Category: Collaboration and workplace (Page 29 of 95)

This category is focused on enterprise / workplace collaboration tools and strategies, including office suites, intranets, knowledge management, and enterprise adoption of social networking tools and approaches.

Intranets that succeed

November 3, 2015 / Frank Gilbane

Employees are customers too. You want to reach them, you want them responsive and engaged with your organization and your joint customers, and you want to keep them. Today’s employees have little patience with poor workplace digital experiences. In addition, organizations need to consider the connection between engaged employees and the ultimate customer experience.

Below are a selection of four conference sessions with multiple intranet case studies at the upcoming Gilbane Conference that will be especially relevant to anyone planning for a new or more successful intranet.

E1. Strategies and Lessons from Successful Intranets

Intranets that work provide an invaluable resource. But too often intranet projects either never get off the ground, or struggle for months or even years before being put out of their misery. How do you know when intranets are working? There is only one metric that matters – adoption, at least voluntary, and ideally enthusiastic. Attend this session get inspired by the managers at two organizations responsible for building successful intranets tell you what they did and how.

Wednesday, December, 2: 1:30 p.m. – 2:30 p.m.
Moderator: Sara Redin, Senior Consultant, Think! Digital
Speakers:
Rachelle Byars-Sargent, Director, Collaborative Technologies, Public Broadcasting Service (PBS)
Productizing Intranets: Breaking away from the Service Catalog
Krista MacDonald, Manager, Business Services Portfolio, Employee Services, Business Systems Integration & Development, Jazz Aviation LP
Engaging Support at Every Level of the Organization – The JazzNet Story

E2. Critical Considerations for Building a Modern Intranet

In this session our speakers take a look at some specific areas to pay careful attention to when getting ready for a new intranet project, or for updating and modernizing an existing intranet.

Wednesday, December, 2: 2:40 p.m. – 3:50 p.m.
Moderator: Sara Redin, Senior Consultant, Think! Digital
Speakers:
Deb Lavoy, Founder and CEO, Narrative Builders
Employee engagement is the opposite of being patronizing
Shannon Ryan, President & CEO, non-linear creations
Imagining and designing your next intranet

E4. Growth Without Compromise: Using Intranets to Scale What Makes You Great

Growth organizations – those who are growing fast, from a few dozen to a few hundred or thousands, have a unique challenge. You’re doing things right. But how can you maintain quality and momentum as you grow? How will you stay great when there are more and more newcomers?

Scaling organizational greatness means scaling a strong community, a strong culture, and a strong sense of belonging. How can culture, leadership and community expand to embrace people who don’t work in the same place or have pre-existing relationships? With intranets or digital workplaces. This panel of HR and Communications leaders will talk about the challenges of scaling culture, and how a great intranet enables extended teams to remain powerful. No compromise.

Thursday, December, 3: 8:30 a.m. – 9:30 a.m.
Moderator: Deb Lavoy, Founder and CEO, Narrative Builders
Panelists:
J Ackley, Senior Director of Technology, Ivie & Associates
Amanda Connolly, Communications Manager, Plexxus
Eric Scholz, Sr. Director & Editor-in-Chief on Marriott Global Source, Marriott International, Inc

E5. Connecting Customer and Employee Experiences

Building a holistic and seamless customer experience is not just a job for marketing. It is not even a job limited to customer-facing employees because they are dependent on other internal employees and systems for their effectiveness. The two case studies in this session are excellent examples of the kind of efforts needed to achieve organizational level customer experience.

Thursday, December, 3: 9:40 a.m. – 10:40 a.m.
Moderator: Sara Redin, Senior Consultant, Think! Digital
Speakers:
Laurel Nicholes, Director, Information Experience, Emerging Technologies & Jill Orofino, Director, Information Experience, Core Technology, EMC
Build a Community not a Crowd: How employees and customers can build content communities to achieve shared goals
Gretchen Nadasky, Manager, Information Management, Optimality Advisors & Matt McClelland, Manager, Information Governance Office, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina
The E3 of Enlisting Employees to Support Customer Experience: engagement, expectation, enthusiasm

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Content Accessibility in the Enterprise is Really Search

April 29, 2014 / Lynda Moulton

The Gilbane Conference call for speakers is out and submissions are due in three days, May 2. As one who has been writing about enterprise search topics for over ten years, and engaged in search technology development since 1974, I know it is still a relevant topic.

If you are engaged in any role, in any type of content repository development or use, you know that excellent accessibility is fundamental to making content valuable and useable. You are also probably involved in influencing or trying to influence decisions that will make certain that technology implementations have adequate staffing for content metadata and controlled vocabulary development.

