositions and utopian visions of a “socially optimized, engaged, digital workplace” are set.

In reality, they are the two sides of the same coin. The Yin and Yang of the modern organization.

Perhaps you’ve visited this place before. Perhaps you live there right now.

And you may notice, no-one really said anything about intranets per se, let alone the so-called social ones. 

Nothing about Active Directory integration.

Nothing about WYSIWIG page editing.

Not a word about activity streams or micro blogging.

Nothing about keywords, tagging, taxonomies, or structured meta-data.

Nothing about commenting, voting, or favouriting.

Nothing about mobile.

Someone did mention SharePoint in the workshop, I will give you that. But it wasn’t good and I daren’t repeat it in mixed company.

Our workshop had intended to surface the question of “WHY?” a social intranet,

What does it mean?

The workshop participants had answered.

And so, we stood at the edge of the social intranet Rubicon – just as Julius Caesar crossed the stream marking the boundary between Italy and Cisalpine Gaul, about to lead his army into a war. A one-way, no-turning back moment, thereby committing us to guaranteed battle, of size and shape yet unknown.

And my metaphorical point is not to claim I was Caesar – far from it, that role was played by the CEO of the organization in this drama – but to point out that the structures, rules, behaviours, and patterns of culture that define the organization - to quote Gareth Morgan, the great organizational theorist – is our social intranet Rubicon.

Once you engage with these forces, there’s no going back.

And the reason for that – these structures, rules, behaviours, and patterns of culture – these “things” – if we can even grant them thing-like status, are entirely personal.

There’s no denying, we’ve done a wonderful job in our our modern organizations of abstracting and then codifying them, quantifying their existence, embodying them in the forms of policies, standards, and business process diagrams, storing them in systems of record, encoding them as fields and rows in relational databases…

But their material qualities don’t interest me (at least not in this talk today) – it is their individual and collective meaning which has been for so long in the background that needs to be foregrounded, brought into focus, blogged about and discussed.

After our mid-level manager intranet strategy workshop we spent some time with the project’s executive steering committee, composed of C-level executives and several key directors.

One of the most vocal members was the Chief HR officer, the person with ultimate accountability on the acquisition, development, and retention of human capital at the organization.

What was their take on this social intranet?

Well, they wanted to ensure that there was

• One, lone contributor to the intranet.
• No-one could leave a comment.
• No-one could edit a page.
• That employee profile pages contained no photographs of staff.
• That Report-to information, the ability to see who manages whom, who reports to whom, was to be disabled.
• And definitely no org chart either.

This was to be a totally closed, totally controlled system.

The contrast with what we had heard in the managers’ workshop couldn’t have been starker.

Our success in the project was not going to be defined as to whether or not we got ThoughtFarmer sync’ing with their Active Directory – but how we made our way through this organizational chasm, separating the present from the future, management from leadership.

And in order to do that, we needed a better an understanding of how organizations work and how they see themselves in the mirror of technologies like ours, than we have today.

I believe, we, intranet professionals of all sorts, we all need to develop a literacy, an understanding of power, of culture, and in particular of how they work in the context of networks if we are going to seek to have any kind of influence or chance of succeeding with our aspirations and visions of a more responsive, humanistic, and resilient organization.

And for goodness sake, we need to stop saying ludicrous things like “We just need to be more social” or grammatically incorrect and ludicrous things like “we need to do social.”

Jump to other sections:
I. The Way We Work
II. Politics
III. Power
IV. Networks
V. Communication Power
VI. Power & The Social Intranet

II.Politics

My social intranet story is intended to underline the simple truth, that organizations are places of divergent interests. 

Where there are divergent, differing interests, there is conflict.

And of course, power.

Deciding how to act, what should be done in light of this fact, is the fundamental question of politics. What should we do? 

My core idea of blog post – and my apologies it’s taken some 10 minutes of reading to get here – is that if we have an improved understanding of power inside of our organizations, how that power flows through the networks inside of our organizations, both embodied through the new-fangled social intranets we’re all so keen about and the traditional invisible interpersonal networks that constitute the social relations of our workplaces, that then and only then can we become more effective in our jobs as intranet managers, communications professionals, HR employees, IT staff, or whomever you represent.

Because there’s enough articles and blog posts about SharePoint web parts, on creating effective IA’s, and on how to evaluate a CMS. Not to diminish the importance or value of any of these tasks – far from it – but the elephant in the room to me when it comes to social intranets is no longer what can be done with the technology, but what should be done?

So it was, that I started my investigation into the topic, by exploring the work of Manuel Castells - one of the most prolific and pre-eminent communications scholars, philosophers, and social theorists of our time.

