Nokians (Nokia employees) and their intranet landscape were the focus of Intranets live in the first week of this month. The whole event continued it's move upward, building on the best of previous events, while leaving the things that didn't work behind.
Close to 300 people attended this month. The technical hitches were fewer and less disruptive than in the past. Where they did occour was probably a good thing considering what they're responsible for, the UK Department of Defense who were to feature couldn't due to snow and a lack of access from home.
This time round the co-host was Richard Dennison, Senior Manager Social Media for BT (British Telecom), who with Paul Millar (Host and founder of the Intranet Benchmarking Forum) and Paul Levy did a great job of bringing some global overview to the topics that came up.
February's Intranets Live event was dedicated to 2.0, with BT being in the vanguard of enterprise 2.0 Richard offered some very interesting insights.
An interesting aspect of this event was that Wyeth conincided their enterprise wide "2.0 Summit" with the first 1/2 hour of the intranets live event. Wyeth's 2.0 Summit was an internal event both physical and virtual where Wyeth staff, headed by Joanne Jackson of Wyeth Global Web Technologies, joined togeather to talk and strategise about things 2.0
I found this committment by a corporation very interesting, in light of John Chambers's video from Davos in Jan 2008 about web 2.0 where almost a year earlier he was pointing out some of the business cases for 2.0
Nokia
Angela Huffman, Service manager portal and phone book Nokia Texas was heading up Intranets Live visit to the Nokian's home 'News Hub'
Angela initially outlined the way in which News Hub, the home page news, works.
News Hub is seen by all staff but only the communications team are allowed to add news, and generally do so at the request of the news item stakeholder.
Limiting addition of News Hub articles in this way was a conscious decision by the intranet team, the goal being to raise the quality of the news items displayed.
A snippet of the first article is displayed, headline links to the others. Note also that under the "most discussed" heading the number of comments on the item is noted. Most discussed also keeps those items that are still generating comments visible to everyone.
Angela points out that the full article once viewed allows anyone to comment on the article (comments are moderated before becoming public) and rate the article. Angela said that if a Nokian (Nokia employee) rates the article nothing specific happens behind the scenes in terms of notifications or reporting but that they're looking at doing something with that in the future.
For the comments:
That ended part 1 from Nokia
Intranet doctor
This month the intranet doctor - William Hudson (User experience specialist) - was talking with Mike Bradley from Kellogs about images. And many thanks to Kellogs for jumping in to be the patient this month, I found it very interesting how Dr Hudson analysed the issues and helped resolve them.
Mike's questions were around the use of images and the use of animations and how they could be improved on the following page.
The Dr pointed out
Mike also had an HR page that the Dr ran through his guidelines
In this case the question mark would be a tick if the person's face was a link to their profile.
The doctor's second item of business was external documents, those often lengthy and large tomes that are easy for content producers to delivery (they had to send them to the printer anyway) but which just arn't quite right for the intranet.
The prescription for resolving this problem was
Live chat Q and A
Toby Ward kicked off this discussion which was interesting in context of the event.
Intranet news
This section I'm picking will be the one that changes the most in format for the March Intranets live event. The issues with news I mentioned last month were not as pronounced but still I wasn't wowed or inspired.
As an example one item presented was the following BlogPulse trend comparison for the terms "social media" recession and intranet
The comments I recall, and I'm sorry I didn't write them down, were along the lines of isn't this interesting that social media and recession are tracking each other similarly in the blogosphere.
I immediately thought there was something not right about this and what do you know, if you do a blogpulse for the following terms: recession ceo and stocks
Well how about that they track each other . . . . . . Nothing to do with any real relationship which was sort of implied by the intranets live news item, but to do with US days of the week and public holidays. Weekdays folks blog, weekends and holidays . . . well not so much.
And this really comes back to what I talked about in my Intranets Live Jan 09 posting - The people attending Intranets live are professionals, they're taking time out of their working lives, or personal lives (depending on the time zone) and when they get thrown this sort of thing as 'news' it really doesn't sit well with me.
I hope that the team at IBF read this post and work on the news for next time.
Part 2 of this post will come through tomorrow: I'll talk about the BBC MOO live demo by Shane Samarwikrema and Nokia's phone book personal profiles.
Remember IBF and intranets live are back 7 April 09 focusing on Finability while talking with Adidas and Hess
Close to 300 people attended this month. The technical hitches were fewer and less disruptive than in the past. Where they did occour was probably a good thing considering what they're responsible for, the UK Department of Defense who were to feature couldn't due to snow and a lack of access from home.
This time round the co-host was Richard Dennison, Senior Manager Social Media for BT (British Telecom), who with Paul Millar (Host and founder of the Intranet Benchmarking Forum) and Paul Levy did a great job of bringing some global overview to the topics that came up.
