Tag Archives: Stockholm

Mobility 2013 top trend among Sweden’s CIOs

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Each year CIO Sweden conducts a trend survey among Sweden’s CIOs. They also host an annual event where they discuss the results and the CIOs from some of Sweden’s largest companies talk about their vision. On February 6 I attended this year’s CIO Trends event at Münchenbryggeriet in Stockholm.

The main conclusion from this year’s survey is that compared to last year not that many things have changed. However, one interesting change this year was that last year’s most important trend, cloud and cloud solutions, had been kicked down by Mobility. Mobility as in easiness to move around not only in the office but also in large scales around the world. Information should always be on your fingertip no matter the device or connection. The Cloud is still a hot topic and focus on that is still high among companies. I guess henceforth we will see more of a combination of the two where you use cloud to create more mobility.

Fun fact of the day from the CIOs of Sweden: The most common CIO in Sweden is Male (84%), around 45-49 years old (33%) and don’t like shopping (2%).

//Ludvig Aldrin still Sweden’s youngest CIO (CIO’s under 30,  1%)

Findability day in Stockholm – search trends and customer insights

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Last Thursday about 50 of Findwise customers, friends and people from the industry gathered in Stockholm for a Findability day (#findday12). The purpose was simply to share experiences from choosing, implementing and developing search and findability solutions for all types of business and use cases.

Martin White, who has been in the intranet business since 1996, held the keynote speech about “Why business success depends on search”.
Among other things he spoke about why the work starts once search is implemented, how a search team should be staffed and what the top priority areas are for larger companies.
Martin has also published an article about Enterprise Search Team Management  that gives valuable insight in how to staff a search initiative. The latest research note from Martin White on Enterprise search trends and developments.

Henrik Sunnefeldt, SKF, and Joakim Hallin, SEB, were next on stage and shared their experiences from working with larger search implementations.
Henrik, who is program manager for search at SKF, showed several examples of how search can be applied within an enterprise (intranet, internet, apps, Search-as-a-Service etc) to deliver value to both employees and customers.
As for SEB, Joakim described how SEB has worked actively with search for the past two years. The most popular and successful implementation is a Global People Search. The presentation showed how SEB have changed their way of working; from country specific phone books to a single interface that also contains skills, biographies, tags and more.

During the day we also had the opportunity to listen to three expert presentations about Big data (by Daniel Ling and Magnus Ebbeson), Hydra – a content processing framework – video and presentation (by Joel Westberg) and Better Business, Protection & Revenue (by David Kemp from Autonomy).
As for Big data, there is also a good introduction here on the Findability blog.

Niklas Olsson and Patric Jansson from KTH came on stage at 15:30 and described how they have been running their swift-footed search project during the last year. There are some great learnings from working early with requirements and putting effort into the data quality.

Least, but not last, the day ended with Kristian Norling from Findwise who gave a presentation on the results from the Enterprise Search and Findability Survey. 170 respondents from all over the world filled out the survey during the spring 2012 that showed quite some interesting patterns.
Did you for example know that in many organisations search is owned either by IT (58%) or Communication (29%), that 45% have no specified budget for search and 48% of the participants have less than 1 dedicated person working with search?  Furtermore, 44,4% have a search strategy in place or are planning to have one in 2012/13.
The survey results are also discussed in one of the latest UX-postcasts from James Royal-Lawson and Per Axbom.

Thank you to all presenters and participants who contributed to making Findability day 2012 inspiring!

We are currently looking into arranging Findability days in Copenhagen in September, Oslo in October and Stockholm early next spring. If you have ideas (speakers you would like to hear, case studies that you would like insight in etc), please let us know.

How to Create Knowledge Sharing Intranets and the Role of Search

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“If only HP knew what HP knows, we would be three times more productive”

The quote is a statement from the former chief executive of Hewlett-Packard, Lew Platt and summarizes this week’s discussion on knowledge sharing intranets at the conference “Sociala intranät” (Social Intranets) in Stockholm.

For two days intranet managers, editors, web strategists and communication managers gathered in Stockholm to talk about the benefits (and pitfalls) of knowledge sharing intranets where the end-users share and contribute with their own and their colleagues information. And what role search plays in a Social Intranet.

A number of larger companies and organization, such as TeliaSonera, Thomas Cook, Manpower and Perstorp, have started their second generation of intranets: where blogs, collaborative areas, wikis, personalization, micro blogging (see the twitter flow from the conference)  and Facebook-inspired solutions finally seem to work in a larger scale.

The pioneers, such as Fredrik Heidenholm from Skånemejerier, has been doing it without a large budget – proving that social intranets are more about users than expensive technical solutions.

Read interviews of Fredrik Heidenholm, Gunilla Rehnberg (Röda Korset) Hans Gustafsson (Boverket)  and Lisa Thorngren (Thomas Cook Northern Europe – Ving).

And in general, the speakers as well as the attendees seem to be agreeing with one another: having the whole organization contributing with their knowledge is a prerequisite for keeping knowledge sharing intranets alive.

But letting everyone create information requires a good enterprise search solution, something some of Findwise customers, such as Ericsson and Landstinget i Jönköping, talked about: “Search promotes the value of our social intranet” said Karin Hamberg, Enterprise Architect, at Ericsson. Search makes it possible to gather information from all kind of sources and make it accessible from one entrance. However, this also requires strategies for handling security restrictions (who should have access to what?), metadata models, user experience (expectations and behavior) and ranking (who determinates which results that should appear on the very top?).

Sven-Åke Svensson, from Landstinget i Jönköping, had the same experiences and emphasized the need for a good prestudy (workshop method) and tools for the editors such as a metadata service to help the contributors write good metadata tags. Sven-Åke also made a demo of the new intranet (if you are Swedish, the blog post “Landsting på väg mot det social intranätet” gives a great overview of the solution)

The two days covered most angles of Lew Platt’s vision – and apart from a number of good speakers the informal talk at coffee breaks and lunch gave a good insight in the fact that Swedish companies are working hard to provide knowledge sharing intranets that serves consumers as well as contributors.

Did you visit the conference? Was there anything in particular you found interesting? Please feel free to comment and share your thoughts.

P.S. If you want to read more about social intranets, take a look at Oscar Berg’s blogpost “The business case for social intranets”. An inspiring summary of the topic.