Recently in Internal Category

Having spent a fair amount of time consulting on intranets and internal applications, as well as being on the receiving end as a user, one thing that's *almost* invariably true is the following...

http://stuffthathappens.com/blog/2008/03/05/simplicity/

Missed this the first time around - a podcasted interview from ETech with Lee Bryant talking about some of the philosophy of the Headshift approach. Good stuff. [tags]headshift, podcast, social[/tags]

I'm running a workshop this Friday morning in Barcelona on how technology - social media - can transform internal communications. All part of a conference being put on by the BlackBrooke Institute - "The Missing Links of Internal Communication". Should be fun. [tags]internal comms, internal, conference, blackbrooke, barcelona[/tags]

Shiv Singh from Razorfish announces that the Razorfish report on intranets has been wikified and is available at The Intranet Maturity Framework. Nice idea, we'll see how it plays out, and whether a better report comes out of it. I'm also interested to see how the rights (and credit) issue gets played out. I've suggested they clarify terms by adding a Creative Commons license - which in itself might be an internally controversial idea. Haven't really read the report, but I did notice that it looks as if Razorfish have got a big downer on internal blogging:

Some employee blogs will last, but, unfortunately, most won't. Many companies that enthusiastically set up employee blogs ignored the two most important ingredients for blogging success. The first is that the blogger needs to have something important and unique to say. According to a recent survey by America Online, the most popular blogs are the most personal and opinionated ones. Most organizations have cultures that subconsciously encourage information hoarding and group think. These organizations will find that their employees are reluctant to share their knowledge and personal insights unless they see tangible benefits to doing so. As a result, most employee blogs will be superficial and boring unless, of course, they are anonymous.

The AOL survey was about external blogs. We're discussing internal use here. Apples vs Oranges ? I think so. I agree there will be many cultural issues (and frankly, the companies with those sorts of cultures probably won't even green light a company wide blogging infrastructure), but a blanket prediction of most internal blogs failing is, I think, a pretty big leap. And finally - could I have chosen a worse title for this post ? [tags]internal, corporate, razorfish, wiki, blogs, intranet[/tags]

Cogenz is a social bookmarking service (like del.icio.us), but explicitly designed for enterprises: instead of the del.icio.us model of a huge vat of shared tag soup (ignoring private bookmarks), cogenz pours the soup into different company bowls and only allows you to drink from your own bowl. OK, enough with the soup analogy - basically it allows companies to have a private version of del.icio.us and not worry about installing and maintaining scuttle or similar). Niall Cook noticed my attempt to sneak in and register before they officially opened up the beta, and was gracious enough to let me be the first external person to access the beta site, and I've been playing with it for a couple of days. After some problems caused by a slight mismatch in our shared understanding - read his post to be clear on what cogenz is and how it works, I think I can post some initial thoughts. Short summary - pretty good, especially for a first release. Clean and simple design, and does most of the simple bookmarky and taggy things one might expect. Everything is feed enabled, and the site throws up related users. If the site stays as it is and no more functionality was added, I think it would be of value to many companies wanting to experiment and start using social bookmarks without having to do it in public. So, now you can tag intranet pages and interesting external content without worrying about what is being revealed to the outside world. Of course, you still have to worry about who's reading it from inside your company, but that's a separate problem ! Of course, nothing is perfect, and here are some quick thoughts I jotted down (Google Notebook really is good for this kind of activity). Nothing horrific, and probably in the plan for future releases.

• Should be able to search for users
• Can't see how to tag a user (although people can tag themselves)
• Permissioning model may be too simple (although I could be trying to make it too complex)
• currently it looks binary (either part of company and therefore able to access all bookmarks, or not part of company and thus not able to read any bookmarks).
• But, how do we share a limited set of content with an external partner.
• Should the system warn if trying to share bookmarks that really are internal (ie point to an intranet that is inaccessible outside the firewall)

See my post for a link to a talk by Joshua Schachter of del.icio.us - where he talks briefly about groups and networks, and this post (in fact the whole blog) from Steve Eisner talks in more detail about some of the issues with permissioning tags and groups. Anyway - nice work guys, it will be interesting to see where this goes, and what the pricing model is ! [tags]cogenz, tags, social, bookmarks, delicious[/tags]

I'm watching John Seely Brown's plenary address at the 2006 Collaborative Technologies Conference, which is a wide ranging and fascinating talk on ways and forms of collaboration. Lots of good stuff and plenty of blog activity around this and the other talks - but in many ways echoing (in a good way) what is rapidly becoming the conventional wisdom in our brave new world...mashups, Second Life, "honouring the emergent", etc. Something that did make me think though, was his description of how an Asian apparel company (Li & Fung) has a large number of suppliers (10,000+) that it has organised into loosely coupled supply and innovation networks where knowledge, practice and process are shared between companies. Hmm...now the way I've generally thinking about collaboration, sharing, security, etc, has been fairly simplistic: there are essentially 2 situations - you're inside a firewall, or you're on the outside. Most available tools focus on the external world (technorati, del.icio.us, etc). Some companies are starting to think about replicating these tools and services within organisations (an external service probably cannot subscribe to, tag or bookmark internal content). But how do we facilitate sharing and collaboration across a number of different companies ? The partners don't have access each other's internal space, and using an external service reduces their ability to reuse internal content (unless they want to copy it to an external service, and then keep it up to date - yuck). It also maybe implies a need to agree on a common set of tools (good luck !) - and suddenly they're not very loosely coupled anymore. So, is there (or will there be) a need for something like a reverse proxy architecture that allows proxying of interesting internal content (feeds, web content, web service calls) to authorised external services ? Or am I making up solutions to problems that don't exist ? Or, even worse, am I misunderstanding something ? [tags]ctc2006, collaboration, internal, external, collaboration, proxy[/tags]