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Intranet Innovation Awards 2009

Here is my review of the Intranet Innovation Awards 2009 report by of Step Two Designs (thank you James for the review copy).

The report has 10 case studies from around the world, each showcasing an idea, an innovation that serves a specific business requirement.

The areas judged cover business solutions, frontline delivery, communication and collaboration and core functionality.

I recommend that you read Alex Manchester’s summary of the award winners to get a glimpse of the detail and richness the report provides.

Given below are the main reasons I find myself carrying the report along when meeting clients or when discussing intranet designs.

If you are an intranet sponsor, intranet manager or intranet consultant, this report will help you get discussions off to a good start. Getting a packaged report like this that includes screenshots and commentary around good solutions is hard to come by. This report fills the gap and is a valuable addition to the literature.

The report is available for online purchase at US$ 189.00 from the Step Two website.

intranets Add tag Permalink | Saturday, November 28, 2009

You Can’t Innovate Like Apple

Alain Breillatt summarises why companies will find it hard to innovate like Apple.

First, forget about it unless you are willing to invest significantly and heavily to establish a culture of innovation like Apple’s. Because it’s not just about copying Apple’s approach and procedures. The vast majority of executives who say, “I want to be just like Apple,” have no idea what it really takes to achieve that level of success. What they’re saying is they want to be adored by their customers, they want to launch sexy products that cause the press to fall all over themselves, and they want to experience incredible financial growth. But they generally want to do it on the cheap.

innovation, apple Add tag Permalink | Saturday, November 28, 2009

Search User Interfaces - Marti Hearst’s book available online free of charge

Marti Hearst’s new book is now available for reading online - “To make this book available to as many readers as possible, the author, with permission of Cambridge University Press, has placed the full text online free of charge.”

This is a fantastic resource. Thanks Marti. Thanks CUP.

If you want a quick reference of Marti’s book - watch her giving this presentation of her book to Google. 

interface, search Add tag Permalink | Friday, November 27, 2009

iPhone + Book = Phonebook

Now this is interesting. The video does look very impressive.

interesting, school Add tag Permalink | Monday, November 23, 2009

A Good Way to Change a Corporate Culture

Peter Bregman makes a wonderful case of highlighting the need to embed the organisation’s culture with stories of change as a way to bring about the change.

“I told him not to change the performance review system, the rewards packages, the training programs. Don’t change anything. Not yet anyway. For now, just change the stories. For a while there will be a disconnect between the new stories and the entrenched systems promoting the old culture. And that disconnect will create tension. Tension that can be harnessed to create mechanisms to support the new stories.”

knowledge management, storytelling Add tag Permalink | Monday, November 23, 2009

Reflections from KM World 09

I had a wonderful 3 days at KM World 09 in San Jose. Much of the enthusiasm was in meeting friends. I’ve known Thomas Vander Wal, for instance, only by his blog and so it was good to put a face to all those entries.

I made some new friends as well. These were the winners at the Intranet Innovation Awards. Thanks to James Robertson for making this happen.

Patrick Lambe, James Robertson, Thomas Vander Wal
(Patrick Lambe, James Robertson, Thomas Vander Wal)

As for the conference sessions themselves there were some good sessions and some not-so-good sessions, as it is to be expected in any conference. Here are my takeaways from the sessions.

I’ve not described much of the other sessions and presentations. The KM blog has got more content in this area. You can also read the tweets on the conference.

knowledge management, kmworld09 Add tag Permalink | Monday, November 23, 2009

Devlearn 09 - Day 3

Day 3 of Devlearn was a short event day, just 1 keynote and 2 breakout sessions. It started off really well with a keynote by Leo Laporte.

Leo is a wonderful storyteller. He told his story as a youngster trying to get into the mass media business. He described the difficulties and bottlenecks that the industry posed to people like him, from the high equipment costs to the very controlled distribution to the impenetrable bureaucracy. Only few people made it through the system, the rest were outliers waiting for their opportunity.

The opportunity came in the form of the microprocessor and the Internet. These two technologies lowered production and distribution costs and enabled mass media to be truly mass media—from many to many. The social media or Web 2.0 tipped this ability over. Nowadays it is easy for anyone to put up a video or talk station and reach out to the masses. Leo described how he started his Internet-based station with just $15k of equipment that reached out to hundreds of thousands of people.

Leo’s main idea is that the Internet and the social tools have lowered the barriers to entry for anyone who wants to work, play or learn on it.

My big takeaway from this conference is that I see the acceptance of a new form of learning, one that is very social and one that is very informal. The orderly well-defined structure of teaching and learning is breaking down and yielding to a more natural way that does not depend on a specific time and place for teaching and learning to happen.

