Category Archives: Enterprise 2.0

Housekeeping rules within the Habitat

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This is the third post in a series (1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7) on the challenges organisations face as they move from having online content and tools hosted firmly on their estate to renting space in the cloud.  We will help you to consider the options and guide on the steps you need to take.

 In the first post we set out the most common challenges you are likely to face and how you may overcome these.  In the second post we focused on how Office 365 and SharePoint can play a part in moving to the cloud.  Here we cover how they can help join up your organisation online using their collaboration tools and features.

Habitat

When arranging the habitat, it is key to address the theme of collaboration. Since each of these themes, derives different feature settings of artifacts and services. In many cases, teamwork is situated in the context of a project. Other themes for collaboration are the line of business unit teamwork, or the more learning networks a.k.a communities of practice. I will leave these later themes for now.

Most enterprises have some project management process (i.e. PMP) that all projects do have to adhere to, with added complementary documentation, and reporting mechanisms. This is so the leadership within the organisation will be able to align resources, govern the change portfolio across different business units. Given this structure, it is very easy to depict measurable outcomes, as project documents have to be produced, regardless of what the project is supposed to contribute towards.

The construction of a habitat, or design of a joint workplace, all boils down to pragmatic steps that are aligned with the overarching project framework at hand. Answering a few simple Questions (Inverted Pyramid):

  • Who? will be participating, who will own (organisation) the outcome from the joint effort pulling together a project (dc.contributor ; dc.creator ; dc.provenance ) and reach ( dc.coverage ; dc.audience )
  • What? is the project all about, topic and theme (dc.subject ; dc.title ; dc.description, dc.type )
  • When? will this project be running, and timeline for ending the project. All temporal themes around the life of a project. (dc.date)
  • Where? will participants contribute. What goes where and why? (dc.source ; dc.format ; dc.identifier )
  • Why? usually defined in project description, setting common ground for the goals and expected outcome. ( dc.description )
  • How? defines used processes, practices and tools to create the expected outcome for the project, with links to common resources as the PMP framework, but also links to other key data-sets. Like ERP record keeping and masterdata, for project number and other measures not stored in the habitat, but still pillars to align to the overarching model. (dc.relation)

When these questions have been answered, the resource description for the habitat is set. In Sharepoint the properties bag (code) feature. During the lifespan of the on-going project, all contribution, conversations and creation of things can inherit rule-based metadata for the artifacts from the collections resource description. This reduces the burden weighing on the actors building the content, by enabling automagic metadata completion where applicable. And from the wayfinding, and findability within and between habitats, these resource descriptions will be the building blocks for a sustainable information architecture.

 In our next post we will cover how to encourage employee engagement with your content.

Please join our Live Stream on YouTube the 20th November 8.30AM – 10AM Central European Time
View Fredric Landqvist's LinkedIn profileFredric Landqvist research blog
View Mark Morrell's LinkedIn profileMark Morell intranet-pioneer

Pace-Layering the Building Blocks in the Cloud

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This is the second post in a series (1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7) on the challenges organisations face as they move from having online content and tools hosted firmly on their estate to renting space in the cloud.  We will help you to consider the options and guide on the steps you need to take.

In the first post we set out the most common challenges you are likely to face and how you may overcome these.  In this post we focus on how Office 365 and SharePoint online can play a part in moving to the cloud.

Let us be pragmatic and down-to-earth! It is time to roll up our sleeves and consider using Office 365, as one example of how organisations can make this transition from their estate to the cloud.  Given that this is the collaborative space many organisations consider using, Office 365 is compelling as a one-size-fits-all, instant build and just roll-out enterprise-wide approach to take sometimes  without an Information Architecture plan whatsoever!

In the Office 365 environment, one has to map the terrain, so that there are distinct districts to where things relate – the same goes for the structure of neighborhoods of clustered habitats. But where it gets tough is to have an agile and resilient city plan for the real-world experience. This is actually the pillar construction in a digital domain, aiming for resilience and emerging uses over the time… but with a simple and agreed upon game plan.

https://flic.kr/p/67w5qd

Pace-layering the information architecture

Most organisations have an ontology of entities, things, that are generic, as stated in the W3C Organisation schema. And these perspectives, domain models, vocabularies and ontologies, add up to become districts, and neighborhoods in the Information Architecture map, with a few angles:

  1. Organisation Units (Business Unit, Division, Function, Group)
    1. Clients/Customers/Partners/Competitors
    2. Professional Networks
    3. Governing agencies, or regulatory entities, intermediaries
  2. Locations (Sites, Geographical places as  /world/continent/country/region/city/address …)
  3. Business Processes (Process & Activities)
  4. Professions, and Disciplines ( Roles), Practices
  5. Topics (derived from line of Business, and controlled vocabularies)
    1. Products
    2. Services
    3. Tasks
  6. Temporal (Events)

Regardless of line of Business for an organisation, these pan out as pretty good structural elements on which to build upon. Since an enterprise is a social construct with agreed borders, it is populated with people who act and interplay in various different ways, and have a multitude facets with regards to everyday work. Some entities change more frequently, generally in the organisational units further down in the leaves, and less so in the top main branches. The vocabularies within an organisation needs to be the center pillar, to reduce linguistic insecurities.

