The Social Portal

Final session of the day from Jim Murphy on Your Next Intranet, the Social Portal.

The old intranet vs the new social portals. Main differences:

Company centric vs People centric
Broadcast vs Engaging
Authoritative vs Empowering
Controlled vs Flexible
Orchestrated vs Open
Stable vs Adaptive
Business to Employee vs Employee to Employee
One place to go vs Omnipresent

Lots of people looking to replace their company intranets with more socially orientated platforms.

Intranet/portal can have many uses ranging from a gateway to applications, to a web based workplace.
Moving more from company centric, corporate news, corporate applications, through to people centric with voluntary, free form profile pages, social software, self directed team support.

Revenue of enterprise portal vendors is declining, enterprise social software revenue is growing,

Employee portal used to be there to improve adoption of enterprise systems. Now using social to help adoption of portal. Should be thinking how we can improve adoption of social. Stop thinking about technology, think about what the user experience is and what they want.
Not, what's in it for the organisation, but what's in it for me. Don't create an environment that someone has to go to, but an environment that goes to them, ie is wherever they're working.

Social intranets require new skills and disciplines:
Traditional cf. Social:
Executive sponsor. cf. Leadership participation
Site administration cf. community management
Content management. cf. content curation
Site design cf. User experience design

Need interaction and interoperability between mobile apps, enterprise apps, people centred services.
Provide services where people need them. Don't make them go to another environment.
Social capability should be in all portal strategies
But, "social" is no panacea, compliment it with business process strategies, content management, portal.




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Location:Westbourne Street,Paddington,United Kingdom

Employee engagement

Having spent lunchtime juggling plates, folks, drinks, napkins and eating whilst standing up and talking to suppliers, it's time for a session on employee engagement, as opposed to customer engagement. Something I'm really interested in, and want people to feel part of a community that they can collaborate in and influence when they come to work. Lets see if I learn anything I can put into practice.

Why is employee engagement important?
Done well, engagement promotes better business performance and work efficiencies. Better customer and partner relationships, great innovation, improved quality, quicker problem resolution, improved knowledge sharing, richer more diverse culture. And, a better place to work.

It should be based on:
Trusted relationship with manager
Opportunities for learning and growth
Understanding and sharing the organisation's mission
Understanding individual's role and responsibilities
Sense of belonging and a shared culture.

Who's usually involved in employee engagement schemes?
Executive team, HR
Who's not?
The employees, the IT department
Not only should they be, they should be synergistic partners

IT needs to partner with the business to promote engagement:
Revisit consumerisation
Reach out to shadow IT
Understand demographic shifts
Become a stakeholder in the changing nature of work
Team with leadership and HR teams on engagement efforts

IT has a lot to contribute, but it needs a new mindset. We need to rething our approach to architecture, governance, support, identity, compliance.

Need to strategically use consumer computing tools and styles for business purposes. Think about people, networks, communities.

Think about all IT projects as engagement initiatives:
Upgrade the email client --> Rethink the inbox
Deploy social networking --> Optimise engagement
Application development --> User experience design
Deploy corporate systems --> Create an App Store
Respond to BYOD --> Lead BYOD

Case study:
Auto manufacturing firm used micro blogging tool to socialise the Helpdesk
Questions posed into twitter like space, private to the company
Any employee can answer questions, not just technicians and Helpdesk staff
Data is mined by helpdesk to augment FAQs, knowledge base and their own understanding of service
Collective knowledge of community is leveraged giving better insights into problems, and to gather information and opinion on future plans

Any engagement initiative should:
• Provide a common framework for diverse IT initiatives
• Supply a common language to talk to the business
• Deliver greater ROI from existing and new IT investments
• Provide a unifying theme across IT and shadow IT
• Provide new challenges as workloads shift to the cloud
• Foster new approaches to partners and customers
• Create new partnerships with leaders and human resources

But IT itself must become more engaging ...






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Location:London,United Kingdom

Digital Gaga

Next session is from Jamie Anderson, described as a management guru in the programme. session is on Doing Business in the Digital World, Myths and Realities.

Case study about customer engagement using a brand which has risen to be a global brand in only 3 years - Lady Gaga! Fabulous animation showing her success. She has:
40.5m twitter followers
50.5m Facebook followers

At a time when music industry in decline. Done it all by understanding customer engagement. Have to stand out and be different, but also have to be a brilliant musician. Also have to be connected. Need a brand. Used to hum Queens's Radio Gaga so given name (brand) of Lady Gaga at 18.
Then worked on look, art performance on stage.