My big fear is that people will take this new form of learning as the only natural way to learn. This is plain wrong. On the contrary this form of learning takes more from the learner, as now he has to analyse and filter from the hundreds of options and opinions that are available to him. The only natural part is that these options and opinions are coming from other people.

I can describe the situation like this: for many problems there is the possibility that the solutions are ‘out there’. Before the Web 2.0 capability came along it was difficult, if not impossible, to surface all of this knowledge from the community. Now with social media we are able to lower the barriers to this hidden knowledge. For example, don’t know how insurgents are using improvised explosives in Iraq? Well, we can ask the soldiers who are coming across this on a day-to-day basis. The New Yorker has a wonderful article on this type of knowledge at work.

But this is not the only way we learn. Sometimes we don’t know the discipline, sometimes there is just too much to be learned, sometimes it is all too complex. In all such cases we require detailed and serious study. It is how we become good at things. Assuming that all learning can take place through social media will do more harm than good. Let’s not forget this when celebrating Learning 2.0.

devlearn09 Add tag Permalink | Monday, November 16, 2009

Devlearn 09 - Day 2

Day 2 of Devlearn was much better for me. But it did not start out that way.

The second day keynote was by Eric Zimmerman, game designer and author of Rules of Play. Now Eric is a very smart chap, but his keynote was a mess. There was no structure in his presentation and his incessant “ahmmm” and “ahhhhs” drove me dizzy. I was not the only one who felt this way apparently. The Tweetboard had many tweets by people having this same feeling. After the dizzy spell, I was behind a couple of people leaving the conference room and this is what I heard: “Did you find it useful?” “Nah! There were both cute and confusing moments but mostly it was distracting”.

Cammy Bean has captured the essence of his keynote if you want to go through it.

Next I attended a very crisp and clear presentation by Dave Ragan who is responsible for training at Taco Bell.  He showed how Taco Bell is using an avatar (from CodeBaby) to present the courses and maintain consistency. He also showed the level of media and interactivity that these coursers have. But more importantly he showed how all of this training is helping Taco Bell meet its business objectives. Not fancy courseware here, just plain and simple—learn it; try it; and then show it to me—type of training.

The highlight of the day however was meeting Mark Oehlert from the Defence Acquisition University. Mark is someone who gets social media. He is using many, many different tools to re-engineer processes to make them more efficient. His focus was on using these Web 2.0 tools in serious applications. The centre of his universe is Twitter and he uses it in many different ways from seeking out options available out there to searching for knowledge from his staff.

They key theme I observed was that all these applications are built on the assumption that there are people who will constantly feed these applications via their tweets, blogs, comments, etc., and there are people who will constantly watch and respond to this stream of information. If there is no ‘social stream’ then it seems we’re talking of the Web 1.0 paradigm. 

To put all of this in perspective, the entire social media thing is working under the assumption that if there is a problem, we can throw the social stream at it and it will somehow get solved. How? Some like Mark seem to have figured it out while others choose to use the word “by emergence” or in simpler words, by magic.

devlearn09 Add tag Permalink | Friday, November 13, 2009

Devlearn 09 - Day 1

I’m in cold San Jose this week attending Devlearn 2009.

The first day keynote was by Andrew McAfee. He is the author of a recently published book, Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools for Your Organization’s Toughest Challenges.

I’m not going to describe the subject of his talk; there are many blogs that have done that already (here and here).

It was a nice talk and he gave many pointers. But he made no attempt to bridge the gap between Enterprise 2.0 and Learning 2.0. Or answer questions like ‘how Enterprise 2.0 can be used to leverage Learning 2.0?’

Maybe the breakout sessions were meant to do just that – and there were many, many sessions that had social media and especially Twitter in their agenda. This surprised me a lot, in a negative way. 

I found that there is a very big hype on using social media for learning. Many are talking about it and there seems to be a divide between those who have experimented with it or have a program for it and those who are just trying to grapple with their day-to-day learning challenges. The 2.0ers feel elevated, hip, trendy and scoff at the those who are still trying to make the best of taxpayer or shareholder money by being conservative and seeking out what works.

But all of this talk on social media I heard had a lot to say about the media part but very little on the learning part. They are still advocating the creating and access to content with very little attention on why this is being done and how is it going to help learning and improve performance in the long run. The systems view I think is missing here. The mantra seems to be “get social and you’ll learn”. This has a lot to say about the maturity of Learning 2.0.

Talking about maturity, there were many talks that were just blasts from the past – “How to grab attention”, “How to use video effectively”, etc. All I can say is, WOW!

Here is my frank opinion on the first day – the talks did not excite me but they did give me a good picture of the e-learning landscape in the US. It shows me what people are busy with and what they are experimenting with and what we can expect to see in the next few years. The total experience is more than the sum of the parts I guess.