From an Information Architecture perspective, in using Office 365 or Sharepoint it is wise to use pace-layering to the building blocks, on to which navigational constructs are built upon. This means, using the highest level of the organisational unit tree branch, a pretty stable foundation for the site-structure can be built. This is where content and teamsites live. More fluid navigational themes (temporal, or topic entities) can then be added.

This goes for activities undertaken within daily practices, where a set of professions and disciplines interact. All of these activities lay out a tapestry of overarching business processes. The outcome or result, might be a thing that is detailed as topic taxonomies. For example, a product structure for a specific manufacturing industry. Since all organisations have actor networks in their ecology, it is preferable to add these entities into the structure, as clients, partners, competitor, regulatory agencies, social networks, communities of practice and so forth.

All of these set of terms, have to be maintained in a Managed Metadata Service, a.k.a TermStore. In most organisations there are other sources of their controlled vocabularies, hence mapping is key, to have aligned master term sets. Either through subscription models (batch) or enterprise-linked-data sets. All these actions, defines the terrain, so we map the ecosystem as taxonomic chartographers.

The Building Blocks: Artifacts and Collections

Office 365 comes with a pretty organised set of tools, themes and things to build upon. For more website related things, one could either use published web sites / portals, or enterprise wikis. The other main services are digital habitats, or collaborative spaces, team-sites. And lasty there are ESN (Enterprise Social Networks) like Yammer, and instant messaging tools like Lync, and Exchange Services like mail and calendar. Sharepoint Online and Office 365 is a Swiss Army Knife.

Within a collection, there are some key artifacts and services, content types:

  • documents
  • pages, web or wiki
  • calendars
  • to-do lists
  • blogs
  • forums
  • list object
  • and social objects to name a few.

If all of these included content types adhere to Dublin Core with a bare minimum of properties, the rest will follow just great.

We will cover more about how Office 365 and SharePoint collaboration tools can help join up your organisation online in our next post.

Please join our Live Stream on YouTube the 20th November 8.30AM – 10AM Central European Time
View Fredric Landqvist's LinkedIn profileFredric Landqvist research blog
View Mark Morrell's LinkedIn profileMark Morell intranet-pioneer

Intranets that have an impact

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Recently I attended Euroia, the European information architecture summit, where experts within the area meet up to discuss, share, listen and learn.

For me, one of the highlights was James Robertson from Step Two Designs, presenting some of the results from their yearly intranet awards. Intranets are fascinating in being large systems with such potential to improve daily work. However, more often than not they fail in doing so. As James Robertson put it “organizations and intranets is the place where user experience goes to die”.  So, what can we do to change that?

Robertson talked about successful companies managing to create structured, social and smart intranets. Two examples were the International Monetary Fund and a Canadian law firm. Both needed easy and secure gathering and retrieval of large amounts of information. Part of their success came from mandatory classification of published documents and review of changes. Another smart solution was to keep a connection between parent documents and their derivatives, making sure that information was trustworthy and kept up to date.

Companies that excelled at social managed to bind everything together; people projects and customers. I was happy to hear this, as we have been working a lot on this at Findwise. Our latest internal project was actually creating our own knowledge graph, connecting skills, platforms and technologies with projects and customers. What we haven’t done yet but other successful companies have, is daring to go all in with social. Instead of providing social functionality on the side, they fully integrate their social feed into the intranet start page. This I’d like to try at Findwise.

The ugliest but smartest solution presented by James, combined analytics with proper tagging of information. Imagine the following; a policy is changed and you are informed. However, you don’t need the policy until you perform a task months later. Now, the policy information is hidden in a news archive and you can’t easily find it. Annoying right?

What CRS Australia does to solve this problem is simple and elegant. They track pages users visit on the intranet. Whenever someone updates a page they enter whether it is a significant change or not. This is combined with electronic forms for everything. When filling in a form, information regarding policy updates pop up automatically, ensuring that users always have up to date information.

These ideas give me hope and clearly show that intranets needn’t be a place where user experience comes to die.

Search as an Integrator of Social Intranets

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Wikis, blogs, microblogs, comments, ratings…we all know the buzzwords around the “Social Intranet” by now. Can we consider search as an integrator of Social Intranets?

If the first trend was about getting people to use the new technology, the second seems to be about making sense of all the information that has been created by now.