Please take a look at this conference track outline and consider where your involvement can be inserted. Then submit a speaking proposal to share your direct experiences with search or a related topic. Our conference participants love to hear real stories of enterprise initiatives that illustrate: innovative approaches, practical solutions, workarounds to technical and business problems, and just plain scrappy projects that bring value to a group or to the whole enterprise. In other words, how do you get the job done within the constraints you have faced?

Track E: Content, Collaboration and Employee Engagement

Designed for content, information, technical, and business managers focused on enterprise social, collaboration, intranet, portal, knowledge, and back-end content applications.

Collaboration and the social enterprise
Collaboration tools & social platforms
Enterprise social metrics
Community building & knowledge sharing
Content management & intranet strategies
Enterprise mobile strategies
Content and information integration
Enterprise search and information access
Semantic technologies
Taxonomies, metadata, tagging

Please consider participating in the conference and especially if content findability and accessibility are high on your list of “must have” content solutions. Submit your proposal here. The need for good findability of content has never been higher and your experiences must be heard by vendors, IT managers and content experts together in this forum.

Can Human Sensors Contribute to Improving Search Technology?

November 27, 2013 / Lynda Moulton / 0 Comments

Information Today fall meetings usually have me in the Enterprise Search Summit sessions but this year KM World was my focus. Social networking, social media and tools are clearly entering the mainstream of the enterprise domain as important means of intra-company communication, as many corporate case presentations revealed. But it was Dave Snowden’s Thursday keynote, Big Data vs. Human Data, which encouraged me because he conveyed a message of how we must synthesize good knowledge management practices out of both human and machine-based information. Set aside 52+ minutes and be prepared to be highly stimulated by his talk .

Snowden does the deep thinking and research on these topics; at present, my best option is to try to figure out how to apply concepts that he puts forth to my current work.

Having long tried to get enterprises to focus on what people need to do to make search work meaningfully in an organization, instead of a list of technology specifications, I welcome messages like Snowden’s. Martin White called for information specialists for search management roles earlier this year in a CMSWire piece. While it may be a stretch to call for “search specialists” to act as “human sensors,” it does merit consideration. Search specialists have a critical role to play in any enterprise where knowledge assets (content and human expertise), data retrieval and analysis , and understanding user needs must fit cohesively together to deliver a searchable corpus that really works for an organization. This is not typically an assignment for a single IT professional focused on installing software, hardware and network oversight.

One of the intangible capital assets defined by a recent start-up, Smarter-Companies, Inc., is human capital. Founder Mary Adams has devised a methodology to be used by a person she calls an Icountant. An Icountant establishes values for intangible capital and optimizing its use. Adam’s method is a new way of thinking about establishing asset value for organizations whose real worth has more to do with people and other intangibles than fixed assets like buildings and equipment.

Let’s consider the merit of assigning value to search specialists, those experts who can really make search technology work optimally for any given enterprise. How should we value them? For what competencies will we be assigning jobs to individuals who will own or manage search technology selection, implementation/tuning and administration?

Rather than defaulting to outside experts for an evaluation process, installation and basic training for a particular technology, we need internal people who are more astute about characteristics of and human needs of an organization. High value human sensors have deep experience in and knowledge of an enterprise; this knowledge would take the consultant off-the-street months or years to accrue. People with experience as searchers and researchers supporting the knowledge intensive units of a company, with library and information science training in electronic information retrieval methods must be on the front lines of search teams.

Knowledge of users, what searchable content is essential across all business units, and what is needed just for special cases is a human attribute that search teams must have. Consider the points in White’s article and the wisdom of placing humans in charge of algorithm-based solutions. What aptitudes and understanding will move the adoption of any technology forward? Then pick the humans with highly tuned sensitivity to what will or will not work for the technology selection and deployment situation at hand. Let them place search technology in the role of augmenting human work instead of making human workers slaves to technology adaptation.

If you are at the Gilbane Conference next week, and want to further this discussion, please look for me and let me know what you think. Session E7 will have a special focus on search, Strategic Imperatives for Enterprise Search to Succeed, a Panel Discussion. I will be moderating.

We want to connect with you before the conference!

September 20, 2013 / Clea Durrell / 0 Comments

With so many sources of information out there we want to make sure you are getting the most up-to-date, accurate information about Gilbane Conference. Make sure you are following us on the official social media accounts for Gilbane:

Twitter: @gilbane #gilbane

Facebook: Gilbane Conferences

LinkedIn: Gilbane Conference

Google +: Gilbane Conference

These accounts are more than us posting about sessions, tracks, and sponsors. We want to connect you with speakers and other attendees. Feel free to start a discussion, ask us questions, and interact! Let’s start the conference experience before December!

