Collaboration and Communications on the Intranet

The five fundamental purposes to intranets are: content, communication, collaboration, activity and culture. Each purpose plays a key role in meeting staff and organizational needs and successful intranets maintain a balance between all five.

Intranet teams benefit from having a clear picture of the current focus of their intranets, highlighting areas of strength and weakness. By focusing on improving key areas, intranet teams can transform their intranets into valuable business tools.

This article focuses on two of the five purposes and looks at where intranets are in terms of communication and collaboration. 

 

Communications

Intranets can do much to support communication and collaboration, which are now seen as integral to the success of modern organizations. Over the past few years we have seen intranets evolve in these areas from just providing news on the home page and the odd project collaboration space, to delivering tailored news, giving staff the ability to comment on, like or add to news articles, and promoting the use of social and other collaborative tools.

In Step Two’s annual Intranet Innovation Awards we have seen improvements in these areas including innovative use of team-based collaboration tools, knowledge-sharing initiatives, integration of other communication channels and uses of technologies such as blogs and wikis.

Intranet Communications Tailored to User Needs

The intranet has a clear role to play as a corporate communication channel, one that reaches most staff across the organization.

On most intranets, this consists of one or more news boxes on the home page, publishing regular items of organization-wide interest. While the intranet’s role as a communications channel is well recognized, it only delivers on this objective when the site is being regularly used, and news alone isn’t enough to draw staff to the site.

We are now seeing a move to tailoring communications to the needs of the audience with home page news including corporate messages as well as departmental, local or role-specific messages. As the intranet delivers greater business value within organizations, we see more effective use of intranet news.

Microblogging and the use of activity streams within the enterprise were prevalent among this year’s Intranet Innovation Award entries. While this is becoming standard in many intranets, success is not as common. 

Collaboration

Historically, there has been little corporate recognition of collaboration, and teams and business units were left with just email and shared network folders. Intranets acted solely as publishing and news platforms, providing access to corporate documents but not directly supporting collaboration.

The changing organizational landscape has made collaboration an imperative, to support knowledge sharing, enhance service delivery and improve competitiveness. In this year’s Intranet Innovation Award entries, we saw the continuation of the key theme that intranets were becoming increasingly "social" and more informal.

We also predicted that they would start to add more business value and this appears to be correct this year too. However, there is some way to go before social tools are truly integrated into core processes and workflow.

Social Tools Positioned Around how People Work

We are starting to see the use of social tools being positioned much more around how people work, than the value of the tools themselves. In this year’s awards, both Stockland and Coca-Cola Enterprises delivered new iterations of their intranets that integrated social tools into their homepages.

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com

SharePoint Business Governance Strategy: An Overview

Many portals, intranets, public websites and other solutions fail to deliver objectives and ROI within 6 months to a year because no one governs the solution. This series will share my high level SharePoint Business Governance strategy to help your company turn those success rates around.

The series will include: Introduction and Governance Strategy Overview, Governance Documents, Human Forces (Organization) and Project Governance. I will follow up with an additional post on Automated Governance and "From Strategy to Business Value.”

Introduction

In the SharePoint business there is a lot of buzz around governance today. Most of it is technical and involves how to automate governance with scripts and 3rd party applications. You can often read about how to script setups, manage sites, databases and security, etc.

Suppliers often say that they have a governance strategy to help your organization with governance planning, but what they really mean is that they can help you manage the solution they provide. Most often you get left all alone with a new “space shuttle” and a service contract to help out when the fire starts.

In the past 16 years I have worked in global organizations and had many roles where I have set requirements for projects and ordered solutions. I have too many times seen IT projects fail the organization's requirements, goals and objectives because of bad IT management. I have asked myself why we don’t learn from our mistakes, instead we make the same mistakes again and again.

Many products fail because a solution goes live before it is completed: that results in bad user adoption and usage. The end users get frustrated and IT tries to rescue the project by pumping in enormous amounts of recourses. This often ends up in the purchase of a new system.

Whatever it is that makes the projects fail, there is very seldom a supplier who can help the customer rescue a project or an already running solution. My belief is that many projects could have been saved if a supplier had intervened to help the organizations with knowledge, skills and experience.

To many, the word governance is the same as manage, but that’s not how I see it.

The word governance derives from the Greek verb κυβερνάω [kubernáo] which means to steer. To put it in context with SharePoint — it is about how one steers to reach one’s goals and objectives year after year, time and again. Business value should be the focus and the technology should be there to support that.

Governance is continuous in an organization, new needs and objectives will come along the way. The governance begins when the first thought/idea of a new solution arrives and it ends when that solution no longer helps you to reach business goals, or delivers a return of investment.

To govern a SharePoint solution requires organization, not only “Automated governance” but also human forces working together to reach common goals and objectives to deliver business value.

You are doomed to fail if you don’t have both. This is not easy in any way, but a very complex task. That is the reason I take on this challenge to help organizations reach their goals and objectives. Not as a one time occurrence, but continuously.

SharePoint Business Governance Strategy

Governance models often have the same name, but the content and the strategy within are very much different.

Based on my 16 years of experience in IT governance and many months of research I have put together a SharePoint Governance strategy that works.

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com