I sat down with a number of our customers the other week to talk about intranets and internal portals and everyone seemed to face one particular challenge: making sense of the collaborative and social content. How do we make this sort of information searchable without losing the context? And how do we know who the sender is?

One approach which was discussed is to use the people card and search as an integrator between the social components. By using search we can easily integrate everything from microblogging-flows, to comments and contributes in different communities used in the enterprise. The search engine fetches the information and presents it real-time.

Social intranets and search

Social intranets and search

When searching for project One HR on the intranet you can, besides all search hits, get an overview of the owner of the project and all the related discussions that has been going on. Apart from this, networks i.e. people who has been involved can be shown – creating 360° view of the information.

What is your view of the future social intranets? Have you solved the issues with search in collaborative and social content?

Real Time Search in the Enterprise

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Real time search is a big fuzz in the global network called Internet. Major search engines like Google and Bing are now providing users with real time search results from Facebook, Twitter, Blogs and other social media sites. Real time search means that as soon as content are created or updated, it is immediately searchable. This might be obvious and seems like a basic requirement, but working with search you know that this is not the case most of the time. Looking inside the firewall, in the enterprise, I dare to say that real time search is far from common. Sometimes content is not changed very frequently so it is not necessary to make it instantly searchable. Though, in many cases it’s the technical architecture that limits a real time search implementation.

The most common way of indexing content is by using a web crawler or a connector. Either way, you schedule them to go out and fetch new/updated/deleted content at specific interval during the day. This is the basic architecture for search platforms these days. The advantage of this approach is that the content systems does not need to adapt to the search platform, they just deliver content through their ordinary API:s during indexing. The drawback is that new or updated content is not available until next scheduled indexing. Depending on the system this might take several hours. Due to several reasons, mostly performance, you do not want to schedule connectors or web crawlers to fetch content too often. Instead, to provide real time search you have to do the other way around; let the content system push content to the search platform.

Most systems have some sort of event system that triggers an event when content is created/updated/deleted. Listening for these events, the system can send the content to the search platform at the same time it’s stored in the content system. The search platform can immediately index the pushed content and make it searchable. This requires adaptation of the content system towards the search platform. In this case though, I think the advantages outweighs the disadvantages. Modern content systems of today are (or should be) providing a plug-in architecture so you should fairly easy be able to plug in this kind of code. These plug-ins could also be provided by the search platform vendors just as ordinary connectors are provided today.

Do you agree, or have I been living in a cave for the past years? I’d love to hear you comments on this subject!

Enterprise Search 2.0?

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While visiting Enterprise Search Summit in San Jose I realized that enabling Enterprise 2.0 within enterprise search is the hottest trend at the moment. Is it Enterprise Search 2.0?

Andrew McAfee who coined the term Enterprise 2.0 and has released a book on the subject, spoke about how to use altruism to develop the enterprise. People are wired to help and if we stop obsessing about the risks and lower the bars for how people can help each other it is possible to make this work within a corporate environment.

He also spoke about how process control and how much workflow control. How much do we really need? Make it easy to correct mistake instead of making it hard to make them. With regards to innovation he pointed out that we need to question credentialism and build communities that people want to join. To leverage the intelligence aspects within the enterprise we should explore and experiment with collective intelligence such as prediction markets and open peer review processes. All in all make it easy for people to interconnect.

Very high improvement in access to knowledge, internal experts, satisfaction, increased innovation and customer satisfaction.

I also recommend to read Price Waterhouse Coopers Technology Forecast Summer 2008 to get a good overview of the available tools and technologies.

So how does this impact enterprise search? Search can be made to be the facilitator for Enterprise 2.0. Of course it is possible to index and make all blogs, wikipedias, tweets (yammer), online communities and social networks searchable, but that is only one way to make it this new environment more findable. If someone tweets or blogs about information we should use that information to impact on the search results and ranking. We could also track user behavior on a site to make certain information more visible with regards to implicitly expressed interests.

Google Search Appliance Learns What You Want to Find

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Analyzing user behaviour is a key ingredient to make a search solutions successful. By using Search Analytics, you gain knowledge of how your users use the search solution and what they expect to find. With this knowledge, simple adjustments such as Key Matches, Synonyms and Query Suggestion can enhance the findability of your search solution.

In addition to this, you can also tune the relevancy by knowing what your users are after. An exciting field in this area is to automate this task, i.e by analyzing what users click on in the search result, the relevancy of the documents it automatically adjusted. Findwise has been looking into this area lately, but there hasn’t been any out-of-the-box functionality for this from any vendor.

Until now.

Two weeks ago Google announced the second major upgrade this year for the Google Search Appliance. Labeled as version 6.2, it brings a lot of new features. The most interesting and innovative one is the Self-Learning Scorer. The self learning scorer analyzes user’s click and behaviour in the search result and use it as input to adjust the relevancy. This means that if a lot of people clicks on the third result, the GSA will boost this document to appear higher up in the result set. So, without you having to do anything, the relevance will increase over time making your Search Solution perform better the more it is used. It’s easy to imagine this will create an upward spiral.

