Intranets should be task oriented | Leadership Development. Intranets must help people do what they have already decided to do Gerry McGovern helps organisations design value-driven intranets. That is, making corporate intranets create satisfaction and added value for employees, companies and their clients rather than pain and frustration. I’ve picked a few of his views on wise intranet design and management shared in a talk he gave in Oslo recently. Intranets should be task oriented Organise the intranet according to tasks, not the organisational chartAllign to the users’ mental models First, what does it mean to have a “task based organisation of the intranet”?
Most wanted functionality in an intranet (sample) Thus, identify what are the most crucial tasks for employees in a company to solve. Second, alligning to users’ mental models is essential. Test whether the intranet actually helps you complete your work McGovern emphasises the need for testing the user value of an intranet. Determining the ROI of Enterprise 2.0. Despite recent statistics showing that Enterprise 2.0 tools have spread to about a third of businesses globally, there remain ongoing questions being asked in the enterprise software community about the real returns that they provide to businesses that deploy them.Many IT solutions create value only after traveling through an indirect chain of cause and effect.
Certainly blogs, wikis, and social networks are popular on public networks, but does that translate to meaningful bottom line value to organizations? In other words, is Enterprise 2.0 truly strategic in the unique way that information technology can so often be? This is a key question since actual penetration of these tools is almost certainly lower than the one third figure I mention above. Most organizations today, even the ones where the applications are available to employees currently, are not yet exhorting workers to adopt these tools en masse despite a suite of compelling arguments and a growing set of case studies. ROI of Social Networking for TransUnion. Internet Evolution interviewed TransUnion CTO John Parkinson about the ROI of Social Networking. It is relatively early in their use of Socialtext, but they are already achieving significant success.
Here is the sidebar article, quoted in full: Can’t put an ROI on social networking? TransUnion CTO John Parkinson has his: an estimated $2.5 million in savings in less than five months while spending about $50,000 on a social networking platform. The savings comes from buying less stuff. TransUnion is one of the big three credit report companies, and it runs on a lot of custom software code. Instead of buying more gear to improve IT performance, employees are brainstorming ideas across larger groups on the company’s Socialtext platform. While the estimated ROI numbers look promising, Parkinson stresses that wasn’t why TransUnion got started with social networking.
The Socialtext platform has profiles, a wiki capability, and instant messaging. . – Chris Murphy (cjmurphy@techweb.com) Rise of the networked enterprise: Web 2.0 finds its payday - McKinsey Quarterly - Organization - Strategic Organization. Every new technology has its skeptics. In the 1980s, many observers doubted that the broad use of information technologies such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) to remake processes would pay off in productivity improvements—indeed, the economist Robert Solow famously remarked, “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.”
Today, that sentiment has gravitated to Web 2.0 technologies. Management is trying to understand if they are a passing fad or an enduring trend that will underwrite a new era of better corporate performance. Podcast The rise of the networked enterprise: Web 2.0 finds its payday McKinsey Global Institute senior fellow Michael Chui discusses how leaders can prepare for the new business environment as well as the latest results from McKinsey’s survey of global executives on their use of Web 2.0. New McKinsey research shows that a payday could be arriving faster than expected. The findings Web 2.0 technologies are now more widely used.
How businesses are using Web 2.0: A McKinsey Global Survey - McKinsey Quarterly - Marketing - Digital Marketing. 14 Reasons Why Enterprise 2.0 Projects Fail | Enterprise Web 2.0 | ZDNet.com. Creating and nurturing a community is not something at which traditional stakeholders in software projects are often skilled. I've been having some very interesting conversations lately about Enterprise 2.0 failures with ZDNet colleague Michael Krigsman. He is doing research for his work on project failures in this area and is trying to understand the reasons why some Enterprise 2.0 initiatives don't succeed. In preparing for our talk together, I ended up doing quite a bit of my own research and the results, at least for me, surfaced some fascinating stories and insights that are worth examining examining here in detail. It's a classic adage that we usually learn more from our failures than from our successes.
For one, IT doesn't seem to be in the driver's seat nearly as much with Enterprise 2.0. Intriguingly, that this is a bad thing is quite debatable in the case of Enterprise 2.0. Venture Model + Rogue IT = Enterprise 2.0 Success? 14 Reasons Why Enterprise 2.0 Projects Fail.