Recipe for a good YamJam

If you type ‘YamJam’ in google, you will eventually see a jar of jam made of yam, a tuberous root vegetable, that is purple and is being used in a variety of desserts mostly in the Philippines.

You might wonder what all this has to do with the digital workplace? Well, if you look further down in your google search results, you’ll eventually also find a logo of Yammer, the enterprise social network recently bought by Microsoft.

YamJam is the name used by many Yammer networks to define a focused online discussion, where a group of people get together at the same time to share ideas, questions and views usually on a single topic. YamJams can broadly be considered like online press conferences with everyone having a voice.

We’ve just conducted our first-ever YamJam and I wanted to share some findings for those who would like to conduct similar online events (in Yammer or any other enterprise social network).

Getting ready!

“To be prepared is half the victory.”
(Miguel De Cervantes)

1. Start by choosing a topic and a speaker.
2. Define your audience (public or private) and create a group dedicated to YamJams.
3. Pick up a date and send a 60 minutes appointment to all participants.
4. Choose a topic to tag all posts (usually a #tag).
5. Create a page where participants can add questions before the YamJam.
6. Announce the event well in advance using regular internal communication channels (emails, posters, intranet) as well as your enterprise social network. Clearly indicate when the YamJam will happen, what it will be about and provide some guidance:
   1. Say what to expect
   2. Provide a link to the page where participants can add questions
   3. Give tips to use your enterprise social network (login, refreshing the screen…)
   4. Remind participants that the YamJam will be accessible even after the event allowing them to come back at any point to continue the discussion
7. Establish a YamJam team that will support the speaker during the event and will
   1. Prepare links to materials that might need to be shared during event
   2. Prepare short welcome and closing messages
   3. Test, test, test in a dedicated group
8. Contact champions and stakeholders who might be involved in the conversations and ask them to be online during the YamJam.

THE Day

“The way you cut your meat reflects the way you live.”
(Confucius)

1. Start by getting the YamJam team together in a room:
   1. The speaker will answer questions and participate in the conversation
   2. The YamJam manager will manage the conversation, point the speaker to new questions or comments and ask the questions that have been posted by participants who are not be able to attend the live event
   3. The YamJam ‘DJ’ will monitor the conversation, ‘like’ messages, add the #tag to all posts and will also provide tips for participants
2. 10 minutes before the YamJam starts, send a reminder email to say that YamJam is starting soon!
3. On time, let the speaker kick of the event by welcoming everyone and setting the scene (this is when to share the short introduction message prepared in advance).
4. If nobody asks a question, start the conversation by using one of the questions that participants added to the page in advance.
5. Manage the questions as they come in
   1. Have one single question per thread to keep the conversation organized
   2. Look carefully at notifications to avoid missing any questions or comments
   3. Try to keep the pace of the conversation slow enough for participants to follow
   4. Ensure that stakeholders are @mentioned by the speaker
6. When the end of the hour approaches, let participants know that the YamJam is about to end and allow one last question before thanking the speaker and everyone involved.

Keep the momentum…

1. At the end of the YamJam, post a poll about the event (Did you enjoy it, would you like to see more…?)
2. Compute a few key success factors and share statistics about the event (we did it using an infographics).
3. Gather feedback in regular internal communication channels and already start planning for future YamJams.

I hope that following this recipe will lead you to illuminating YamJams with great conversations and creative thinking!

PS: Our YamJam was made possible following great advises on how to get your Executives to participate on Yammer.

Digital Workplace Trends 2013

The Digital Workplace Trends 2013 report has just been released by Jane McConnell, marking a turn in what has become over the years an institution.

Using a completely new layout, this year’s edition has been designed as a direct communication tool to be used in meetings and conversations.

It contains 169 pages of insightful findings, facts and concrete examples that will surely make it an essential reference and practical tool for Digital Workplace practitioners.

The excitement could be felt in the Digital Workplace Twittersphere on its release date, almost ‘Harry Potter’ like.

Whether you have a senior position in your organization, are directly involved in the management of one of the dimensions of the Digital Workplace or have a genuine interest in the potentials that the combination of applications, tools and Intranets that people use to do their job can bring to your organization, this report is for you.

