Recreate or integrate … that is the question?

As we’ve busily rolled out one social media tool after another within BT, one question has got bigger and bigger in my mind and has become increasingly troublesome … what’s the right balance between recreating stuff on our intranet that already exists on the internet, and just integrating tools from the internet into our intranet toolkit for employees through our permeable firewall.

Not sure how well I articulated that?? Here’s an example … someone in BT has produced an internal version of Twitter … the question is, do we need an internal version of Twitter or can we just use the real thing … as indeed my team currently is? Why would anyone want to tweet in two places? Also, the great thing about having a Twitter network is that it incorporates people from around the globe with whom you have common interests and ideas. A closed, corporate, twitter-replica would surely be a shadow of the real thing in terms of value to the individual as it would only have a very limited gene pool from which to create interesting and vibrant networks. Trying to integrate an internal and external version would be very confusing and could lead to employees posting internal stuff to external networks …

This question became very troublesome for me after we launched our internal enterprise social network a few weeks ago. It was a long time in gestation and is a great tool with lots of similar functionality to Facebook like status updates, message board (or wall), contacts (friends) etc. However, the glaring question is why would someone who uses Facebook (or indeed any one of the many other social networking sites) want to use an internal, closed version of the same thing with a limited gene pool of knowledge and ideas from which to draw. Indeed, even if someone wanted to use the internal version, how would they do so without duplicating activity on both or losing value/possible opportunities by only doing it on one and not the other …

Since we launched our internal blogging platform, I have had an internal blog as well as this external one. My internal blog has two posts on it …

The balance between recreating and integrating I think is going to be what makes or breaks our internal social media tools in the future. We need to give it some serious thought … I need to give it some serious thought. I don’t think we’ve got the balance right yet …

My slides from International Employee Communications Summit

I managed to struggle through man-flu to do my key note presentation at the International Employee Communications Summit on 6 June. Here are the slides … enjoy … questions/discussion very welcome!

(If for any reason you can’t see the slides, they are also available here).

Who owns collaboration?

Everyone’s talking about collaboration within the enterprise and excited about using social media tools on intranets … but who owns the business requirements for collaboration within the enterprise?

One of the serious dangers of introducing social media tools onto your intranet is that, because they are ‘free’ and simple to deploy, techies start deploying them left, right and centre. Before you know it, the hard-fought battle for business-led technology deployment is reversed to the bad-old-days of technologies popping up all over the place looking for a business problem. And, if it isn’t clear who owns the business requirements for collaboration, the danger is even greater as techies start enthusiastically deploying tools to fill the void and meet local needs, rather than concentrating on common capabilities that solve enterprise wide business problems. These under-web tools will also ignore governance, information management, design etc policies and standards.

So, my top-tip for the day is decide who owns the business requirements for collaboration sooner rather than later if you don’t want to spend months unravelling the technical mess that will ensue if you don’t!

Twitter in the enterprise …

A week into using Twitter and my experience so far has been overwhelmingly positive. It takes some getting used to and was very disruptive at first. Relying on just the web interface makes it significantly less integrated into my way of working and requires you to keep going back to the web site and refreshing the page. This wouldn’t have worked for me in the long run and it would have slipped from my mind and into none-use. Downloading Twhirl – a desktop client that works a bit like e-mail – really transformed my experience.

Following some advice from my colleague and Web 2.0 tool guru Steve Ellwood (@steveellwood in Twitter), I’ve set up a private Twitter group for my team in BT (using Grouptweet) – the team being highly dispersed and made up of mainly homeworkers – so that we can bond and share on an ongoing basis. I’m sure this will have a really positive effect on team dynamics … I’ll let you know how we get on!

I think this is a really good example of how the intranet has become more than just web pages behind a firewall.

Makes you feel human again …

One of the key benefits of social media tools in a corporate context for me is letting employees be ‘human’ at work. Until now, as employees we have had to lead double lives.

We get up in the morning as humans – we express our opinions and listen to the opinions of our families … we talk about how we are feeling. Then, as we approach our offices, we switch off our humanity, close down our feelings and lock away our opinions. We spend the day as part of project teams – acting ‘professionally’ … create content that says nothing about us but just contains de-humanised words lacking a human context. We browse our intranets where, very occasionally, we find a page with a photo of a human being on it … only to find the accompanying words could have been written by a robot. We dress the same, act the same and behave in an acceptable, sanitised fashion.

It’s probably not a surprise to discover that people who are made to act out of character – out of balance – and who have to suppress their natural human instincts are not likely to be engaged, happy or at their most productive and creative. Social media tools can really help employees feel and behave like human beings – it allows people to put something of themselves into their work. It allows employees to have the same kind of conversations they have at home in a work context – express themselves, express their opinions … feel part of a living organism rather than part of a machine. It allows people to communicate directly with each other rather than through intermediaries where communication can easily break down or be misinterpreted. Social media is technology embedded in human behaviour.

The sooner that work places are transformed into human spaces the better for all of us. After all, work is an activity, not a place …

Facing up to competition …

In 1984 BT lost its monopoly status with the de-regulation of the UK telecoms market. It has survived by defending its core, traditional business through quality of service, and flourished through diversification and transformation into a global communications services company – utilising its hard earned skills and sweating its key asset – namely its core network and its networking expertise. For me, the internal comms (IC) profession is about to have its own 1984 moment.

Until now, the IC profession has had monopoly supplier status on the flow of non-operational information within organisations. That’s about to change. The internal information environment is being deregulated through the deployment of tools that facilitate the publishing of user-generated content. This environment is about to get very busy, noisy and competitive. What can IC people learn from BT’s success:

• Defend core business through quality of service – IC people are skilled communicators who know how to exploit channels to best effect – our core ‘business’. In a competitive environment dominated by amateurs we must exploit this advantage through the provision of ‘quality’ content and channel consultancy services by utilising our core skills to differentiate ourselves from the morass of unprofessional, competitive noise.