Photo: Manuel Castells
Image Credit: foto La Jornada Jalisco

In particular, I took a run at Castells’ book Communication Power.

It is a lengthy and detailed attempt to understand “Why, how, and by whom power relationships are constructed and exercised through the management of communication processes, and how these power relationships can be altered by social actors aiming for social change by influencing the public mind.”

Castells continues in his introduction to the 600-page text:

“The analysis presented in this book refers to one specific social structure: the network society, the social structure that characterizes society in the early twenty first century, a social structure constructed around (but not determined by) digital networks of communication.”

Castells’ analysis of The Network Society starts with the specific forms and processes of communication in society, of which the communications processes that flow through our social intranets and content management systems inside of our organizations can be seen, I believe at least, as a primary unit of analysis.

So I want to spend the next part of this talk reviewing the highlights of Castells’ big ideas (of which there are many in his work).

And then do my best to build a bridge from the ideas, to the real world of intranet professionals, in order to help develop that missing understanding.

And we may as well cut right to the chase.

Jump to other sections:
I. The Way We Work
II. Politics
III. Power
IV. Networks
V. Communication Power
VI. Power & The Social Intranet

III. Power

What is power, anyhow? 

Well, according to Castells,

“Power is the most fundamental process in society … since society is defined around values and institutions, and what is valued and institutionalized is defined by power relationships.

Power is the relational capacity that enables a social actor to influence asymmetrically the decisions of other social actor(s) in ways that favour the empowered actor’s will, interests, and values.

Power is exercised by means of coercion (or the possibility of it) and/or by the construction of meaning on the basis of the discourses through which social actors guide their action.”

Castells sets up the classic dichotomy of power in sociology: on one hand, the (legitimate or not) resort to violence and the fear of that violence and. on the other hand, the act of persuasion, influence, through construction of meaning – the construction of meaning being the result of communication.

For those with a background in sociology, you may recognize this as the theoretical positions of Max Weber vs. Michel Foucault

Castells continues:

“Power relationships are framed by domination, which is the power that is embedded in the institutions of society. The relational capacity of power is conditioned, but not determined, by the structural capacity of domination. Institutions may engage in power relationships that rely on the domination they exercise over their subjects.”

The modern symbol of organizational domination, that is, the embedded relational power inside of the place where you work, is one of the favourite targets of the new-fangled social intranet: the organizational form of the hierarchy, best represented as organizational chart visualizations like this, and it’s evil cousin and byproduct (dum-dum-dum – dramatic reveal), the “SILO”.

PhotoCredit: Doc Searls

Essentially, by adopting an hierarchical organizational form, you are embedding and inscribing power into relationships through structures. That’s why hierarchies simultaneously work and don’t work. And as evil as it’s made out to be these days, there’s efficiency afforded by signifying power like this. Hierarchies have a long successful history, after all.

But before we go too far into making the same mistake as I hinted at earlier; I don’t think it’s fair to describe power is a “thing” that “lives” in a hierarchy. Or that a hierarchy is synonymous with power. They are not the same.

Castells is a firm believer in the idea that “power is not an attribute but a relationship. It cannot be abstracted from the specific relationship between the subjects of power, those who are empowered and those who are subjected to such empowerment in a given context.”

This notion of subjects and relationships I think is an important one to remember, out of all of Castells’ concepts.

And it helps us better understand empowerment – a word, an expression “Empower your employees!” which is used a lot when it comes to social intranet technologies like mine.

A sobering point from Castells in the rhetoric of empowerment to consider:

“The empowerment of social actors cannot be separated from their empowerment against other social actors, unless we accept the naïve image of a reconciled human community, a normative utopia that is belied by historical observation.

The power to do something … is always the power to do something against someone, or against the values and interests of this “someone”…“

Within the social context of your organization, power means influence over another.

Having “the other” is a necessary condition for power to exist.

So while empowerment is spun as some kind of individual freedom or liberation from the tyranny of hierarchy or control, some new “feel-good” sensation your employees suddenly experience by smashing the silos around them, there’s always a receiving end to empowerment.

I wouldn’t describe Castells’ characterization of power as meaning the organization is a zero-sum gain entirely, but he does not mince words here.

Power does not exist without those to wield power over.

So that’s power. Or at least some of Castells’ fundamentals.  He says a lot more, believe me. But I think that will suffice to move onto the next part.

Jump to other sections:
I. The Way We Work
II. Politics
III. Power
IV. Networks
V. Communication Power
VI. Power & The Social Intranet

IV. Networks

What is a network? 

“A network is a set of interconnected nodes. Nodes may be of varying relevance to the network, and so particularly important nodes are called “centers” in some versions of network theory. … any component of a network … is a node and its function and meaning depend on the programs of the network and on its interaction with other nodes in the network.”