The Digital Workplace Trends report is very handy, it will save you a lot of time when you need

• a quick snapshot of the current trends
• critical success factors of the early adopters
• inspirational and tangible examples of what was done successfully
• facts and data to build a business case
• a direction for your future investments and budget planning
• ready made slides to discuss with your colleagues on specific topics
• terms clearly defining the Digital Workplace and its various dimensions

The report can also serve as a starting point to reflect on issues surrounding the Digital Workplace including

• the diversity of job functions needed for its management
• the  leadership and organizational strategy required for an effective implementation
• what leads or might lead you to a solution in the cloud
• the (re)definition of you target audience

The report will tell you that Digital Workplace initiatives are officially part of many enterprise transformation programs and provide you with other key points, including:

1. ‘Organizational intelligence’ and ‘efficiency and cost savings’ are the top 2 drivers for a Digital Workplace
2. ‘Colleagues and peer behavior’ are more effective for facilitating change in social collaboration
3. Few organizations have already integrated social collaboration into their enterprises processes and thereby fundamentally rethought how they work

The Executive Summary will surely convince you to quickly get your own copy of the ‘Harry Potter’ of the Digital Workplace Trends 2013.

2013, the year of new ways of working?

As we can wish a happy new year until the end of January, it’s probably still possible to attempt a prediction for the new year: I bet that new ways of working will make a breakthrough in 2013.

What Everett Rogers described as the “early majority“ will start adopting new ways of collaborating, interacting, communicating and engaging with the consequence of shifting away from the ‘email – share drive’ couple that has ruled the world for the past 20 years.

Innovative organizations have already been witnessing benefits from the adoption of new ways of working. These organizations are at least one step ahead of the others. They are already looking and talking about agile work or the end of the workplace as we know it.

Most organizations are however slower in their willingness and ability to change. Even those who have already put in place the platforms that support new ways of working haven’t yet experienced a high rate of user adoption.

But this situation might change as employees that were so far reluctant or hesitant (“the early majority”) are now used to new ways of interacting, sharing and communicating in their private life. Their increasing private use of smart phones and tablets is also impacting positively their maturity and readiness to adopt new ways of working.

Provided this turns true and employees adopt new ways of working, we will see in parallel an increasing pressure on IT departments to deliver optimal solutions.

The “I want what I get at home” symptom will indeed force them to deliver solutions that:

• offer the same user experience that we can find on the web and apps,
• are available on the employees’ own smart phone or tablets,
• are social by nature,
• are tied together trough a unified navigation and super search (google experience).

Employee hearing their IT department say “Sorry, this is not possible. Sorry, this can’t be changed. Sorry, we do not have the resources.” will not hesitate anymore to use “pirate” solutions in the cloud (the term “pirate” has been inspired by @claudesuper).

We are at a frontier where the old model is being directly challenged in its existence and the new model is still a sort of “Wild Wild West”.

From a coordinated and unified Digital Workplace point of view, this move to new ways of working will not necessarily be done in the most efficient way and we might very well live in a sort of “Intranet +” situation for some time.

Oh, by the way, happy new year!

How to sell the Digital Workplace to senior management?

If the Digital Workplace concept is gradually becoming an accepted term, it’s still hard to sell the concept to senior management.

‘What is the financial value of investing in the digital workplace?‘, the new report issued by the Digital Workplace Forum , brings a new perspective on this issue, and provides new arguments to help you defend your business case for a Digital Workplace.

Through a lot of concrete examples and data, the report lists 6 non technical areas where evidence shows that the Digital Workplace can achieve results and is worth investing in:

1. Reduction of costs associated with office space thanks to the ability to work anywhere and on any device.

2. Improvements in the way people work while away from the office thanks to flexible work arrangements and not being disturbed by colleagues.

3. Increased staff engagement thanks to the availability of alternative ways of working that impact positively staff turnover. Happier employers are less likely to leave.

4. Business continuity guaranteed in case of a disaster.

5. Reduction in the environmental impact by reducing travel and commuting.

6. Reduction in absenteeism.

The report rightly argues that investments in a well implemented and integrated Digital Workplace is a prerequisite for starting to see these results.

Have you witnessed any of these results? or used these arguments to sell the Digital Workplace to your senior management?