The 6.2 release also delivers improvements regarding security, connectivity, indexing overview and more. To read more about the release, head over to the Google Enterprise Blog.

Internet life in the Future

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I always think it’s nice when I hear people talking about the same things that are on my mind these days. It makes me reflect upon things in new ways and also makes me realize that I’m on to something. I attended a presentation by Björn Jeffery from Good Old (hosted by Region Västra Götaland). His talk on internet strategy was interesting and had many things in common with the keynote by Elizabeth Churchill (Yahoo) that I recently heard at the HCI2007 conference. Two things interested me most; the future of mobility and the inevitable question of integrity. So here are my thoughts today, on internet strategy and the future of internet usage.

Integrity

Today young people have become used to using different web 2.0 technologies such as Flickr, Facebook, Delicious etc. So we have seen the emergence of things such as social search and folksonomies. People gladly contribute with information about themselves and what they think and like. I believe this is a good thing, but there are also some risks with this. These risks are that once something is on the internet and is indexed, it’s out there and it stays there. Many people are not aware of that fact. How do you keep your integrity when everything about you can be found online? Integrity is very important when implementing these solutions in an enterprise setting.

How can people contribute without having to share their stuff with everyone else if they don’t want to? Björn Jeffery mentioned that we’ve gone from sharing nothing with noone to sharing everything with everyone and that he thought this would change back to us sharing a lot of things with many people. I hope he’s right. Teenagers might note care who they share their stuff with, but security and integrity are vital issues when considering enterprise solutions.

Mobility

In these days mobility has become an important thing. We not only expect to be able to find the information we need but to find it whenever we want from where ever we want to. I am actually writing this blog post on a train, and off course I expect to have access to all Findwise and other resources from here as well. As technology changes our behavior and expectations change with it, and so does society. (I covered excitement generators in a previous post about Jared Spools keynote on HCI2007.)

“I don’t use computers, love. This is just the internet”.

quote from Elizabeth Churchills keynote

Today there is no longer an association between internet and the computer screen. Mobile phones have become an increasingly popular way of accessing the internet. So, you can use search to access all your company’s information from a single point of access when ever you need it. Then maybe next step is mobile search on your intranet? That would not only make information become available at all time but from where ever you might be, and exactly when you want it.

So in conclusion of these talks; I think that in the future we will want to be able to access everything from everywhere at any time. We used to talk about time we spent online. That distinction isn’t really there any more. Today our tasks are interweawed, we don’t separate time we spend online and offline. (Something that becomes painfully obvious when trying to work on the train when you’ve forgotten the usbconnection for the mobile internet.) And in that time we spend online we also need to define what things we want to share with whom. If we as designers can solve these things, I think we’re on to something promising.

Usability 2.0

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A lot is happening in the world of enterprise search. Recent blog posts include discussions of how enterprise 2.0 tools can be integrated into corporate systems; see discussions of taxonomies or integration on Social Glass for example. Or take a look at Bill Ives examples of people who achieved success with E 2.0, on the FAST Forward blog. These new trends are also starting to affect how we talk about usability. A couple of months ago there was a seminar about how web 2.0 technology have consequences for usability. (Watch the video from the seminar Usability 2.0.)

This week I am attending the 2007 HCI conference in Lancaster, UK. I will present an article, written together with Mattias Arvola, discussing how prototyping techniques can structure conversation in different stakeholder groups. On this traditional HCI conference, web 2.0and search technology have also entered the scene, with both keynotes and papers being presented about these subjects. Therefore I am looking forward to many interesting presentations and discussions about what effects enterprise 2.0 tools have on usability. So stay tuned for reports from the conference…

The Flexibility of Internet Search

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The expression “have you googled it?” meaning “did you search for it on the internet?” shows what an impact the worlds most valuable brand has made on people.

However, new development has provided several new and flexible ways of using search. The traditional way of searching often helps you find specific information that you know exist (presented in endless hit lists). Another approach is to let search help you find the things you didn’t know existed, but most likely help you put things into new perspectives.

One example is the recommended search solutions, such as music map or live plasma, which finds music or movies that are related to your search term and that you most likely will appreciate. Another example is what to rent that, by using different people’s preferences and searches, can recommend a good movie for your weekend.

Interesting and innovative approaches are also made by Chacha (a people powered search engine that actually has real people guiding you in the information jungle, helping you explore new information) and Speeglebot (that talks to you).

I could go on and on about these new solutions, but instead just conclude by saying that search provides the platform for gathering loads of knowledge from different sources and people, and presenting it in new ways! Keep your eyes open for these upcoming solutions, it won’t be long until it is used within your enterprise to find related information and people that will revolutionize your way of finding information.