Nodes and ties or

Vertices and edges

Actors and relationships

I’d argue that with the introduction of communications technologies, enabled by computers and common network protocols, our dominant image for understanding the organization has changed. The network is becoming or for many has become the pervasive organizational metaphor for our time. And will continue for some time to come.

Networks of course, have been around for a long time. They are not new and not limited to computer-based communication technologies. They are a pattern that is common to all life, as systems theorist Fritjof Capra points out in Castells’ book.

We’ve just started to pay closer attention to them in the last little while, as our ability to quantify them, measure them, visualize them, and comprehend them has become very good.

Castells gives us 3 reasons why networks kick ass in our current organizational situation (my words, not his).

 …networks became the most efficient organizational forms as a result of three major features of networks which benefited from the new technological environment: flexibility, scalability, and survivability.

Flexibility is the ability to reconfigure according to changing environments and retain their goals while changing their components, sometimes bypassing blocking points of communication channels to find new connections.

Scalability is the ability to expand or shrink in size with little disruption.

Survivability is the ability of networks, because they have no single center and can operate in a wide range of configurations, to withstand attacks to their nodes and codes because the codes of the network are contained in multiple nodes that can reproduce the instructions and find new ways to perform.

With a fundamental concept of power and a rudimentary conceptual definition of a network in mind, we can now move onto the combination of the two, the typology of power that frames all of Castells work and the model that I hope you can derive value from as an intranet professional.

Jump to other sections:
I. The Way We Work
II. Politics
III. Power
IV. Networks
V. Communication Power
VI. Power & The Social Intranet

V. Communication Power

In asking the question, “where does power lie in the global network society?” Castells comes up with this handy, oh-so-easy to remember four-part typology of power:

• networking power
• network power
• networked power
• network making power

It was at this point in my reading of Castells that I had wished he’d named his types of power after colours or animals or something.

Wouldn’t that have been so much easier to remember?

1. Networking Power

Let’s examine the first type.

Castells defines networking power as:

“the power of the actors and organizations included in the networks that constitute the core of the global network society over human collectives or individuals who are not included in these global networks.”

Essentially, I understand this kind of power to be Who is In and Who is Out of the network. Again, Castells may be operating at a global, macro, societal level in his analysis, but for our intranet context, if work is being increasingly mediated through the digital technologies of the workplace, then access to that technology and the networks which flow through that technology, is a form of power.

You might think, “access to digital technologies – who doesn’t have that in the modern organization?”

Well, the organization that I started my talk with had a high percentage of outside workers. Staff who didn’t have workstations, staff who didn’t have even reliable mobile web access. Yes, even in the year 2013.

What power do those inside of the network possess over those who are not included?

Likewise, this form of exclusionary power prompts us to ask how do we define the question of access in our increasingly porous organizations; full time staff, consultants, vendors, partners, outsourced overseas labour; who gets access? who doesn’t?

This is not simply a question of who has network connectivity, although the question of the technical capabilities and hurdles faced to get access are very real. But it is bigger than that.

How do we define the membership of our social intranet?

Who is included in this so-called digital workplace and who is excluded?

Those of us in a position to grapple with these decisions are gatekeepers, in the truest sense of the word. We decide who comes in, who stays out.

And once in, you have power over those not included, especially when you belong to the same organization.

2. Network Power

The next form of power deals with those in the network, conveniently named: network power.

Network power can be understood as “the standards or protocols of communication that determine the rules to be accepted once in the network.”

They are the rules of inclusion.

You may be able to join the club, be a member of the club, but this club has rules. And the rules matter, because they limit what can be done in the network.

Castells borrows heavily from network theorist David Grewal’s work here – and the important part to the critique of the emancipatory aspects of the social intranet’s rhetoric is the two ideas inside network power:

1. Coordinating standards, protocols of communication increase in value when more people use them (i.e. Zipf’s Law – read our post about the new laws of intranet ROI) – the old expression was it’s not much value if you’re the only one in the world with fax machine.
2. These standards and protocols, by the nature of becoming standards and protocols, can “lead to the progressive elimination of the alternatives over which otherwise free choice can be collectively exercised . . . “

To paraphrase Grewal, A social intranet platform provides the solution to the problem of organizational coordination amongst diverse employee participants, but it does so by elevating one solution above others and threatening the elimination of alternative solutions to the same problems of communication and coordination.

We trade convenience for choice. 

Other implications to contemplate about your social intranet:

• What are the rules of your social intranet?
• Is it merely an IT acceptable use policy?
• What communications protocols have you programmed into the intranet?
• What can and can’t be said, for example?
• What cultural norms exist?
• Do they differ from your in-person, face-to-face organizational norms?