Building a perfect Intranet using lego blocks

Which Intranet manager has not been dreaming at least once to build a perfect Intranet in 20 seconds? you’ll see at the end of this post that my son was able to!

Did I say building a perfect Intranet using lego blocks?

It all started from our willingness to engage our audience in helping us build our new Intranet. We wanted the end result to be something concrete, not just words. We decided to use legos of different colours to represent the building blocks of an Intranet and asked our audience to build their perfect Intranet.

Our Intranet building blocks:

• Content
• Collaboration
• Social
• Activity (or ‘task based tools’)
• News and Events

The results were surprising. Whereas we might have thought that ‘social’ and ‘activity’ were what people would want to see on the new Intranet, the results showed that our audience wanted mostly ‘content’ (38.3%), then ‘social’ (19.7%), ‘collaboration’ (17.2%), ‘news & events’ (16%) and finally ‘activity’ (8.8%).

Some examples of the resulting Intranets built using legos:

I conducted a similar exercise with Intranet Managers from one of the JBoye groups. The results were different and their focus went into ensuring that their Intranet doesn’t fall apart and is well integrated.

Far from being a scientific exercise, the outcomes showed nevertheless that:

• ‘content’ always seems to be the base on which other parts are added
• ‘news’ is still the entry door
• ‘activity’ is an ‘enabler’
• ‘collaboration’ is intertwined with ‘social’
• and the ‘social’ dimension is often considered to be the ‘glue’ that holds it all together

It’s a fun exercise that will help you

• engage with you audience (sometimes in very funny and constructive way)
• get direct feedback
• better explain what constitutes an Intranet
• raise awareness about your future plans

I recently read this quote from a Toronto Customer of Intranet Connections (101 Intranet Ideas):

“The Intranet is not something that’s made out of stone, it’s made out of lego”

The building exercise we’ve conducted seems to confirm this!

Here is your challenge for this summer: can you build a perfect Intranet in 20 seconds?

See how my son was able to:

Will enterprise social network replace Intranets?

It’s interesting to see that some organizations are starting to use Enterprise Social Networks  (#ESN) as a replacement for their Intranets.

• The social network becomes the entry door (or ‘Intranet’ homepage)
• Content is no longer static but interactive and dynamic
• The Intranet can suddenly be accessed from any devices, anytime, anywhere
• Users start to adopt the Intranet and do not miss their traditional Intranet in a matter of days

These moves are often justified by the ease of use provided by most Enterprise Social Network solutions, their quick implementation and relatively low costs. To be successful, they require an increase in the resources dedicated to community management.

We knew that Enterprise Social Networks were starting to replace emails. The debate is now opened: is the future of collaboration and communication Not the Intranet (by @bmosherzinck)?

The answer is probably yes.

But that doesn’t imply that the future will only be Enterprise Social Networks.

Enterprise Social Networks are just one of the dimensions of what many have been describing as the Digital Workplace. They are the social layer that should go on top of every tools and be, in a sense, the glue that holds it all together.

Some vendors are starting to realize the potential of replacing Intranets and are starting to offer Intranet like features. Most however still lack a few essential features of advanced Intranets such as:

• The ability to integrate with enterprise systems beyond providing links
• The ability to manage structured content
• The ability to create and manage authoritative content
• The ability to manage processes

It’s great to see how Enterprise Social Networks how have brought fresh ‘blood’ into traditional Intranets. It is equally exciting to see how some are increasingly improving their features to the point of willing to replace Intranets (and they are quicker to develop new features than most Intranet team is able to).

Overall, I think however that we will continue to see Enterprise Social Networks coexist alongside traditional Intranets for sometime to go until they can be fully integrated into the Digital Workplace.

What are your views?

Is Digital Workplace becoming an accepted term?

The concept of a “Digital Workplace” has gained momemtum since a few weeks and this weeks @IntraTeam conference (#IEC12) seems to confirm this: “Digital Workplace” was all over, whereas the word “Intranet” was heard less than in the past.

I bet that 2012 will be the year where the concept of a “Digital Workplace” will start to be adopted outside of circles of experts. As a matter of fact, we just started to introduce the concept internally to help us set the scene to move beyond our traditional Intranet.

