Planet Enterprise 2.0

Craig Thomler has written a post about choosing social networking tools. To quote:

I apply some fairly rigorous criteria. Any system must:

1. Meet W3C, Federal, Department and Agency web standards
2. Support at least AA accessibility (and preferably AAA)
3. Meet our ICT requirements for interoperability, stability, bandwidth use and technology platform
4. Integrate with our identification system
5. Be server lite
6. Track usage by user

Ok, so we thought with only 3 weeks lead-time, a room with space for 200 would be enough. We were wrong. :-)

As of this morning, the Presentation Zen session in Sydney run by Garr Reynolds has sold out. It's going to be a great session. If you've missed out, we'll certainly be endeavouring to bring him back to Sydney when we can...

Andrew McAfee has written up a list of frequently asked enterprise 2.0 questions. To quote:

As I’ve talked with many different audiences over the past two years about Enterprise 2.0, I’ve noticed that the same questions keep coming up, and I wanted to capture them. I’ll talk about the best answers to these questions later, and also about which of them seem to be most legitimate—to reflect the real risks a company takes on when it deploys emergent social software platforms (which from now on I’m just going to abbreviate as ESSPs). For now I just wanted to list them, and to make sure that I’m not missing any common ones.

Kas Thomas has raised some questions about the value of best bests in a search engine. To quote:

Not everyone thinks the "best bets" mechanism is a good idea. The problem is that, fundamentally, it's a hack. It's arguably the worst kind of hack in that it involves serious amounts of human intervention. Someone has to create the best-bet database. (Typically there will be hundreds, if not thousands, of best-bet links.) Then the database has to be updated and kept fresh as user needs change and documents are added to or dropped from the system.

Avi Rappoport has written about the long tail and short head of search. To quote:

The term "Long Tail" was popularized by Chris Anderson in his book and web site of the same name to describe the successful business model of Amazon and Netflix: offering huge selections of books and DVDs, significantly more than brick-and-mortar stores could ever hope to keep in inventory. Customer demand is expressed by searching, and the Long Tail describes the existence of a surprisingly large percentage of of unique search terms.

Janus Boye has written about the release of JSR 286, the latest portlet standard. To quote:

Standards generally go missing in this marketplace, but judging from the very limited attention this new version of the portlet spec has received, it makes me wonder whether the marketplace has already left the need for it in the dust. As a buyer the new industry standard might seem the preferred option over the many proprietary implementations that build on the shortcomings of JSR 168, but make sure to study the emerging implementations of the new standard carefully to avoid an early mover disadvantage.

I had the pleasure of catching up with Patrick Lambe when he was in town last week. Best yet, he provided me with a copy of their brand-new KM Method Cards.

80 cards in total, these cover a huge range of approaches, methods and tools. This includes methods such as appreciative inquiry, concept mapping, play of life, after action reviews, world cafe, and many many more.

This is a superb piece of work, and invaluable for knowledge management teams, in fact anyone with an interest in doing or learning about KM. There are so many uses for these cards, including:

• reviewing current techniques used, to identify gaps and opportunities
• learning about new approaches, using the cards as a "table of contents"
• sparking conversations amongst stakeholder sessions
• supporting facilitated discussions and other group formats
• underpinning formal training and skill sharing programmes
• breaking teams out of ruts or narrow fields of practice

These cards are both useful and fun. With KM being such a broad field, I strongly recommend everyone purchase a copy of these cards. Well done Patrick!

Craig Thomler has written an article on making government data freely available. To quote:

Rather than struggling, as it currently does, to design [web ]sites that meet each end-user need, we argue that the executive branch should focus on creating a simple, reliable and publicly accessible infrastructure that exposes the underlying data. Private actors, either nonprofit or commercial, are better suited to deliver government information to citizens and can constantly create and reshape the tools individuals use to find and leverage public data.

Avi Rappoport has written about the search usability research conducted at Open University in the UK. To quote:

Whitney Quesenbery and her colleagues convey the findings of a long study about how search is used at the UK's Open University, She gave a talk at the Enterprise Search Summit, and presented more formally at the Usability Professionals’ Association conference, in June 2008. The study included search log analysis, heuristic reviews, remote and local usability testing on the search user experience, over the course of several years, and they are linked from Whitney's valuable Search Usability page.

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Despite the late notice, we've had registrations flooding in for the Presentation Zen session in Sydney next Friday (4th July), presented by Garr Reynolds. We're approaching 150 people, but have space for just under 200, so it's not too late to get a seat. This is going to be an inspiring session, and I know I'm looking forward to it!

Click through the presentation above, or go straight to the event page.