I ask that last question with an asterisk – does such digital/physical dualism even make sense to ask (see Jurgenson) – I’m somewhat skeptical myself.

And this question, I find to be one of the most interesting of all questions about the social intranet:

What are the protocols about inter-divisional collaboration? How does it relate to the other, embodied form of power that probably exists side-by-side along with the intranet, even represented by the intranet, the existing organizational structure, your org chart.

A hierarchy is still a network after all, a particular shape of network that sets forth a protocol for communication and collaboration (up and down, and only then sideways).

A multi-directional social intranet affords the ability to jump across those formerly developed up and down protocols and rules.

But has it been programmed to do that?

That is, are its participants capable and/or allowed?

And of course, who creates these rules in the first place?

But I’m jumping ahead, we’ll get to that question shortly.

3. Networked Power

The simplest way of understanding power, the third type, is also perhaps the most complicated. That’s “networked power”

Simply put: “once in the network, some actors have power over others.”

We previously setup the two types of power over each other earlier: the resort to coercion and violence on one hand, and the use of persuasive power, the construction of the meaning of action in the minds of people through communication, on the other.

It’s the second form that is more predominant, I truly hope, in most of your organizations.

What are the implications of this power dynamic for the social intranet? 

As a shared place where all participants can see the actions and behaviours of their co-workers, it represents a new ability to perceive authority, control, merit, skill, and the persuasive abilities (or lack thereof) of certain individuals in the organization.

Our intranet software relies predominantly on the manipulation of text – you type words into a text field in order to communicate.

Well what if I don’t write well? Maybe I hold back. How am I then perceived? What happens to my power over others?

Perhaps I rely on my booming voice and physical presence to influence others – well, not so on the social intranet.

The same question holds with a shift or introduction of video-based technologies in this context. I don’t do well on camera, I do better in print.

This is not a new thing in organizations – text-based communications environments have been a safe-haven for people less likely to share their opinion in front of large groups for a long time. How many things have been said in email messages that would never be said in person or face to face?

Ironically, those higher up in hierarchies typically have less time to participate actively in systems of engagement – face to face, in-person time is still the hallmark of a busy, senior executive – it’s possible that typing into text fields isn’t perceived as an efficient use of their time. Like sending emails – it takes a while to craft compelling, persuasive content. It’s much easier to issue decrees from a position of authority, in a face-to-face setting.

Does less visibility in the system, less ability to be seen being influential and persuasive, mean less power?

Another popular concept in social software theory, participation inequality, is directly related to this: 1% frequent contributors, 9% intermittent contributors, and 90% lurkers that idea Jakob Nielsen uncovered many years ago (which may or may not hold true on the social intranet I might add).

Does frequency of contribution, raw quantity of communication suggest a shift in power? What about the 90% that never participate? Or what if 90% of the company does participate more than once per week, as we have seen in some of our implementations?

This type of power, while intuitive, is far from being clear-cut or easy to analyze.

So that takes us to the fourth and final type of power, network making power, is considered by Castells as the most crucial form.

4. Network Making Power

Network making power has two mechanisms: the ability to form networks and to program and re-program networks.

Who created the network in the first place? And who created the rules of inclusion that set the whole thing in motion? Who “programmed” the network? And who are the “switchers” as Castells calls them, the actors who control the points between other related and connected networks?

These questions are fundamentals to a concept that I didn’t include in my presentation abstract and have skillfully avoided using in all the other words I’ve used so far, but one which is often taken as irrelevant in the free-for-all many-to-many intranet Enterprise 2.0 world (I would argue of course, for the exact opposite) and that is concept is the one of governance.

Who decides on who is included or excluded?

Who decides on what is acceptable?

Who decides on what groups exist, don’t exist, and how their membership is negotiated?

In ThoughtFarmer, for example, we have open and closed groups – groups you are made a member of by someone else, and groups you are able to join as you choose.

Who sets those up? That’s programming (creating the rules of inclusion) and it’s also switching (the group becomes, arguably, a very small network itself), a network nested within a bigger network.

Lots of people groan over the topic of governance or try to ignore it or just run for the hills when they hear it uttered, but I’d argue this is essentially at the core of this type of power. It’s about decision-making. And who gets to make decisions.

Network making power forces us to ask the hard questions of governance and examine our culture of decision making in the organization.

Jump to other sections:
I. The Way We Work
II. Politics
III. Power
IV. Networks
V. Communication Power
VI. Power & The Social Intranet

VI. Power & The Social Intranet

So there’s a lot more in his 600-page text, but essentially, you’ve got the basics: power, networks, and his four-part typology of power.

So what can we, the managers of communications networks called intranets, learn through Castells’ analysis of networks and power about what’s going on inside our organizations? 

