Over the last few years Intranet Focus Ltd has built up a substantial research collection of around 1000 reports and papers on all aspects of intranet management and information management, and over 100 books.  We also have access to the Digital Library of the Association for Computing Machinery, a repository of over 1 million research papers, reports and conference proceedings.  Most important of all we have the knowledge we have gained through the consulting projects that we undertake each year.

So this month we are launching a series of Research Notes. These will be published monthly, other than in July and August and will be written in a style that we hope intranet managers will find useful in discussions with other business managers about enhancing the scope and value of an intranet.   The topics will be based on the requirements we see emerging from our consulting work. Each of the Research Notes will be 10-15 pages long and will be published towards the end of the month. We are not going to publish a schedule of titles for the year as we want to reflect on what is important at the time we start to prepare the next Research Note. The first one to be published is on enterprise search team management. You will see from the drop-down navigation bar for Resources there is now a section called Research Notes, and all the research can be downloaded as pdf files. If you would like to have any of the Research Notes as a Word file that you can use for internal purposes please contact us, but normally this format would only be available to our clients.

We can also prepare custom reports, either a tailored version of one of the Research Notes or specifically written for your organisation.  We would be pleased to give you a quotation for the work.

We would welcome feedback on the titles we publish, and it is highly likely that in the course of the year the format and approach of the Research Notes will evolve as we respond to your comments and suggestions.

Martin White

The sections of this 320 page book are

• Really understand the technology
• Outline the vision
• Accept technology is a small factor in success
• Determine your governance approach
• Make every effort to engage the business
• Apply intentional energy to adoption
• Pursue increasing value

Although there is a substantial chapter of over 60 pages on technology the emphasis is on understanding what features are needed to support collaboration and how to evaluate the extent to which your current technology platform is able to deliver these features.  Michael has a great deal of experience of Microsoft and IBM collaboration technologies but the book is absolutely vendor neutral, and there is an emphasis on recognising and working within the capabilities of your current technology platform before making any arbitrary decision to change. I especially liked Chapter 6 on how to engage with the business, in which Michael sets out five hallmarks of engagement and then follows with seven engagement strategies, of which the first is lunch! I also like the way that Michael brings a large number of frameworks and models into play to help readers understand the fundamental principles of effective collaboration, and that he is very open about presenting the ideas of others who have looked in detail at the processes and problems of collaboration.

Michael has self-published this book but the production quality is higher than many commercial publishers achieve. The cover artwork alone will make you want to have this book on your desk to show that you (thanks to Michael) really do know how to get the best out of the teams you work on, or work with.  The book is full of charts and diagrams that will soon find their way onto a whiteboard in your office. At just $39 it is excellent value for money. Why not buy one for each of your team leaders and one for your CIO?

Michael runs superb workshops, so if you want to have a personal guide through the book why not come to his Collaboration Master Class in London on 15 March?

Martin White

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) (USA) 2009

Altran (France) 2009

AMP Limited (Australia) 2011

BASF SE (Germany) 2009

Bennett Jones LLP (Canada) 2011

Bouygues Telecom (France) 2011

CenturyLink Business (US) 2012

COWI Group A/S, (Denmark) 2009

Credit Suisse AG (Switzerland) 2011

Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu (DTT) (Global) 2009

Duke Energy (US) 2011

Enbridge, Inc. (Canada) 2010

Environmental Resources Management (ERM) (Global) 2009

Everything Everywhere (UK) 2012

GE (US) 2010

Genentech (US) 2012

Habitat for Humanity International (US) 2011

Heineken International (The Netherlands) 2011

Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) (US) 2010

HSBC Bank Brazil (Brazil) 2009

Huron Consulting Group (US) 2010

Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) (US) 2010

Kaupthing Bank (Iceland) 2009

Korean Telecom (Republic of Korea) 2011

L.L.Bean (USA) 2009

LivePerson, Inc (US) 2012

Logica, (UK) 2012

MAN Diesel & Turbo SE (Germany) 2012

McKesson Corporation (USA) 2009

MITRE Corporation, (US) 2010

Mota-Engil Engenharia e Construção, S.A. (Portugal) 2011

NCR Corporation (US) 2012

SCANA Corp. (US) 2010

Scotts Miracle-Gro (US) 2012

Skanska (Sweden) 2012

Staples, Inc.(US)  2012

Trend Micro, Inc. (Japan) 2010

URS Corporation (US) 2010

Verizon Communications (US) 2011

Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. (Walmart) (US) 2010

Martin White

This year the winners are

• CenturyLink Business (USA),
• Everything Everywhere (UK),
• Genentech (US),
• LivePerson, Inc. (US),
• Logica (UK),
• MAN Diesel & Turbo SE (Germany),
• NCR Corporation (US),
• Scotts Miracle-Gro (US)
• Skanska (Sweden)
• Staples, Inc. (US).