But I can tell you what excited me – meeting Jay Cross. Here we are, two individuals on opposite sides of the planet, engrossed in each other’s work for over 10 years but never having met face-to-face. Then I finally see him and what a joy it was.

image

devlearn09 Add tag Permalink | Thursday, November 12, 2009

The Information Architecture of Behavior Change Websites

This research report looks at the IA of sites that are designed to influence behavioral change, for example, giving up smoking. The report identifies 3 types of structure: hierarchical, matrix (hypertext), tunnel (linear) and the hybrid (a mix of the other types).

“The Internet has rapidly become an accepted part of daily life for hundreds of millions of people worldwide. As a result, it is reasonable to conclude that these revolutionary advances will act as a catalyst to expand the scope and impact of both persuasive technology, in general, and of Internet-based health behavior change programs. We have highlighted the important role that IA designs can have upon the design and likely impact of online behavior change programs.”

Via Adaptive Path’s Signposts.

information architecture, health care Add tag Permalink | Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Communities of Practice: Optimizing Internal Knowledge Sharing

Michael Hawley has written an article describing how ‘Communities of Practice’ or CoPs can save intranets from the findabilty problem.

“The key to intranet success is to provide value to employees and give them a reason to visit the site repeatedly. One of the primary ways to achieve this is to connect employees with the people and groups with whom they need to collaborate. Workgroups, or communities of practice, provide the basis for a living, growing, vibrant space in which people can access the information they need, share best practices, and contribute to a shared knowledge base.”

I don’t think CoPs can save intranets. The CoPs may solve the local findability problem but not the global findability problem. What if a staff from another department wants to find something that sits in a siloed CoP? We’ve seen this again and again. A new technology comes along and people get excited with it, start using it and then find out they are doing the same things with the new technology as before.

In my experience, intranets have seen progress when changes are made to the process—the way the work is done.

In his talk yesterday Michael Sampson mentioned that when e-mail and shared access came to the enterprise we learned to work with them and became comfortable with them because the technology worked and because there was nothing better for a long period of time. Now we’re seeing a fast pace of change in the technologies available in the enterprise. These are much better and more efficient but we resist giving up our way of working.

There is always going to be this gap and if we don’t do something to bridge it then CoPs and whatever comes next will just add to the chaos.

intranets Add tag Permalink | Friday, November 06, 2009

You Can Get There From Here: Websites for Learners

Amber Simmons writes about making websites 'learner-friendly'.
"Most websites are not learner-friendly. Web creators might aim for beautiful, accessible, usable interfaces to house their smart, web-native content, but they don’t often have learners’ goals or needs in mind—if they even know what those needs are... As an industry, we haven’t done our best to make our content-rich websites suitable for learning and exploration. Learners require more from us than keywords and killer headlines. They need an environment that is narrative, interactive, and discoverable."
You may also want to skim an article I wrote back in 2001 titled Serendipitous learning.

instructional design, interaction Add tag Permalink | Wednesday, November 04, 2009

Anecdote Circles at High Speed

A great way to show a technique in action. Patrick Lambe speeds up a video of ‘Ancedote Circles’ and explains steps in the process.

knowledge management Add tag Permalink | Wednesday, November 04, 2009

Human behavior: the key to future tech developments

CNN reports on the increasing awareness and demand for digital ethnography education.

“As trained observers of how people in a society live, ethnographers can help companies figure out what people need and then work with designers to meet those needs with new (or more often tweaked) products and services. In a world in which ever more people are using technology products on a daily basis, such skills are increasingly in demand.”

ethnography Add tag Permalink | Sunday, November 01, 2009

The PEP Talks videos

PEP stands for Passion, Experience, People. It's an event where experts share their passions with college students. Nice talks all around. From Chis Rockwell on Mind of Design to Jim Hendrickson on "choosing" vs. "following" your career path.

innovation, events Add tag Permalink | Tuesday, October 27, 2009

Attending Devlearn 09 and KM World 09

The good folks at Devlearn have given me a journalists pass to attend Devlearn this year. So I am going. While I’m there I’ll also be attending KM World. I think it will be a terrific opportunity to meet the community and make new friends. If you are going as well and if you like to connect do mail me at maish-at-elearningpost.com. Looking forward to these events.

devlearn09 Add tag Permalink | Saturday, October 24, 2009

Why Are Web Sites So Confusing?

Andrei Hagiu assistant professor in the Strategy unit at Harvard Business School tries to rationalize why websites are so confusing:

“Thus, consumers coming to the supermarket to buy daily staples (say, bread and milk) might be induced to also get expensive chocolate if they have to walk past the corresponding aisle anyway. Shoppers visiting a mall for its anchor store (say, Macy’s) may decide to stop by a small design store while walking around the mall. And while flipping through the pages of a magazine in search of the article promised on the cover, readers are exposed to advertising, which produces most of the revenues.”