I think Castells ideas are is worth considering as we transform our intranets from glorified file servers to living, breathing social systems that are a more accurate mirror of the larger social systems in which they are embedded, at both the organizational and societal level.

The map, however, is not the territory. I am not saying that the social intranet is the organization or that any analysis of the organization can ever capture fully its complexities, contingencies, and meaning.

But we see a lot of organizations throwing themselves with reckless abandon, trying to become more network-like, to do social, to be social; whatever that ridiculous expression means.

I have no argument with their intent. With the meaning and motivation I saw from that group of managers in their workshop.

I have no quarrel with the sincerity of their desire or effort.

As Esko Kilpi so astutely observed, they are trying to shorten the distance between two randomly picked people inside the organization and to get more people who you know personally to know each other.

This in turn works to enhance the value of a network organizational approach, as Rob Cross describes it, which is intended to recognize opportunities and challenges and coordinate appropriate responses, quickly and effectively.

They are doing it to benefit from the network’s flexibility, scalability, and survivability.

It is a noble goal.

But we cannot shorten the distance between people without considering how power flows through that relationship.

We cannot recognize opportunities and challenges, collectively, without contemplating who’s opportunity or challenge it may be.

We certainly cannot coordinate appropriate responses without having power be a part of it – coordination is an act of getting people to do something together; power is a mandatory condition of coordination.

In this presentation, I have been involved in a form of critique, in particular questioning how power relations work and what their effects are in the organization and as a subset of that, on the social intranet.

With the foregrounding of the idea of power inside the social intranet and the organization that I’ve attempted to share today, I hope we focus on a bigger question and steer away from prescribing an ideal model that we’re all working towards, or the one “best practice” version of an organizational form, or a best practice social intranet, or even ideal relations amongst individuals and employees - certainly not something which can be put on a maturity model and “optimized” in all of its reified, Platonic glory.

Instead, I think that when we contemplate power, we essentially ask ourselves

What kind of political form do we want to belong to, in our organizations, to resolve the divergent interests that are bound to happen? 

The social intranet then is the convenient object, the “MacGuffin” in that strategic design exercise associated with answering that question, just as the suitcase in Pulp Fiction drove the plot forward, or R2D2 in Star Wars was the object of everyone’s search, or the infamous Rosebud in Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane. Those were all MacGuffin’s too that held the characters attention and drove the plot forward. But really, the audience watching the film is more interested in the characters and their relationships. That’s what really matters here.

We live in a time when we are no longer limited by some of the physical barriers in organizing our work that we once were. The tyranny of distance has been overcome and our perception of time has been much affected by network technologies.

And so, if these costs are essentially reduced (and a corresponding set of possibilities are opened to us), we also then live at a time in our organizations to ask ourselves the corporate or institutional version of the Socratic question, “What is the life worth living?”

or rather,

What is the organizational form worth having? 

What shape will it take? 

What actions can it support? 

What relationships define its being?

What affordances are we able to design and create, to achieve some stated purpose, some hopefully agreed-upon collective way of carrying out the work that we believe needs to be done? 

To come full circle back to Gareth Morgan:

“Organizational politics arise when people think differently and want to act differently. This diversity creases a tension that must be resolved through political means. As we have already seen there are many ways in which this can be done:

• autocratically (“We’ll do it this way”);
• bureaucratically (“We’re supposed to do it this way”);
• technocratically (“It’s best to do it this way”); or
• democratically (“How shall we do it?”).

In each case the choice between alternative paths of action usually hinges on the power relations between the actors involved. By focusing on how divergent interests give rise to conflict, visible and invisible, that are resolved or perpetrated by various kinds of power play, we can make the analysis of organizational politics as rigorous as the analysis of any other aspect of organizational life. “

I am not here to decree a normative, best practice, idealized, future state utopia of the digital workplace to you.

I think that’s an even more dangerous journey to take, quite frankly, than the one you’ve been on with me today.

Our intranets have just as much likelihood of chance of re-enforcing the current modes of domination inside of an organization (further re-enforcing the power structures that are encoded and embedded in our institutions) as it does being an emancipatory force.

We can put all of the affordances we want into our user interface, but if the exec want to turn off comments and limit page authorship and editorship to one lone employee in an organization of several hundred people… well….

My call to you, as you work on these vitally important systems of engagement, inside of organizations, as you work on the preferred and promoted method of communicating, collaborating, organizing, and making meaning these days, my call to you is please don’t be naive about what is happening beyond the technical aspects of the social intranet and its associated buzzwords.

Try to understand that power, even “empowered power” or “power to the people” unleashed via a system like this, is always defined as power over the other.

Understand that some people are less capable or able of persuading or influencing those than others and are therefore less powerful.