This year many of the winners are somewhat smaller than in previous years. As the report notes, technology offerings might contribute to the success of these smaller winners because as a very long-term trend it’s getting easier to implement designs with good usability, bringing quality user experience within the reach of ever-smaller companies. One notable change has been the increase in size of intranet teams to around 1 per 1500 employees from a fairly steady level of 1 per 3000 employees for a number of years. This is a welcome commitment from the award winners, and probably a critical success factor in gaining this prestigious award.  What is slightly surprising is that none of the award winners has made much progress in support for mobile devices, but the reasons for this are well argued by the authors of the report.

As well as highlighting the reasons why these ten organisations won an award this year there is a list of 14 areas where many intranets are still failing to adopt good practice in design, content and usability. A good checklist for your own intranet that might help you make a business case for investment!

Each profile is around 30 pages long, with in total 187 screen shots.  Overall the production quality, attention to detail and value for money ($248 for 431 pages and ten profiles) makes this report a must-buy even for small organisations. As an intranet community we are indebted to the Nielsen Norman Group for the effort it devotes each year to this unique and invaluable publication.

Martin White

This excellent report by Stephan Schillerwein (Infocentric Research) provides a complementary ‘information management’ perspective and starts off with an analysis of the work that has been done on the impact of information on organisational performance. There is more evidence than most people realise.  In this opening section I loved the comment that employees are both expensive and bad search engines! The author then discusses what it will take to develop and implement a digital workplace, commenting that a digital workplace is not primarily an IT-system and it can only be effective when completely embedded into all aspects of an organization. This of course is only possible if fully backed by management and accompanied by substantial change management activities.

Much of the discussion about digital workplaces does not actually get into the detail of what such a workplace will offer, and that is one of the many aspects of this report that I liked a great deal. Whether I entirely agree with some of the proposed features is irrelevant, as the purpose of the report is to stimulate further discussion and experimentation.  There is an especially good section towards the end of the report about how to use a balanced scorecard approach to illustrate the value of information management. The only aspect missing from this report is a consideration of who should own information management and sponsor the development of digital workspaces.

Overall this is the best report I have seen so far on digital workplaces, and I would strongly recommend it to any organisation. The presentation is excellent, with some very good charts and diagrams, and I have already added some to my PowerPoint files, with an acknowledgement to Infocentric Research of course!

Martin White

There are eleven chapters in this 200 page book, but to me the core of the book is around the development of a strategic approach to community collaboration that is set out in Chapter 5. I’ve seen too many companies rush headlong into social media just because everyone else is doing so, and then find it very difficult to assess the impacts and to build on the initial offerings.  The key message of this book is that it is important to target a specific group of participants, understand the nature or focus of their collaboration, understand what is in it for the participants and then consider what the value is to the organisation.

One of the methodologies suggested by the authors is a ‘purpose roadmap; that identifies the target community and how it may change over time. This roadmap then forms the basis of the rest of the book, which covers topics that include launching a community, guiding from the middle and adapting the organisation. The book includes a good glossary and a very good index.

This book takes a very sober view of social media and the development of social organisations, with a good balance between identifying the value and yet taking a realistic view of how much vision, time, resource and patience will need to be invested if there is to be a measurable impact on the organisation.  The writing style is also sober – it does read more like a Gartner report than a book. One  thing that did annoy me about the book is the way that every telephone conversation the authors had with their clients is listed out in the Notes section with a time and a date. Who cares? Very Gartner but of zero benefit to the reader!

Martin White

The report has six main sections

• The Digital Workplace
• The Managed Dimension
• The Social Collaborative Dimension
• The Mobile Dimension
• Governance and Management
• The Digital Workplace Tomorrow

This year just over 450 organisations completed the survey, and as intranets mature the scatter of some of the earlier reports is now being replaced by a consensus of vision even if not yet a consensus of outcomes. The way in which Jane has presented the survey information makes it even easier to assimilate than in the past.  There is careful highlighting of the data supported by insights that are always a blend of survey outcomes, the text responses in the survey and Jane’s extensive consulting experience.