• Transformation and exploitation of key assets – we must look at diversifying our offering, while sweating our key asset – namely, strong relationships and access to senior managers. What communications services will senior managers want in this new deregulated space? Time to start thinking and planning … maybe personal brand managers for senior people; information brokers; engagement consultants??

We must be thinking ahead to stay relevant …

You can read more about what the future might hold for our profession on my blog, and on Kevin Keohane’s blog … and probably many more besides!

The power of peer pressure …

An interesting article in today’s Financial Times about the politics of sellers and buyers rating transactions on eBay.

To summarise, eBay is shifting the balance of power to consumers on its auction site by removing the ability of sellers to leave feedback about buyers. Its reasoning is that if a buyer leaves negative feedback for a seller as a result of an unsatisfactory transaction, some unscrupulous sellers leave negative feedback against buyers as an act of revenge without any justification. This means that buyers are much more willing to leave positive feedback and often reluctant to leave negative feedback thus skewing the rating system and eroding its value … still with me! eBay has said that it will deal with poor performing buyers behind closed doors on behalf of unhappy sellers.

Two things struck me … firstly, what a shame – there’s always some jerk who has to ruin it for everyone else! But, more interestingly for me, is the sheer power of peer pressure as  demonstrated by comments in this article … it’s extraordinary how much value people put on preserving their on-line ‘reputations’ … for me, this is a really positive affirmation of the underlying principles of social media. When people care about how they are perceived on the web, crowd-sourced content can only be in rude health.

It also bodes very well for companies thinking of introducing user-generated content onto their intranets where anonymous participation is impossible. I have always maintained that, if you allow employees to publish freely on an intranet, they won’t go and publish defamatory, pointless, abusive content. Firstly, because they aren’t stupid and don’t want to get sacked gratuitously and secondly, because people genuinely care about what their colleagues think of them.

As ‘personal’ brands grow through individuals creating more content on the web, so individuals have more to lose … the direct result of which must be a decreased likelihood of people doing stupid things without thinking and potentially jeopardising their hard-earned reputations.

The future of leadership communications …?

I’ve written an article for the next edition of Melcrum’s Strategic Communication Management magazine (not sure if that is the Feb or Mar 08 edition?) about the changing nature of leadership communications … a sneak preview is available on this blog.

Enjoy … comments very welcome!

BT Intranet strategy

In a comment on the ‘What is an intranet?‘ post, Steve Kent asked if I would talk a bit about the BT Intranet strategy … so here goes.

We’ve made a big effort in the last year to ensure our intranet strategy is very closely aligned with BT’s overall business strategy. We looked at the work in this area of the Intranet Benchmarking Forum, and then crafted a set of short-term objectives (1-2 year) and a set of medium term objectives (3-5 year). Without going in to too much detail, these objectives are grouped into four strategic areas, which are:

Short-term:

• Strategy & governance
  • governance model
  • information management
  • extended enterprise
  • product provision

• Business value
  • knowledge management
  • measurement
  • emerging technologies
  • benchmarking

• Communications & culture
  • collaboration
  • information ownership

• Design & usability
  • consistency and context

Medium term:
The medium term objectives are grouped under BT’s values (inspiring; trustworthy; heart; helpful; straightforward) and under the tag-line: ‘Spirit of change’ which is central to our overall business strategy … see diagram below:

Obviously, underneath these strategic areas are detailed action plans with owners, objectives and timescales …too much detail to share here!

Steve – hope this is of some interest?? I’m happy to expand on any areas … if I can without giving away the family silver …
I’d love to hear how other organisations have defined their intranet strategies …

What is an intranet (2)?

While I was ‘off-air’ over the festive holidays, my post on What is an intranet? (which I published just before Christmas) was picked up by Neville Hobson and Shel Holz and nearly made it into the excellent For Immediate Release podcast (show #305) … as it turned out, it ended up on the cutting room floor

Shel/Neville … I am a ‘regular’ rather than ‘occasional’ listener and I think the show is great – keep up the good work!! I’m also not responsible for ‘all’ social media tools in BT … I’d hate to upset the many BT people engaged in this space and who contribute to the exciting social media stuff we are introducing and using!!

Anyway … one interesting comment that Shel made in the piece was about ‘duplicating’ internet tools for intranets … this has certainly been my experience to date of how intranets evolve and take advantage of innovations that happen on the internet.

However, I wonder if that will continue to be the case in the future, or if companies will be forced to allow employees to conduct more and more business activity on the internet itself in the ‘native’ tools (… providing security, legal, etc, risks are mitigated).

We are really beginning to see the concept of the ‘extended enterprise’ become reality in BT (we have 110,000 employees and around 160,000 users of our intranet – the difference being partners, suppliers and contractors etc.).

As the ‘edges’ of companies become more permeable and as companies increasingly rely on third parties and contractors to deliver their business, will it be sustainable in the long run to duplicate what happens on the internet internally, manage all the access permissions in real time, and keep up with the vortex of new innovations that appear daily on the internet?

Wouldn’t it be simpler to let employees engage and collaborate on the internet … while providing the tools and services internally that require higher levels of security or carry significant legal/HR risks? Playing catch-up on an intranet is becoming less and less sustainable and, due to the rapid rate of innovation on the internet, it is becoming increasingly difficult to offer anything other than a significantly poorer user experience behind firewalls from the one employees can experience on the internet.

Food for thought??

[PS - I'll have to try to think of something REALLY interesting to say to make it into a full edition of FIR in the future!! ]