Understand that the rules of inclusion, the standards of communication limit the possibilities of your organization as much as they are convenient and efficient.

Understand that someone sets those rules. Someone creates the standards. Indeed, someone creates, maintains, and programs the networks through which power flows.

Understand that we inscribe power in our structures – and that it’s not just hierarchies that have a monopoly on this practice – that your networks, your social intranets do it too.

And understand that to be critical about power is not to somehow be against it – that simply cannot be. We will never get rid of it. We can’t. It makes no sense. It’s like being against gravity or air. There’s no point.

But to be aware of it, how it works, and what our place and role in it, that provides us with a new sense, a new ability, a new literacy.

This is the literacy you, as intranet professionals, need to develop in order to be effective in being successful in a network transformation of you organization.

It’s perhaps out of our comfort zone, but I truly believe that understanding concepts like this, bringing a bit, even 6000 words of social theory into the social intranet will radically enhance and improve our likelihood of succeeding (however you and your organization define that, in whatever form of political configuration you choose), of leaving the status quo behind and benefiting from the power of networks.

Jump to previous sections:
I. The Way We Work
II. Politics
III. Power
IV. Networks
V. Communication Power
VI. Power & The Social Intranet

Interested in learning more about intranet strategy and management? Read our 8 Inspiring Interviews from Successful Intranet Managers.

Assiniboine Credit Union and ThoughtFarmer worked together closely to develop a user-friendly, fit-for-purpose intranet navigation.

Over the years we’ve worked with many financial institutions. We’ve engaged with these clients in Professional Services projects of varying sizes, from speedy three-week get-’em-done’s to twelve-month behemoth efforts.

While every company needs a unique intranet tailored to its employees’ needs and the company’s culture, some very noticeable patterns have emerged.

1. Focus on customer-facing employees

There is one particularly direct way to gain social intranet adoption and deliver business value with your new intranet: Make it easy for customer-facing employees to find the information they need.

Customer-facing employees fit into several common roles:

• Bank teller
• Call center operator
• Loan officer
• Mortgage officer
• Business banking officer
• Branch manager

These employees are often the face of your bank and their efficacy can shape customers’ experiences.

The information these employees need spans all types of bank products and services:

• Details about different account types (fees, interest rates, etc.)
• Up-to-date interest rate sheets
• Instructions for cancelling checks
• Trouble shooting tips for using online banking
• Account closure guides
• Affidavit instructions for reporting unauthorized charges

By helping these employees quickly find information and do their jobs more easily you can increase their and customers’ satisfaction, which can directly impact the bottom line (see the Harvard Business Review article Beating the Market with Customer Satisfaction).

Providing this information can also drive intranet adoption and help you make the case for investing in the intranet. But how exactly do you implement this on your intranet?

2. A special section for customer-related information

From our many bank and credit union intranet implementations, one strong pattern that has emerged is a top-level navigation section for information about the bank’s products and services.

Here’s a sample global intranet navigation:

1. Home
2. People directory
3. About the company
4. Products & services
5. Tech & admin
6. HR & career
7. Fun/social

Navigation Item #4 (Products & Services) above contains the real meat of a bank intranet. This is the material that employees need every day in order to provide stellar customer service.

By consolidating here the information needed for answering customer questions, you reduce the amount of searching employees will need to do. By including this section in the global navigation you ensure the information is just a click away.

The real trick is to organize the content within this section so the navigation makes sense to employees.

3. Resources for branch operations

Another common pattern is the bucket of information about daily branch management. This includes information such as:

• Bank safety protocols
• Opening and closing procedures
• Teller cash-in and cash-out procedures
• Courier pickup times
• Night drop logs
• Branch inspections

​This information is not needed with as much speed as the other bucket of information, but is highly relevant to your front line people.

This content may go in the “Products and services” area (which then might have a broader title, such as “Banking Services”) if that’s where employees look for it during user testing. Or it may go under the “Internal administrative” section — again, depending on the results of user testing. Maybe it will have its own section in the global navigation.

No matter what, the decision about where this information goes should be based on iterative user input. Our Professional Services team does this most commonly through user-centered design techniques such as intranet card sorting and task testing.

4. Employee engagement & knowledge sharing

A final pattern we’ve seen is the focus on building a positive work environment. This includes online and offline efforts to keep employees engaged and enjoying their work, as well as helping them share their know-how.

One of the most popular sections on the The Farm Bureau Bank’s intranet lets employees publicly thank each other.

Common intranet features and activities that fit this pattern include:

• Contest to name the new social intranet
• Rich employee directory
• Discussion forums focused on products & services
• Recognition and “shout-out” forums
• Internal classifieds
• Community spaces for sports teams, recipe sharing, knitting groups, etc.