Launched as $4m start up project. No record contract etc
Thought differently. Singles usually 3 minutes because that's what fitted on a vinyl single.
Couldn't get radio time, so went straight to video, on YouTube. Length of video depends on attention span. 7m 47secs optimum time apparently,
Changes her look weekly. Keep customers interested.

There are 4 pillars of engagement in digital world demonstrated by Lady Gaga:

1. Excitement. Have to excite customers with services

Must have great product.

Also need to be known. Connectors in music industry used to be DJs. Now new ones especially music bloggers. So, they targeted influential music bloggers, and generated 10s millions hits on YouTube. That lead to her videos being viewed millions of times.
Now has 2.2bn downloads. For free.
Her debut tour was 200 concerts raising $227.4 revenue.

Forming a community is very important. Use social media for mass intimacy. Only person with password to Lady Gaga account is Lady Gaga. Authenticity is hugely important. She retweets, answers, thanks.
Gets involved eg with anti bullying campaigns. That leads to....

2 Emotional connections

Give things that are special, that other people don't get. Eg telling twitter followers about perfume launch.
Picture of her without make up caused huge spike in sentiment analysis. So, has done it again.
Take control eg Daily Mail published picture of her looking fat, tweeted about her problems with weight control.

Built her own social media platform. Little monsters. Have to ask to become part of it......

3 Exclusivity

Information just for you. Makes you feel special.

Gaganomics. Given away more than 2bn free downloads to sell 23m albums and 91 m singles. Piracy still rife but you don't steal from your friends.

Now, streaming (Spotify) is changing download market. Producing huge amount of data and analytics. Using analytics to track customers behaviour, likes etc.

4 eCommerce
How do you connect with customers?. How do they connect with you? Need to be whoever your customers want you to be. Lady Gaga has been with iTunes, Amazon, Spotify.

Excitement, Emotional connectivity, Exclusivity. eCommerce - get them right and you'll get customer engagement.

Brilliant presentation, and nice to hear some Lady Gaga music and watch some videos. This blog won't have done it justice, but interesting to see a case study using a musician.







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Social, Mobile, Digital

Well, here I am at the Gartner Portals, Content and Collaboration Summit in a lovely sunny London. Shame I'm going to be in conference sessions in a windowless room for the next 9 hours!
Will blog as much as I can, but as usual, it will be in note form.

Opening keynote is from Daryl Plummer, on Succeeding in the Digital, Social and Mobile Enterprise. I expect to hear those three words a lot during this conference, together with with "cloud".

The way we engage with each other has changed. The way we engage with technology is also changing. From wearable technologies to 3D printers, innovation is allowing us to engage in new ways. We need to be adaptive and aggressive about how we deal with these changes which are taking place.

Consumerisation revolution started with the PC, and is continuing. After the PC, the web, allowed people to interact with information everyday. Now we have mobile, cloud, social software. Think mobile first. Have to accommodate the mobility of people in all of our services.

The consumer is changing. Live in a culture of we, not me. Expect to be able to share, to interact, give feedback and expect it to be heard. Engaged, not passive. Experience orientated. Informed not ignorant. Connected. Consumers expect to collaborate. People will use technology and avoid telling IT department if they are disconnected. Dropbox good example. People will use it even if IT dept say they can't. Twitter and Facebook still banned in some places.

Employees are business consumers. ( NB Consumers not users. Not drug addicts :-) ). Will acquire technologies that IT dept not aware of. We need to help them and connect with them.
This disruptive innovation has 4 main forces, social, mobile, information, cloud.

Need to think about different ways of using information. Sentiment analysis is more important than surveys. Mining for trends is more important than mining for data elements. The wisdom of crowds can be mined.

Interfaces changing. No longer roll, click, lean, type. Now gesture, touch, talk, swipe. Services need redesigning for mobile. Can't just move them.

IT is moving out of the domain of IT the department. Our role will be to add value, coordinate, facilitate - not control. We need to concentrate on improving the experience. Simplicity of design, simplicity of use. Architecture and strategies need to change. Identify scenarios for change - especially in how we interact with employees, customers, partners. Put control into hands of customers. Lots of good examples. Airlines, on line check in etc. Some airlines use iPads for entertainment, continue watching movie after flight has landed.
Guardian, moved to cloud, launched Guardian API, launched on Amazon cloud. Extended their engagement, kindle edition, Facebook apps using API, social sites etc.