Michael Angeles has written about the interesting idea of creating an Universal Edit Button. To quote:

There is a group of people getting around the idea of having a Universal Edit Button in browser bars to indicate when a page is editable. The green pencil icon is similar to the orange "broadcast" RSS icon that indicates there is an RSS feed available.

Alex Kirtland has written an article on designing rating systems (eg. where users score from 1 to 5). To quote:

Where would we be without rating and reputation systems these days? Take them away, and we wouldn’t know who to trust on eBay, what movies to pick on Netflix, or what books to buy on Amazon. Reputation systems (essentially a rating system for people) also help guide us through the labyrinth of individuals who make up our social web. Is he or she worthwhile to spend my time on? For pity’s sake, please don’t check out our reputation points before deciding whether to read this article.

Jane McConnell talks about a number of issues which aren't priorities for intranet teams. To quote:

What bothers me the most is to see "Risk management" next to the bottom of the list. If we want the intranet to become a business critical tool, the way of working, the single entry point into the organisation's information and collaboration resources, etc. - all those good things we keep talking about, then why are intranet managers not more interested in seeing how other organisations are managing the risks.

There's a new site: Information Architecture TV. To quote:

Information Architecture Television is a weblog that contains quite an extensive collection of online videos concerning usability, information architecture, interaction design and user experience design.

[Thanks to putting people first.]

Richard Dennison has written about the newly-launched social networking tools in BT. To quote:

Top left is the normal friends functionality … only we call them contacts because it would never do to have friends at work … this also displays a newsfeed of your contacts’ current activities or status (you can edit your status at the top of the page)

Registration for Open Publish 08 is now open, and it's not to be missed. This has evolved into the definitive content management conference within Australia, covering web content management, structured (XML) content, content strategy and much more.

Run by practitioners for practitioners, this isn't a hollow excuse for vendor pitches like some other events. Instead, it provides a great opportunity to catch up with fellow content folks, and to hear insights from those that have actually done it.

(I'll be running a pre-conference workshop on selecting a CMS, as well as presenting on collaboration in the conference. Cairo Walker will also be presenting on the WWF project we've been doing.)

Angela Quail has written about assessing the validity of personas. To quote:

Robust Personas are personas we can stand behind with confidence. We have conducted stakeholder interviews, internal research interviews, general industry and domain research, ethnographic field research, and we have tried hard to shoot holes in what we have found. We have conducted as many in-person ethnographic interviews as possible in each target segment or sub-segment. We have identified patterns of thought or behavior only if we have seen them occur multiple times. We have sifted through existing quantitative and other qualitative research to confirm or refute what we have seen. And as we developed the personas, we asked refining questions with follow-up phone interviews. Our personas look and act like real customers, which we have confirmed through preliminary introductions to select customer-facing employees in customer service, support, and sales. We confidently deliver these personas to our client with few, if any disclaimers.

[Thanks to Steve Mulder.]

Jane McConnell has released the results of a quick poll on hot topics for intranet managers. To quote:

1. We are getting back to intranet basics - that is to say (a) users finding what what need and (b) raising intranet awareness in general.

The chart below shows the top 10 topics. You'll see that "search & findability" leads all other issues. It's followed by roles and perceptions of the intranet and obstacles holding the intranet back.

These fundamental issues risked getting lost in all the excitement about social media behind the firewall. It is reassuring to see that intranet managers have their feet firmly on the ground!

James Dellow has written about intranets and document management systems, and the relationships between them. To quote:

Question: How do you decide what content goes on intranet and what content goes on a Document Management System. Is it an issue in your organization?

What is the intranet for? An easy question to ask, but surprisingly hard for many intranet teams to answer.

To be successful, intranets must have a clear definition of their purpose and character. This underpins decisions about future directions, as well as current priorities and activities.

Answering this question goes a long way to defining the intranet 'brand'. More than just colours and logos, the brand captures and communicates the nature of the intranet.

This briefing will outline a simple technique to start the process of determining the intranet brand.

Product Reaction Cards

The user experience team at Microsoft have published a very interesting tool called the 'Product Reaction Cards', which can be freely downloaded from the team's website:

www.microsoft.com/usability/UEPostings/ProductReactionCards.doc

This contains a wide range of words that can be used to describe almost any product, whether physical or electronic.

It includes words such as 'innovative', 'engaging', 'collaborative', 'reliable', 'effective' and 'useful'.

These can be used to help define the future direction and role of the site, narrowing down the many possibilities to one clear direction.

The cards also contain a range of negative words, such as 'dated', 'overwhelming', 'irrelevant', 'busy', and 'complex'.

These have obvious application to the current intranet in many organisations.

[CM Briefing 2008-08, read the full article]