We’ve seen many other creative ideas as well. The key is to create engaging uses of your intranet that fit your company culture and employees’ needs. ThoughtFarmer social intranet software works well here because of its core social features and flexibility.

Read our white paper on social intranets and employee engagement for more examples, data and best practices in this area.

4 takeaways for bank intranet teams

Based on all of these patterns and a few intranet best practices, here are some recommendations that can help any bank or credit union intranet be a success:

1. Identify the common customer-facing roles at your bank
2. Research these employees’ most common daily tasks and information needs
3. Use structured, user-centric techniques to design your intranet’s site navigation
4. Use social intranet software that supports conversation, collaboration and knowledge sharing

Good luck out there! And if you have any questions, holler at our friendly team.

Gordon Ross, VP of ThoughtFarmer, recently discussed this concept of “Networks, Power, and Politics” in a keynote talk at IntraTeam 2013. As head of our Professional Services team, he has worked on the front lines of numerous organizational changes and understands that implementing a social intranet is much more than just clicking ‘install now’.

Gordon Ross presenting at IntraTeam 2013

He believes that we, as intranet professionals of all sorts, need to develop a literacy, an understanding of power, of culture, and in particular of how they work in the context of networks if we are going to seek to have any kind of influence or chance of succeeding with our aspirations and visions of a more responsive, humanistic, resilient organization.

You’re invited to explore this topic in our one hour, free webinar: Networks, Power, and Politics – What’s really going on inside of our social intranet?

• Date: Wednesday, Mar 27th, 2013
• Time: 8:30AM Pacific / 11:30AM Eastern / 15:30 UK / 16:30 EU
• Format: 40 minute presentation followed by a 20 minute discussion period.

Who should attend? This webinar is intended for intranet managers, communications professionals, HR employees, and IT staff who want to better understand the invisible interpersonal networks that constitute the social relations of our workplace and govern our intranet relationships. We also welcome intranet thought leaders and analysts who are interested in the theory behind communication power and its impact on the social enterprise.

Register Now >>

The 22 companies interviewed explain how social enterprise features have made an impact in their organization. We’re proud to tell you that our very own ThoughtFarmer-powered intranet, “Sparky”, was one of the featured social intranets. The NN/group rounded up trends across all analyzed intranets and compared them to previous intranet studies, providing interesting insight into the past, present, and future of social enterprise software. Here’s a brief recap of some of their most interesting findings.

NN/group found that “social tool infractions remain rare.” We’ve heard concerns about employees inappropriately using social tools, and we’ve even hosted a webinar on Overcoming Executive Fear of Social Intranets. Despite the fear that employees will unleash secrets, dissent in public, or share unprofessional personal info, NN/group found that “as long as attribution is built in and required, communities police themselves.” Trust in social enterprise tools seems to be increasing, and NN/group also noted a “major increase in management support of social features.”

The NN/group confirmed that “community management is vital in social environments.” We’re happy to see growing awareness around the value that intranet managers provide. The fundamental truth about good intranets is that they result from good intranet managers. From engagement to governance to technical problems, this individual or team creates the foundation to social enterprise interaction. If you are an intranet manager, or are looking to hire one, we have a handy e-book on the subject.

The report wraps up with a conclusion that we can’t emphasize enough: “Social intranet projects must be driven by business needs.” When you’re evaluating intranet software, it’s easy to get caught up in features while forgetting the problem you’re attempting to solve. We always recommend starting with the “why?”, and then looking to the “what” of the intranet to meet those needs. And be sure to share that “why” with us — we’ve helped clients implement many, many intranets and we may have an alternate solution.

We have a number of previous blog posts to help people define their business problems and describe their solutions, including The Intranet Identity Crisis and Communicating Your Intranet Requirements.

Want to see the whole report? Read the summary or purchase the entire 271-page report from NN/group.

A panorama the audience during my talk at IntraTeam.

Kurt Kragh Sørensen and his event organizers crafted three days of education, hands-on activities, and most importantly, great conversation. As a group that facilitates intranet communities of practice in Denmark and Sweden, Kurt and IntraTeam clearly have some practice at this. But the feeling of being at an event with such a great community basis sets it aside from other conference experiences. “Some of you might think you’ve walked into a family party, so many of us know each other,” said Kurt in his Thursday morning conference opening remarks. And it’s true – the conviviality, the camaraderie, and the general civility of the whole thing was really quite lovely.

I ran a workshop on using archetypes and personas in intranet design and change management on Wednesday and had 10 brave attendees who stuck with me for the better part of the entire day, running through a narrative and sense making exercise, which derived five archetypes.