Digital engagement initiatives require input from portal managers, web developers, mobile managers, enterprise architects, content specialists.

If we don't get involved, it will happen without us.





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Dead Hedwigs, Pierced Angels and Omi

A common theme of this blog is why I love working at the University - last night was another good example. An invite to the opening of another exhibition in our great Western Bank Library Exhibition Space. This time it's of the work of the Sheffield sculptor, Anthony Bennett. Anthony has been working for 30 years, but has been relatively unknown till recently. He has produced some amazing work - the Pierced Angel at the bottom of the Library stairs is really impressive

But the strangest piece of all is of The Great Omi - aka The Barbaric Beauty or The Zebra Man. He was really Horace Ridler, a British cavalry officer in WW1 who after the war decided to join the circus. He had a variety of mundane jobs, and in 1935 decided to transform himself into an exotic sideshow curiosity. He was tattooed and pierced, and this is an extremely lifelike sculpture of him. So lifelike it's creepy. I kept expecting it to wink at me.

It's a great exhibition - curated of course by the great Professor Vanessa - here she is opening it in front of another work - Humbug

If you can get to see it, it's open to the public every weekday from 0900 to 1900 and weekend afternoons - details here.

My only concern was I thought that he had killed some Hedwigs - but he assured me they were handmade...

Wow factor

Several years ago I was involved in a really exciting project as part of the client design team for the Information Commons. This lunchtime I was back pouring over plans and 3D images, discussing power supplies, even talking about colour swatches - all very exciting. Our New Engineering Building (working title only, watch this space) is starting to be built. The old hospital site has been cleared, a big hole has appeared, and piles are being driven.

Although the building will have a substantial amount of space for Engineering teaching, there will also be a lot of student-led learning space, or as we call it, IC-type space. These are the bits that we're interested in, and it was great today to see how it's all coming together. There'll be many more group  rooms, silent areas, group study areas and we'll be seriously increasing our creative media facilities for both production and editing of all kinds of media.

The building will certainly have the wow factor. Desinged by the same architect who designed the IC, it has an innovative cladding, and although some media coverage has referred to it as a pyramid, it really isn't - it's more of a cuboid, although from this angle it does look a bit as though it's higher at one end.

The inside is going to be really funky, with a spiral staircase, pods, and bridges in a central atrium. Here's a couple of taster images of the latest renderings.

Glad we've started the really detailed design and the build now - can't wait to see it start to rise out of the hole in the ground!

Art on the pasternoster and other ideas

Several big meetings over the last couple of days as we get back into the swing of the new academic year. Yesterday was the Process Improvement Steering Group, an important, high level body chaired by the VC which oversees the work of our PIU (Process Improvement Unit).  Lots of projects in various stages of progress - you can see a list of them here.  There's been good progress in the year that the unit has been set up, and the VC is holding a formal launch event later this week. The PIU uses a mixture of techniques, concentrating on LEAN, and it was interesting to hear about some work going on in our Management School using Six Sigma  which puts much more emphasis on data analysis.

Then it was our Service Strategy Board where we had our standard look at reports from all of our projects, and highlight reports from each of our service managers. Interesting discussion about resources, particularly as we introduce more and more new services, seemingly without stopping any. System and infrastructure support is becoming a real issue for us -  I'm sure every IT Director is facing the same issues. It doesn't help when things come out of "left field" at us - things that are apparently very important and have to be implemented, but they haven't come through any of our governance processes, and we have no resource allocated to them.

Today was PSE (Professional Service Executive), and we had a brilliant presentation from our new Student Sabbatical officers. Our aim is to work collaboratively with them to maintain the University's exceptional provision for students, and we have a good track record of an excellent working relationship with them.
They outlined their prioritues for the year to us, which fall under the following themes:

Well Being  - sport, links to health service, encouraging students to be active, helping women feel safe, safety abroad workshops, training for tutors on support for students

Community - volunteering, outreach, student engagement, getting women into STEM subjects through science outreach

Campus Life - promoting Reslife, integrating home and international students, public art on campus, (they suggested an art exhibition on the paternoster lift - inspired!), making rooms accessible for student societies, eliminating booking charges

Postgraduate research students - issues relating to contracts, continuation fees, pastoral care, allocation of teaching hours

Protecting international student rights - campaign against NHS fees, leveraging #weareinternational campaign, accommodation issues, welfare

Student Union - set up gumtree network accessible through MUSE for textbooks, household items, languages; implementing SU policies across University including living wage, funding education not war, bottled water ban

Student Voice - undertaking a one year research project using active critical engagement resulting in a long term strategic plan for the University written by students.

