The Workplace Blog

Over at AlwaysOn Network, Tony Perkins interviews Jotspot founder Joe Kraus about do it yourself content and new kinds of collaboration. Joe talks about changing his business model from charging “per head” to “per pages” used as he believes that a tool that’s meant to foster collaboration, shouldn’t punish its users each time they invite others to collaborate. It’s only a matter of time before other software vendors discover that charging per head for any tool that fosters collaboration in the workplace is a mistake.

Jotspot is a hosted, web based collaboration tool that includes basic content management, wiki, blog and project management type features.

Talking of Google (who isn’t talking about them these days) Google Scholar points to some research on workplace productivity conducted in 2001(costs $10 to access the complete paper). The last line in the summary is interesting, ” Finally, plant productivity is higher in businesses with more-educated workers or greater computer usage by nonmanagerial employees.”

It is a pity that we don’t see more research on how non managerial workers use information technology to be more productive. Everyone is concerned with the knowledge workers only - probably because they are the most influential and have the loudest voices.

Along with Apple and a few others, Google has perfected the art of making simplicity a competitive advantage. Compare Google.com to Yahoo.com or Google News to CNN.com to understand the power of simplicity.

Now with their Enterprise Solutions, Google hopes to replicate that simplicity in the enterprise. Companies like Endeca, Microsoft and Hyperion believe that with Sarbanes Oxley, security concerns, administration and maintainence requirements, the enterprise cannot have Google like simplicity. Do you think Google win in this space? It’s anyone’s guess at this time.

IBM recently showcased its intranet during the Intranet Insider World Tour Series. Here are some interesting statistics about their intranet portal - 80% of IBM employees access the intranet daily, 68% view the intranet as crucial to their jobs and the intranet has 1.7 million page views per day or about 6 page views per employee per day.

Furthermore, 52% of employee training is delivered via the intranet with over 200,000 employees receiving online e-learning saving the company $284 million annually. The Intranet has also resulted in $683 million in direct cost savings. To learn more purchase a CD recording of a tour of their intranet from Communitelligence.

A recent study of the enterprise handheld marketplace has shown that seventy-nine per cent of respondents consider e-mail to be the greatest source of security risk among the applications deployed on mobile devices, followed by corporate intranet applications, which 26 per cent of respondents regard as the greatest vulnerability. 600 US based IT professionals were interviewed for the study which was released by Good Technology. Security risks along with cost are the primary reasons why intranet applications are not delivered on mobile devices.

It seems everyone is talking about corporate blogging these days whether it executives blogging for their customers or employees blogging to each other behind the firewall. Well, now its Computerworld’s turn to talk up blogs. In an article titled, “Corporate Blogging: Beyond the Water Cooler” Computerworld talks about the legal questions that may arise when you allow employees to blog. If you are looking at a blogging strategy but haven’t thought about the legal ramifications, you definitely need to read this introductory article.

One the new buzzwords in the portal space is “contextual.” The idea being that everything displayed through a portal should be contextual based on the activity being peformed by the user. This is certainly a noble concept but one that can be hard to execute on. The portal needs to know the user’s context, the right features to push in that context and then needs to recognize when the context has changed too.

A more simpler way to bring context to a portal experience, is to organize all the content on the portal around the specific tasks that the user is trying to accomplish. If the tasks can be defined in a finite, compartmentalized fashion, determining what other pieces of content and functionality to surface gets a lot easier. Last month, Portals Magazine talked about a simple but very useful contextual portal at the AO Foundation that seemed to work quite well.

A Cyberposium was held at Harvard Business School on November 19th, 2005. Some of the speakers included James (Jim) L. Balsillie of Research in Motion, Geoffrey Moore of Crossing the Chasm fame and Jeremy Allaire of Brightcove.
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This year’s KM & Intranets World was held again in San Jose, California. The conference included a well received keynote by Tom Davenport of Babson College. He has just published a new book titled, “Thinking for a Living” which discusses management techniques to motivate and retain knowledge workers. The case studies were the most interesting part of the conference. They demonstrated how much an intranet is a factor of the organization within which it lives. Visit the conference wiki to learn more.

HP launched a partner portal for its resellers last week. However, the much hyped portal was down for a while soon after launch according to vnunet.com. The reason - usage was more than expected. It is hardly surprising that a partner portal which gives its users (in this case the resellers) near real time pricing and stock inventory information will get a lot of traffic.

Strangely, many companies underestimate the amount of traffic their portals will get when they launch. While estimating repeat usage of a portal can be difficult and is dependent on several different factors, estimating first time usage is generally easy. Quite simply, most users with easy access to the web, will try something at least once if it is promoted well. Plan for that and your portal will not go down when it is launched. In fact, in the case of partner portals, smaller rollouts one region or district at a time often makes the launch go much more smoothly.