Workshop on Intranet Personas

I then delivered a rather theoretical and formal presentation on Thursday, covering the topic of Communication Power and the Social Intranet; investigating the ideas of Manuel Castells, power, networks, and their relationship to the new forms of organizational and interpersonal communication afforded by technologies like social intranets.

Presentation on Communication, Power, and the Social Intranet. Photo credit: Paolo Tosolini

As a vendor-practitioner, Kurt provided me with the freedom to do something completely different. It was a risk to be sure – the concepts, ideas, and nature of the topic demanded attention from the audience. And they reciprocated. I had some thought provoking questions at the end and in the hallways and 25th floor lunch venue overlooking Copenhagen in all of its late winter glory, ones that zeroed in on the core issues at hand, demonstrating to me that the attendees not only heard what I said, but comprehended why it mattered.

A view of Copenhagen from the 25th floor.

Only the speaker evaluation forms will tell the true tale, but I’m grateful for the opportunity to try to take the conversation about technology beyond the usual boundaries of either technical implementation, best practice models, or overly simplified descriptions of how humans engage in the social context of the workplace, digital or otherwise.

It was also special to meet, for the first time, old friends; one of those unique aspects of our contemporary condition, where people you’ve followed for years on twitter and in blogs come face to face for the first time, shaking each others hands and hugging each other like long lost relatives. Amongst those people I had the pleasure to meet and talk with for the first time in person included Martin Risgaard, Mark Morrell, Jane McConnell, and Elizabeth (“Party in a Box”) Lupfer. And it was a pleasure to re-connect with Martin White and of course the host himself Kurt.

Mark, myself, and Kevin at Rio Bravo

And then there were the new connections; from both near and far. Ironically, it took me going to Copenhagen to meet my Vancouver neighbour Jane Nunnikhoven from Vancity and Seattle-ite video expert Paolo Tosolini from RunStudios. The North American entourage was rounded out by Donna Papacosta, who’s presentation about the power of stories, resonated with my own interest in narrative methods in an organizational context, and Jarrod Gingras of The Real Story Group, who’s enterprise search workshop was standing room only. And off course, it would only be fitting that I wind up in the corner of the Rio Bravo with the Brits drinking pints – cheers Kevin & Julian from Arup, you’re doing some great work on your intranet.

I’m bound to forget someone in this list, but I also had some great conversations (over food and drink inevitably, be it Carlsberg and Stegt Flæsk or coffee and pastries) with Kristian @kristiannorling, Matt Mullen (451 Research), David Cotterill (GDS), Gabriele, Kerry, Morten (Webtop), Ivalo, Tina, Merete, and Herluf @luffeman (our final night dinner recommender – Un Mercato was great, tak!)

Your hospitality and warmth, passion for intranets, and impeccable sense of fashion and design and love of cycling all pretty much summed up why Copenhagen is one of the world’s great cities (certainly in my eyes), thanks in no large part to the great people who call it (and Denmark) home.

I hope to be back again, a Canadian intranet cousin, keen on crashing your family party, and savouring the hygge.

The article explains how ACU approached needs analysis and vendor selection. It also highlights how the credit union’s new social intranet has improved knowledge exchange.

ThoughtFarmer is a mission-critical business tool at ACU. The article explains:

78% of Assiniboine CU’s staff uses the intranet at least once per hour. On average, all employees login in the morning, check various feeds such as member service, employee communications or news about the teams and groups to which they’ve been assigned. They keep the site open in a browser tab and refer back to it throughout the day.

Read the full article here (registration required).

Entering is easy: just submit a screenshot and brief description using our online entry form. Besides glory and accolades from your peers, all submissions will be entered in a draw for an iPad with Retina Display!

There are three categories: Best-looking. Most innovative. And Best Collaboration. To see what it takes to win, see the winners from the 2012 competition.

BEST-LOOKING

Is your ThoughtFarmer intranet beautiful? Submit a screenshot and it will be judged solely on its esthetic appeal.

Example: Our 2012 winner, WATG, employed a neat, minimalist aesthetic that complements the stunning photography. See a screenshot.

MOST INNOVATIVE

Are you doing something unexpectedly clever with ThoughtFarmer — perhaps using the API, TIK or other integration? Take a screenshot and describe it.

Example: Our 2012 winner, KWL, used ThoughtFarmer’s commenting feature with some nifty database plotting to run an online employee auction that raised $4230 for charity.

BEST COLLABORATION

Has your ThoughtFarmer intranet been used to collaborate on something great? Submit a series of screenshots and describe what it is!

Example: Our 2012 winner, ACRONYM Games, used ThoughtFarmer’s photo gallery view for “smut and copyright reviews” prior to releasing a new game. Read more.

Enter the competition

Entry deadline: Friday, March 15th, 2013