Recently in Internal Category

In an ideal world, most internal (and external) documention, whether we're talking about user manuals for software, SPDs, or pension plan information would be held in a wiki, where users could update and edit content freely. Mention that to most HR departments, however, and the response is often "No - impossible". There is a lot of sensitivity around the accuracy of documentation, as the HR internal web site is increasingly viewed as authoritative and definitve. The prospect of users (ok employees) being able to freely edit text that has been checked and peer-reviewed, probably run past lawyers, and checked again, is just a non-starter. But there's still a need for dialogue, for feedback, and even user to user (peer to peer) conversation or help. I've thought for a while now that a nice compromise would be the "commented manual" pattern - as shown here on the MySQL documentation site. You can see that there is "official documentation" that is fixed, and underneath, clearly differentiated by using a different colour, are user comments for that page, which, for areas of concern or trouble, turn into user to user help, feedback on the documentation, etc. So, fixed documentation with employee involvement - the best of both worlds ? Technorati Tags: internal, employee, HR, documentation

...and do communication consultants help them ? This should be interesting - David Ferrabee of H&K is posing the question, andwill follow up, I hope, with some answers ! Read the first part here: Why do companies lie?

Technorati Tags: internal, communication, comms

Interesting - it seems as if Michael Rudnick, Watson Wyatt's Global Intranet and Portal Practice Leader, has started a blog - Employee Portals 2.0. Toe in the water time - it's a blogger blog, hosted on blogspot, and not referring to WW, but the fact that he's taken the first step further demonstrates blogging's penetration into the world of professional service firms. I expect this trend to accelerate rapidly in 2006. His first substantive entry describes some basic and fairly well known internal uses for RSS, such as delivering HR communication. While this distribution of generic information is, of course, of value, I'm starting to think that there are many interesting uses beyond this, particularly when RSS and personalisation start being mashed up. I touched on this use back in January - RSS and aggregators protect against phishing, but the internal use cases are just as interesting. Providing a personalised RSS feed from, for example, a total rewards site (or HR site) would provide quick and efficient delivery of vital info, without requiring an employee to visit the site. Stock plan value updates, pension plan updates, back end administrator query resolutions/updates, targeted communications, etc. Of course, getting an employee to subscribe in the first place will be a challenge, but if we imagine a reasonably well developed internal RSS consumption infrastructure, then injecting these feeds into an employee's personal aggregator should be possible. The other thing that sprung to mind was that identity confirmation is going to become even more important, both for ensuring that people get only the feeds they are entitled to, but also to ensure that people who start blogs are who they say they are. This doesn't mean that I think it isn't Michael Rudnick blogging, but it did occur to me that it would be easy to set up a blog in someone else's name, and do some damage to their reputation. And with that thought - have a great Christmas - I'm in Quebec looking forward to getting some decent snowboarding done, and looking at the mounds of snow outside, I think I've a good chance ! Technorati Tags: internal, RSS

Fredrik Wackå does some translating  and lets us know that Klaus Kleinfeld, CEO of Siemens, has an internal blog.

An interesting look into the blog plans of the largest German companies: Five of 30 are already using internal or external blogs, and five more are examing the tool. Among the bloggers we find the boss of Siemens, Klaus Kleinfeld, who uses his intranet blog to talk about visits to different companies in the group, technology, trends and innovation.

This was also peripherally mentioned in BusinessWeek

Kleinfeld's toughest task may be to remold the mind-set of Siemens' managers and employees so that they can keep up with the accelerating pace of technological change as well as the emergence of new economic powers such as India and China. "The landscape of our customers and competitors is changing drastically, and you have to adapt to that," he says. Kleinfeld is leading by example, documenting his frenetic schedule on a daily internal quasi-blog. "Spent a few days in Mumbai, Kalwa, and Delhi," he wrote during trip to India in April. "The energy and sheer potential in this region are tremendous."

Technorati Tags: internal, corporate, CEO, blogging, Siemens

Alistair from Headshift talking about using a wiki (Confluence) for project communication / management during a project. Always good to hear real stories from the field, and I love the idea of creating the minutes during the meeting..

We've been using our enterprise wiki, Confluence, to keep track of things, and I have to say, it's proved an invaluable tool for this situation. In the planning meetings - which can last hours - we can very quickly record our technical discussions and create agreed minutes in the meeting itself, as we go along. The only tools needed are a web browser and, ideally, a projector, and the attendees can see the meeting notes (and the plan itself) developing in real time. This also helps keep the meeting focussed : you have an identifiable goal ( "ok, by the end of this meeting we want to have sections X, Y and Z done..." ) and everyone can see the progress towards that goal as it happens. Even non-attendees can see the progress of the meeting while it's taking place, either by viewing the in-progress Confluence page or via RSS.

Technorati Tags: wiki, confluence

No time to go into this in much detail, but will be following up on think again, ideascape moves people to action

Ideascape is a platform for enterprise blogging (one for each employee), bookmarking, and content management that we install, maintain, and support on your servers (requires LAMP - linux, apache,mysql, & php) or ours. Payment is based on a monthly subscription. Ideascape is based almost entirely on open source software. To start off, we provide inter-connected, scalable blogging tools/services and implementation consulting services - a methodology, to make the whole process of getting up to speed hassle free. From internal and external blogging policies and training/education on Ideascape to creating specialized taxonomies/folksonomies as well as customizing the software that runs the blogs, wikis, forums , RSS feeds, and bookmarking/tagging services.