This week in links - week 11, 2009

"Building Employee Engagement With Internal Social Networks" by Toby Ward:

Employees want to connect with each other, and more importantly, they want to connect with the company and senior management. A study by Towers Perrin found that employees overwhelmingly want to know “that leadership is interested in them.”

Social networking allows employees to connect with relevant or related individuals by subject matter, job description, geogrpahic location, and by personal networks to help birdge this information gap. In fact, for those social media doubting-Thomases that question the value of Intranet 2.0, there are increasingly more numbers that quantify the measured value:

• 52% of organizations using Web 2.0 achieved Best- in-Class performance (5% didn’t) (Aberdeen Group)‏


• Companies using Web 2.0 tools achieved 18% increase in engagement (1% of those that didn’t) (Aberdeen Group)‏


• Sabre has already attributed $500k in savings to their employee social networking tool


• Cisco attributes $millions in savings to their wikis

Leading organizations that understand the power of Intranet 2.0 are blazing some incredible trails. Early adopters are finding positive business results by helping employees connect through "internal Facebooks." By effectively harnessing these new networks, organizations are seeing positive impacts on internal brand building, as well as employee engagement, satisfaction and motivation -- which leads to higher levels of productivity, revenue, and profit.

"How to find the people you need" by Jon Mell:

Rich profiles can be a powerful cornerstone of an Enterprise 2.0 / next generation intranet / social business software solution. Finding people rather than documents can be highly beneficial in terms of productivity, using information rather than looking for it, and simply getting things done and making things happen.

They are also often misunderstood, many fail to understand that profiles do not require regular maintenance or updating, and can stay current and relevant with very little effort on the profile owner's part. This is a scenario based on Jive Clearspace (although Socialtext and Lotus Connections have very similar functionality) to show how rich, social profiles can help people do their jobs.

"Working Together" by Power of Information Task Force:

The Government today published a new document called ‘Working Together - Public Services on your side’ outlining its vision for public sector reform.

This contains the comments below in the Strategic Government section which refer to the Taskforce report:

"Delivering transparency...A focus on outcomes is only meaningful when it is combined with clear and reliable information on performance. Transparency that delivers accessible and useful information on the performance of services and the outcomes they achieve is at the heart of our strategy for improving public services."

Here's a good definition of collaboration by Matthew C. Clarke in "Wanted/Needed: UX Design for Collaboration 2.0":

Collaboration is a co-ordinated sequence of actions performed by members of a team in order to achieve a shared goal.

The main concepts in this definition are:

• Collaboration is action-oriented. People must do something to collaborate. They may exchange ideas, arrange an event, write a report, lay bricks, or design some software. To collaborate is to act together and it is the combined set of actions that constitutes collaboration.


• Collaboration is goal-oriented. The reason for working together is to achieve something. There is some purpose behind the actions: to create a web site, to build an office block, to support each other through grief, or some other human goal. The collaborators may have varying motivations, but the collaboration per se focuses on a goal that is shared.


• Collaboration involves a team. No-one can collaborate alone. Collaboration requires a group of people working together. The team may be any size, may be geographically co-located or dispersed, membership may be voluntary or imposed, but there is at least some essence of being part of the team.


• Collaboration is co-ordinated. That is, the team is working together in some sense. The co-ordination may follow some formal methodology, but can equally well be implicit and informal. There needs to be some sense at least that there are a number of things to be done, some sequences of actions, some allocation of tasks within the group, and some way to combine the contributions of different team members.

Any collaboration process involves interactions between six elements, as shown in the following diagram:

"Launch of Implementing Enterprise 2.0 Framework" by Ross Dawson:

A centrepiece of our recently launched Implementing Enterprise 2.0 report is an Implementing Enterprise 2.0 Framework.


Like everything in the report, the framework will be developed and refined for future releases of the report, so any feedback and input will definitely be taken into account as we make this framework more useful and relevant.