Leveraging Search in Small Enterprises

April 5, 2013 / Lynda Moulton / 0 Comments

A mantra for a small firm or start-up in the 1970s when “Big Blue” was the standard for top notch sales and selling was we need to out-IBM the IBMers.

Search is just one aspect of being able to find what you need to leverage knowledge assets in your work, whether you are in a small firm, a part of a small group in a large organization or an individual consultant seeking to maximize the masses of content and information surrounding you in work.

My thoughts are inspired by the question asked by Andreas Gruber of Informations und Wissensmanagement in this recent post on Enterprise Search Engine Professionals, LinkedIn group. He posed a request for information stating: For enterprise search solutions for (very) small enterprises (10 to 200 employees), I find it hard to define success factors and it seems, that there are not many examples available. If you follow e.g. the critical success factors from the Martin White’s Enterprise Search book, most of them doesn’t seem to work for a small company – simply because none of them can/will investment in a search team etc.…

The upcoming Enterprise Search Europe meeting (May 14-16, 2013) in London is one focus of my attention at present. Since Martin White is the Chairman and principal organizer, Andreas’ comments resonated immediately. Concurrently, I am working on a project for a university department, which probably falls in the category of “small enterprise”. The other relevant project on my desk is a book I am co-authoring on “practical KM” and we certainly aim to appeal to the individual practitioner or groups limited by capital resources. These areas of focus challenge me to respond to Andreas’ comments because I am certain they are top of mind for many and the excellent comments already at the posting show that others have good ideas about the topic, as well.

Intangible capital is particularly significant in many small firms, academia, and for independent consultants, like me. Intensive leveraging of knowledge in the form of expertise, relationships, and processes is imperative in these domains. Intangible capital, as a percent of most businesses currently surpasses tangible capital in value, according to Mary Adams founder of Smarter-Companies. Because intangible capital takes more thought and effort to identify, find or aggregate than hard assets, tools are needed to uncover, discover and pinpoint it.

Let’s take the example of expertise, an indisputable intangible asset of any professional services. For any firm, asking expert staff to put an explicit value on their knowledge, competencies or acumen for tackling the type of problem that you need to have solved may give you a sense of value but you need more. The firm or professional you want to hire must be able to back up its value by providing explicit evidence that they “know their stuff” and can produce. For you, search is a tool to lead you to public or published evidence. For the firm being asked to bid on your work, you want them to be able to produce additional evidence. Top quality firms do put both human and technology search resources to work to service existing projects and clients, and to provide evidence of their qualifications, when being asked to retrieve relevant work or references. Search tools and content management methods are diverse and range from modest to very expensive in scope but no firm can exist for long without technology to support the findability of its intangible capital.

To summarize, there are three principal ways that search pays off in the small-medium business (SMB) sector. Citing a few examples of each they are:

Finding expertise (people): potential client engagement principal or team member, answers to questions to fulfill a clients engagement, spurring development or an innovation initiative
Retrieving prior work: reuse of know-how in new engagements, discovery of ideas previously tabled, learning, documentation of products and processes, building a proposal, starting point for new work, protecting intellectual property for leverage, when patenting, or participating in mergers and acquisitions.
Creating the framework for efficiency: time and speed, reinforcing what you know, supporting PR, communications, knowledge base, portraying the scope of intellectual capital (if you are a target for acquisition), the extent of your partnerships that can expand your ability to deliver, creating new offerings (services) or products.

So, to conclude my comment on Andreas’ posting, I would assert that you can “out-IBM the IBMers” or any other large organization by employing search to leverage your knowledge, people and relationships in smart and efficient ways. Excellent content and search practices can probably reduce your total human overhead because even one or two content and search specialists plus the right technology can deliver significant efficiency in intangible asset utilization.

I hope to see conference attendees who come from that SMB community so we can continue this excellent discussion in London, next month. Ask me about how we “ate our own dog-food” (search tools) when I owned a small software firm in the early 1980s. The overhead was minimal compared to the savings in support headcount.

Do Google Yourself – Preserving and Protecting your Companies Online Reputation

August 15, 2012 / mstevens / 0 Comments

With The Gilbane Conference just a few short months away, I’ve been thinking a lot about the evolution of themes and topics covered over the past few years. This year we are pleased to have a session lead by Russ Edelman and Toby Bell on Two Key Management Concerns About Social Media :ROI and Reputation Management. This is an increasingly important subject especially when it comes to the enormous impact online reputation has not just on an individual but a company as well.

15 Minutes. 15 Minutes is all it takes for an angry customer to chip away at the integrity of your businesses’ reputation by casting an instant smear campaign across all of your social networks. In some cases that 15 minutes is a generous figure as today’s internet users are more savvy than ever ,especially when motivated by what they deem to be an unfair experience.