Great set of priorities, (especially the last one) - looking forward to working with them.

Time To Ring Some Changes

Yesterday we had a visit from a Gartner Analyst, Simon Mingay,  to talk to us about the "art and science of service portfolios". We had as many service managers, process owners and exec as we could get, and it turned into an excellent workshop. Simon talked us through a number of principles - for example, the service portfolio is an outside-in view -  nothing to do with how we do stuff, how many people we have working on stuff, how much stuff has cost, or how important stuff is.

It is a demand-led tool, there for the benefit of our customers, not there for the convenience of the IT department.

We talked a lot about why we need a service portfolio - common reasons are to communicate the value we bring, to define what we are trying to optimiise, and to make it easier to do business with the IT department.

Defining what we mean by a service also sparked an interesting discussion. A service is an action, not a thing. If you can point a stick at it, it's a thing not a service. So, servers and networks are not services. What runs on them probably is. So, a service is an action that delivers a benefit to a customer, and often, but not always, involves a technology, people and processes. Not all of our services involve a technology - process improvement or project management for example.

The difference between a service portfolio and a service catalogue was something that we haven't really thought much about before, but now need to get our heads around. The portfolio's audience is usually the senior executive team of an organisation,  and it should be is a strategic, value based description of the IT organisation's mission role and capabilities. It can be used for investment planning, prioritisation and business justification.   The catalogue is used more on a day to day basis by customers and is an operational tool to simplify service requests from customers and to link to automated back off processes for improved IT efficiency.

We've been developing our own service catalogue for a couple of years now, and Simon had seen it in advance and reviewed it for us. Definitely time to make some changes. We need to separate it out into a portfolio (which will mainly be the top level - the left hand column) which will need value statements adding,  benefits listing, and SLAs writing, and a catalogue, which will be mainly the right hand side column. Once we've weeded out the technologies masquerading as services.

Good debate about what is in ours that shouldn't be - there was general agreement that "infrastructure", where it refers to hardware, is not a service , but there are aspects of it that can be described as services   - access to the internet for example. I was also surprised at how much was missing. High value services such as process improvement, project management, consultancy services including advice and guidance don't appear at all.

An excellent session with lots of debate and questions, and I think we were all agreed that it's a good time for a review!

Plain English

I posted yesterday about the Design Principles adopted by the GDS. Well, I've also been shown the content principles, and in particular a list of banned words if you want to write in plain English. Here's a few - see how many you regularly use in web pages or other comms - it's quite scary -  I'm very guilty.....

agenda (unless it is for a meeting)
advancing
collaborate (use ‘working with’)
combating
commit/pledge (we need to be more specific – we’re either doing something or we’re not)
deliver (pizzas, post and services are delivered – not abstract concepts like ‘improvements’ or ‘priorities’)
deploy (unless it is military or software)
dialogue (we speak to people)
disincentivise (and incentivise)
drive (you can only drive vehicles; not schemes or people)
drive out (unless it is cattle)
empower
facilitate (instead, say something specific about how you are helping)
foster (unless it is children)
going forward (unlikely we are giving travel directions)
impact (as a verb)
in order to (superfluous – don’t use it)
key (unless it unlocks something. A subject/thing isn’t ‘key’ – it’s probably ‘important’)
land (as a verb. Only use if you are talking about aircraft)
leverage (unless in the financial sense)
one-stop shop (we're not a retail outlet)
overarching
progress (as a verb – what are you actually doing?)
promote (unless you are talking about an ad campaign or some other marketing promotion)t
slimming down (processes don’t diet – we are probably removing x amount of paperwork, etc)
streamline
strengthening (unless it’s strengthening bridges or other structures)
tackling (unless it is rugby, football or some other sport)
transforming (what are you actually doing to change it?)
utilise

Digital design principles

I'm quite impressed with the work of the Government Digital Service, set up by Martha Lane Fox as a team in the Cabinet Office to transform government digital services. I've heard a couple of their key people speak at various conferences, so will have blogged about some of their principles before, especially their tagline  -  Digital by Design.