It is impossible to summarise the analysis in a short blog, so just a few comments will have to suffice

• I like the four scenarios for the future of the digital workplace, which should stimulate a lot of debate. The scenarios are given the short titles of “My apps”, “Smart systems”, “People centric” and Super search”. Jane highlights the fact that these are not four different scenarios, but represent different strategies and visions as digital workplaces evolve.
• There is little improvement in search satisfaction over the last two years and 61% of respondents still have less than one member of staff allocated to search. The view that Jane has on digital workplaces is that they will attract the “best and brightest” people will be personalised, people-centric and powered by a super-search.  I support that vision, but how organisations with such a minimal investment in search are going to get there with the current lack of investment in search is quite a conundrum.
• The section on mobile adoption is very timely, as much of the discussion in 2011 has been based on largely anecdotal information. Now we have quantitative information and that alone should justify the purchase of the report because what limited survey data there is tends to come from surveys of IT managers.

It’s sad to see a page about senior management issues 16 years after the advent of intranets!

My only suggestion for improvement next year is to provide a shorter Executive Summary. Sadly few senior managers are going to read and respond to the six pages of analysis that provide such an excellent summary of the report. The NetStrategy/JMC survey is now the definitive survey of digital workplace adoption as well as for intranet development.  The report should be be shared with all the intranet stakeholders in your organisation as the basis for deciding what actions should be taken over the next couple of years as digital workplaces start to emerge. By the time they do it may be too late for you to respond  and (as Jane suggests)  the brightest and best employees will find somewhere else to work.

Martin White

Intranets

What’s in store for the world of intranets in 2012  Paul Miller, Chief Executive of the Intranet Benchmarking Forum

A review of 2011 in intranets and the digital workplace   Sam Marshall, Clearbox Consulting

Digital Workplace Trends  Jane McConnell, NetJMC

Intranet predictions for 2012  IntraTeam

Technology

2012 Technology Predictions  Real Story Group

10 Predictions for 2012 Gartner Group

Top tech predictions for 2012  Newsfactor

Mobile

Mobile strategy tips for 2012  Gred Nudelman

16 predictions for mobile in 2012  Gigaom

2012 mobile industry predictions survey Chetan Sharma

Social media

30 social media projections for 2012  Social Media Examiner

Microsoft

12 Microsoft hot buttons for 2012 Mary Jo Foley

Martin White

The literature of information science is vast, but is published in books and journals aimed at the academic market. There have been some attempts to ‘popularise’ information, notably (and in my view unsuccessfully) by James Gleick, but none of them get to the heart of matter.  Browsing around the vast subterranean Norrington Room of Blackwell’s in Oxford this week I can across a very small book entitled Information – A Very Short Introduction by Luciano Floridi. This is a remarkable book.  In just 126 pages of masterly exposition and insight the author introduces the reader to a vast panorama of information in action. The chapters cover the information revolution, the language of information, mathematical information, semantic information, physical information, biological information, economic information and the ethics of information.  In the intranet world we often see content and information as being synonyms, but that is far too simplistic.

Reading this book will not have an immediate impact on your intranet, but you will almost certainly see information in a different and probably more stimulating way.  I know many people who have had the same sort of epiphany when reading the books on the visual display of information by Edward Tufte.  Why not start 2012 by stretching your mind a little, and purchasing this little book?  It won’t take long to read.

Martin White

What we refer to as information architecture dates back to 1503 where a branched contents page was used to help the reader understand how the manuscript was organised. The concept of the index dates from 1515, and at that time had to cope with the fact that manuscripts did not have page numbers. Instead a chapter was divided into sections, tagged from A through to whatever was a sensible letter . Writing marginal notes in manuscripts, very much along the lines of social tagging, started to be commonplace around 1570. All these were solutions to how to deal effectively with increasing amounts of information.

Even some of our current approaches to information management have a long history. The development of enterprise search can be traced back to the work of Gerald Salton in the mid-1960s and wikis were introduced by Ward Cunningham in 1994, about the same time as weblogs started to appear. No one has even owned up to coining the term ‘intranet’ though by 1996 there were certainly a number of intranet implementation case studies being published. I can still vividly remember the enthusiasm and indeed passion for intranets at Intranets 1999 in San Francisco. This was probably the first intranet-specific conference.

As we move in to 2012 it is likely that mobile access to information will be high up the list for evaluation and implementation, so it is worth remembering that the initial development work on cellular mobile devices took place in the mid-1970s and tablet PCs were launched (briefly!) in 2002.

As well as Ann Baker’s book there is also a good book on the historical development of information management from Alex Wright.

Is there a moral here for 2012? Probably that we should not be diverted from a path of delivering content excellence by unthinking adoption of ‘new’ technology. An article that I had written in late 2002 on selecting a content management application was brought to my attention just before Christmas.  To my considerable surprise well over 90% is still relevant today. I’d like to think that was a result of my skills in forecasting the future but the reality is that industrial-strength technology takes a long time to move from vendor enthusiasm to wide-spread adoption.

Martin White