Kasio Martin, a self proclaimed internet professional and blogger recently related in one of her entries how a series of bad experiences with local businesses and the subsequent online smear campaigns she launched against them received very different responses, prompting both positive reactions and further negative behavior from her.

“After the bad transaction I googled the business again. I left negative reviews on Insider Pages, City Search, Yahoo, Google Pages and Yellow Pages. These review sites outranked the businesses own Facebook Page in Google. The next time someone googles that business they will find my review 5 times before they get any other information about the company. This took me about 15 minutes to accomplish.”

The part of this scenario that strikes me the most is not just the short amount of time it took this customer to cause a major headache for the offending business, but also that the popularity of these sites she targeted make them the first picks in online search results. The company’s lack of response to her complaints showed even less integrity as it showed they either had a poor social media strategy or none at all. As to the effect they had on the business itself there is no mention but one can imagine that it served as a major discouragement towards attracting new customers.

Ms. Martin recounts an additional story in which her online complaints against a large chain restaurant were not only heard but resolved before the day was through:

“Because the restaurant was a large corporate chain, I didn’t really expect anything to come of it. But I received an email response within the hour. They informed me that they were getting that store on the phone and fixing this immediately. . . Within only a couple of hours they responded to me on Twitter and offered to help. . . Before the end of the workday they had resolved the issue and I didn’t have a bad thing left to say on any channel.”

While the Ms. Martin’s of the world may scare the faint of heart away from attempting to grow their business through social media, both scenarios show that regardless of whether or not you have made pages on these sites, that a Social Reputation is being made for your company whether or not you’re the one facilitating it.

Social Reputation can not be ignored, but it can be preserved and even strengthened through early intervention and constant diligence.

Here are a few Do’s and Don’ts for getting you started:

Do Google yourself: This is simply the easiest way to find what’s being said about your company around the entire internet. For faster results try signing up for Google alerts for your company.
Do check your @mentions on Twitter and Wall on Facebook: See what’s being said about you both good and bad in seconds. This is a great public forum to address questions, comments and complaints from your customers.
Don’t ignore negative online comments: While the easiest solution to a jaded customer review may be to delete it or simply ignore it, this sends an undeniable message to others that either you don’t care enough to answer the complaint or that you’re not on top of your online presence at all.
Don’t let third party sites and blogs outrank your own in search results: If third party pages such as yelp, hub pages, and Wikipedia are the first returns when someone searches for your company then your customers/potential customers will receive biased opinions before they even make it to your own site. Stay active on all of your websites and social media outlets and you’ll be sure to have your companies mission and services heard first and foremost.

And finally,

Don’t let negative opinions get in the way of your business’s goals: There will always be critics of the work you do and the worst thing you can do is let it get in the way of the doing a good job. Stay true to your companies mission and purpose and ultimately that work will speak for itself, hopefully in the form of good reviews for a positive Social Reputation.

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For more information on the Gilbane Conference please visit our website @:

http://gilbaneboston.com/12/index.html

To read more about Russ Edelman and Toby Bell’s Session at Gilbane Boston you can find out more @:

http://gilbaneboston.com/12/conference_program.html#c4

http://gilbaneboston.com/12/speakers.html

Follow the Gilbane Conference Facebook page

July 12, 2012 / Clea Durrell / 0 Comments

We have had a Facebook page for a couple of years but it has suffered from neglect. No longer. We have updated the page and have a new secret resource who will be keeping the Gilbane Conference Facebook page active and useful for all those who prefer to stay informed about our conferences via Facebook. The link is http://www.facebook.com/Gilbane.Conferences.

Gilbane Conferences

Gilbane Conference workshops

July 10, 2012 / Clea Durrell / 0 Comments

In case you missed it last week while on vacation the Gilbane Conference workshop schedule and descriptions were posted. The half-day workshops tale place at the Intercontinental Boston Waterfront Hotel on Tuesday, November 27, 9:00 am to 4:00 pm:

Insider’s Guide to Selecting WCM Technology – Tony Byrne & Irina Guseva, Real Story Group
Implementing Systems of Engagement: Making it Work with the Team That Will Make it Work – Scott Liewehr & Rob Rose, Digital Clarity Group
So You Want to Build a Mobile Content App? – Jonny Kaldor, Kaldor Group (creators of Pugpig)
Content Migrations: A Field Guide – Deane Barker, Blend Interactive & David Hobbs, David Hobbs Consulting
Social Media: Creating a Voice & Personality for Your Brand – AJ Gerritson, 451 Marketing
Text Analytics for Semantic Applications – Tom Reamy, KAPS Group

Save the date and check http://gilbaneboston.com for further information about the main conference schedule & conference program as they become available.