Today I've been having a look at their  principles for designing digital services - and they are excellent. We certainly adopt some of them to a greater or lesser extent when developing services,  but I think we could do with having a close look at all of them. The website is extremely well set out - very concise descriptions of the principles, and for each one a drop down set of examples of how they've put the principle into practice. In summary they are:

1 Start with needs
  - start by identifying and thinking about real user needs and design around those — not around the way the ‘official process’ is at the moment

2 Do less
 - only do what you can do. If someone else is doing it — link to it.

3 Design with data
 -  learn from real world behaviour and continue this into the build and development process — prototyping and testing with real users on the live web.

4 Do the hard work to make it simple
 - making something look simple is easy; making something simple to use is much harder — especially when the underlying systems are complex — but that’s what we should be doing.

5 Iterate. Then iterate again.
 -  start small and iterate. Release Minimum Viable Products early, test them with real users, move from Alpha to Beta to Launch adding features and refinements based on feedback from real users.

6 Build for inclusion
 -  build a product that’s as inclusive, legible and readable as possible.

7 Understand context
 - don't design for a screen but for people. Think  about the context in which services are used. Are they on a phone? Are they only really familiar with Facebook?

8 Build digital services, not websites
 - services don’t begin and end at websites. Might start with a search engine and end somewhere physical.

9 Be consistent, not uniform
 - wherever possible  use the same language and  design patterns — this helps people be familiar with  services. But, when this isn’t possible,  make sure the underlying approach is consistent.

10 Make things open: it makes things better
 - share code, designs, ideas, intentions, failures,  with colleagues, with users, with the world.  The more eyes there are on a service the better it gets — howlers get spotted, better alternatives get pointed out.

Annual Report

Time to review the past academic year,  take stock of what we've achieved and produce our Annual Report. You can read it here (optimised for tablets), or download a copy as a pdf here. Each year we try and find something new to include, and this year there's a lot more facts and figures, which I hope you all find interesting.

 Thanks to the Comms team for pulling it together and to the Service Managers for the content - as always I'm happy to receive any comments on it.

Back to work, again

Hi folks - I'm back, and have just logged into blogger to find my last post stuck as a draft - hence it only just being published. You must have wondered where I'd gone :-)   Whitby was fantastic, in case you're wondering. If you're really interested you can read about it on my personal blog. This year you're not getting the obligatory morris dancing photo, but one of the cottage we used to stay in a few years ago. Or rather, where the cottage used to be - lost to a landslide, and I must admit, many of the quaint cottages perched on the cliffs now look a bit unsafe to me...

So, back to work. This week has so far been about meeting the new Student Union officers - always a pleasure, looking at a number of HR matters, and dealing with an incident. For obvious reasons, can't say too much about it, but it involved three people thinking about it, one watching them, and a huge chocolate cake, which is out of shot!

Also had a good conversation this morning with a Gartner analyst about a workshop we're doing next week on service portfolios and service catalogues where we'll be reviewing our existing service catalogue and looking at how we might develop a portfolio. Should be interesting.

Clearing

Today begins one of our busiest times of year  - A level results are announced!  We've been busy for the last few days - A level results are sent to us in a file transfer over the weekend, and we have a few days to process them so that when the students get them we're prepared.

We're heavily reliant on our systems being available so for a period of 10 days we have a change freeze - no-one can make changes to any of our systems unless they are essential (of course, it can't be a complete change freeze, or nothing would actually work!), but we try and minimise risk as much as possible.

The past few days we've been setting up on of our open access computer rooms to be the confirmation and clearing hub, and this morning at 8am we were off!

Dedicated incoming and outgoing telephones lines are set up, about 40 temps answering calls,a nd another 6 or so staff making outgoing calls. Big plasma screens round the room gving status updates on courses and information for the operators. Our voice and data and IT support teams are down there making sure everything works OK and providing stas on phone calls to the admissions team. For example they can see how many calls are waiting, how long they've been waiting for and then suggest changes to the incoming/outgoing operators.

Also, our colleagues from epiGenysis who wrote the clearing system are on hand to provide techncial support and help with data issues

Altogether a great team effort, which if this morning is anything to go by, ably assisted by donuts!

After today, no more blogging for a week as I'm off to one of my favorite annual events - Whitby Folk Week - so see you after that.