February's Intranets Live event was dedicated to 2.0, with BT being in the vanguard of enterprise 2.0 Richard offered some very interesting insights.
An interesting aspect of this event was that Wyeth conincided their enterprise wide "2.0 Summit" with the first 1/2 hour of the intranets live event. Wyeth's 2.0 Summit was an internal event both physical and virtual where Wyeth staff, headed by Joanne Jackson of Wyeth Global Web Technologies, joined togeather to talk and strategise about things 2.0
I found this committment by a corporation very interesting, in light of John Chambers's video from Davos in Jan 2008 about web 2.0 where almost a year earlier he was pointing out some of the business cases for 2.0
Nokia
Angela Huffman, Service manager portal and phone book Nokia Texas was heading up Intranets Live visit to the Nokian's home 'News Hub'
Angela initially outlined the way in which News Hub, the home page news, works.
News Hub is seen by all staff but only the communications team are allowed to add news, and generally do so at the request of the news item stakeholder.
Limiting addition of News Hub articles in this way was a conscious decision by the intranet team, the goal being to raise the quality of the news items displayed.
A snippet of the first article is displayed, headline links to the others. Note also that under the "most discussed" heading the number of comments on the item is noted. Most discussed also keeps those items that are still generating comments visible to everyone.
Angela points out that the full article once viewed allows anyone to comment on the article (comments are moderated before becoming public) and rate the article. Angela said that if a Nokian (Nokia employee) rates the article nothing specific happens behind the scenes in terms of notifications or reporting but that they're looking at doing something with that in the future.
For the comments:
- about 1 % of viewers comment on the News Hub article
That ended part 1 from Nokia
Intranet doctor
This month the intranet doctor - William Hudson (User experience specialist) - was talking with Mike Bradley from Kellogs about images. And many thanks to Kellogs for jumping in to be the patient this month, I found it very interesting how Dr Hudson analysed the issues and helped resolve them.
Mike's questions were around the use of images and the use of animations and how they could be improved on the following page.
The Dr pointed out
- appropriate images are beneficial especially when used as links, they improve visual engagement and some people find appropriate images can be more quickly found than similar words (No advantage for peoples faces though)
- there needs to be a clear relationship between the images and the items they pertain to
- be consistent: linked images should have similar appearance and location relative toother page elements. There should be a clear relationship with the item linked to
- unlinked (decorative) images should not like linked images, e.g. they should be large and further away from other page elements
- accessibility: supply useful alternatives, title and alt tags, for meaningful images
- keep animations to a minimum since they can distract
- allow users to have control over rotating content, or content that changes on reload
- consider allowing animations to play through only once
- accessibility: users must have full control in order to be able to use screen madnifiers and similar tools
Mike also had an HR page that the Dr ran through his guidelines
In this case the question mark would be a tick if the person's face was a link to their profile.
The doctor's second item of business was external documents, those often lengthy and large tomes that are easy for content producers to delivery (they had to send them to the printer anyway) but which just arn't quite right for the intranet.
The prescription for resolving this problem was
- for online reading, appropriately structured when size is large, use HTML
- for presentation, printing and similar make PDF, powerpoint, word etc copies available for download
Live chat Q and A
Toby Ward kicked off this discussion which was interesting in context of the event.
Intranet news
This section I'm picking will be the one that changes the most in format for the March Intranets live event. The issues with news I mentioned last month were not as pronounced but still I wasn't wowed or inspired.
As an example one item presented was the following BlogPulse trend comparison for the terms "social media" recession and intranet
The comments I recall, and I'm sorry I didn't write them down, were along the lines of isn't this interesting that social media and recession are tracking each other similarly in the blogosphere.
I immediately thought there was something not right about this and what do you know, if you do a blogpulse for the following terms: recession ceo and stocks
Well how about that they track each other . . . . . . Nothing to do with any real relationship which was sort of implied by the intranets live news item, but to do with US days of the week and public holidays. Weekdays folks blog, weekends and holidays . . . well not so much.
And this really comes back to what I talked about in my Intranets Live Jan 09 posting - The people attending Intranets live are professionals, they're taking time out of their working lives, or personal lives (depending on the time zone) and when they get thrown this sort of thing as 'news' it really doesn't sit well with me.
I hope that the team at IBF read this post and work on the news for next time.
Part 2 of this post will come through tomorrow: I'll talk about the BBC MOO live demo by Shane Samarwikrema and Nokia's phone book personal profiles.
Remember IBF and intranets live are back 7 April 09 focusing on Finability while talking with Adidas and Hess
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