“In the same way, Google faces a subtle issue in designing its search result pages: consumers are mostly interested in the “objective” (i.e., middle) search results, but all revenues come from the sponsored search ads on the right hand side. The result is a compromise between what users want and what produces more revenues. For any given search, the 11th objective search result might be more relevant than any of the sponsored search results displayed on the right; yet it will be displayed on the second search page only—well beyond the reach of most users.”

information architecture, usability Add tag Permalink | Wednesday, October 21, 2009

The Myth of Usability Testing

Robert Hoekman Jr. discusses the reliability of usability tests in the latest issue of A List Apart.

“Usability teams also have wildly differing experience levels, skill sets, degrees of talent, and knowledge, and although some research and testing methods have been homogenized to the point that anyone should be able to perform them proficiently, a team’s savvy (or lack thereof) can affect the results it gets. That almost anyone can perform a heuristic evaluation doesn’t mean the outcome will always be useful or even accurate. Heuristics are not a checklist, they are guidelines a usability evaluator can use as a baseline from which to apply her expertise. They are a beginning, not an end.”

usability, research Add tag Permalink | Tuesday, October 20, 2009

The essence of qualitative research: “verstehen”

Nice post by Sam Ladner on sample size when conducting qualitative research. Ladner says “Folks, qualitative research does not worry about numbers of people; it worries about deep understanding”. I can relate with this because I’m writing a response to a proposal that has stated the problem only briefly but has spent the rest of the proposal describing how they want the research to be executed, along with the exact number of people to interview, etc. This is an example of a quantitative proposal to solve a qualitative problem.

research Add tag Permalink | Monday, October 19, 2009

Libraries and Readers Wade Into Digital Lending

NY Times reports on the emerging trend of borrowing e-books from libraries. It’s all nice but there are some cracks—e-books are treated as physical books. “Most digital books in libraries are treated like printed ones: only one borrower can check out an e-book at a time, and for popular titles, patrons must wait in line just as they do for physical books. After two to three weeks, the e-book automatically expires from a reader’s account.”

social media, school Add tag Permalink | Friday, October 16, 2009

Google Wave’s Best Use Cases

Life Hacker asked people: How would you use Google Wave? They got over 600 responses. Here is a list of their top picks. Cool!

“Dozens of teachers, students, and academics of all stripes wrote in saying that they need better and faster ways to communicate and collaborate in and out of the classroom…”

collaboration, google Add tag Permalink | Thursday, October 15, 2009

7 principles for decentralized publishing

Jane McConnell writes about 7 principles for decentralised publishing on the intranet.

“If you are a large, global organization, you will have many different types of content with varying degrees of ownership depending on the source: business unit, country, function, etc. Ask the different business units and functions to define their own guidelines for what type of content require approval by what level or role.”

content strategy, intranets, content management Add tag Permalink | Saturday, October 10, 2009

Barriers to Intranet Use from Forrester

Bill Ives has summarized a Forrester report on “What’s Holding Back Your Intranet?”. The findings are not surprising.

“They found that 93% of employee respondents said they use an intranet or company portal (Forrester uses the terms interchangeably) at least weekly, and more than half reported daily use. However, they found that these intranets were mostly accessed for basic functions such as company directory, benefits information, and payroll. Access to collaborative tools, what some might called an enterprise 2.0 capability was ranked fourteenth.”

intranets Add tag Permalink | Thursday, October 08, 2009

A Look Behind The Curtain At YouTube’s User Experience Research

Jason Kincaid writes about how YouTube tries to constantly test out and understand how its users are using the website.

“To help gauge the Watch page’s ideal layout, YouTube invited in a number of users and gave them magnets that represented different elements from YouTube and other popular video sites. The results were not surprising, but they present an interesting challenge to YouTube: the vast majority of users chose to streamline their page as much as possible, featuring a large video player, a search box, and a strip of related videos. But the site’s heavy uploaders, who are obviously key to YouTube’s success, tended to favor a more complex site with a greater emphasis on analytics, sharing, and social interaction.

YouTube’s task is to figure out a way to appeal to both sets of users.”

governance, usability, research Add tag Permalink | Tuesday, October 06, 2009

HBR: The Simplest Way to Reboot Your Brain

The Harvard Business Review has an article by Robert Stickgold where he writes about the benefits of sleep:

“A report in the June 2009 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showed that a nap with REM (or “dream”) sleep improves people’s ability to integrate unassociated information for creative problem solving, and study after study has shown that sleep boosts memory. If you memorize a list of words and then take a nap, you’ll remember more words than you would without sleeping first. Even micronaps of six minutes—not including the time it takes to fall asleep, which is about five minutes if you’re really tired—make a difference.”

innovation, interesting, neuroscience Add tag Permalink | Tuesday, October 06, 2009

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