Mark Morrell (markmorrell) ran a very interesting workshop on ways to build the right governance model for the digital workplace that he defined as “anytime, any place, any device” (see his latest blog). According to Mark, the way forward to create a digital workplace strategy is to

1. Define what is a digital workplace;
2. See at which stage of the digital workplace your organization is;
3. Set up a governance for your digital workplace;
4. Define what needs to be done to ensure employees use your digital workplace.

To help us define what is a digital workplace, four great and complementary reports have recently been published:

1. Digital Workplace Trends 2012

Jane McConnell (@netjmc) has been one of the pioneer to talk about the digital workplace. I remember the debate that one of her posts generated in 2009 when she started to challenge the term “Intranet”.

Jane is running a yearly survey which is THE reference if you need numbers and facts about the digital workplace. The 2012 edition included more than 450 participating organizations and evaluated four possible scenarios for the digital workplaces of tomorrow:

1. “My Aps” – where you will be able to select what you need to do your job like on a smart phone;
2. “Smart systems” – where the digital workplace will remember you and deliver what you need based on your past online behavior or your context;
3. “People centric” – where a social layer will allow each of us to be central actors;
4. “Super search” – or the ability to finally find what you need to do your work.

What I particularly like is Jane’s understanding and clear definition of the digital workplace dimensions:

If you do not know Jane’s report yet, download the Digital Workplace Trends 2012.

2. The Digital Workplace – Redefining Productivity in the Information Age

Probably the less known of all four is Stephan Schillerwein’s (@IntranetMatters) Digital Workplace whitepaper, a deep dive into the building blocks of the digital workplace to get the whole enterprise 100 % loaded on your screen.

Stephan describes the poor state of most current information systems and lack of a logical enterprise-wide architecture:

Like most cities, organizations and their information system landscapes are products of years and years of organic growth and change. But imagine a city in which only the buildings have received some degree of central planning and coordination, but no thought has ever been given to roads, electricity lines and sewerage.

The report stresses the importance for any digital workplace initiative to be backed up by management and accompanied by substantial change management activities.

Stephan describes the building blocks of the digital workplace with concrete example scenarios and associated technologies. Key aspects to be considered for a digital workplace are also listed such as the Universal Inbox – a “one-stop-shop” for all information relevant to a person independent of source, device and format.

Stephan ends his report by recognizing that digital workplace management needs to be a strategic function in the organization, making the case that the digital workplace will enable to turn knowledge back into organizational power and should be a priority in every company.

Download the Digital Workplace – Redefining Productivity in the Information Age.

3. Digital workplaces – an implementation checklist

Martin White (@intranetfocus) gave a great presentation at #IEC_12 on “Building the digital workplace”.

According to Martin, the recent decision by Roche, one of the largest and most conservative pharmaceutical company in the world, to move to Google Aps is a clear sign that organisations are moving towards a digital workplace accessible “from any web-enabled device”.

Martin’s report list 20 technology, information and governance issues that need attention in order to be able to implement our vision of a digital workplace and includes a very instructive diagram showing that vision should be accompanied by skills, incentives, resources and an action plan in order to become a reality.

Some of the questions to consider:

• Have you identified core customers and suppliers who could usefully be involved at an early stage in the development of a digital workplace strategy?
• Have the change management implications of a digital workplace been discussed with HR and training teams?
• Is there a roadmap for the development of executive authority by the group currently responsible for digital workplace vision and strategy development?

Learn more by downloading the Digital workplace – an implementation checklist

4. A week in the digital workplace

Last but not least is James Robertson (@s2d_jamesr) “A week in the digital workplace”, a concrete vision of how we will work in the future.

Using a powerful storytelling approach, James describes with talent how ‘Morris’ is helping Sarah complete her tasks at work. Oh, by the way, ‘Morris’ is a Sarah’s new company Intranet. ‘Morris’ help translate the abstract concept of a digital workplace into something concrete.

Abstracts: “When Sarah logs in to her laptop, she finds an email waiting for her. “Hi, I’m Morris, the intranet. Welcome to our company!” … Sarah notices another prominent element of the Intranet homepage: a task list, pre-populated with items … Morris also seems to want to help Sarah make new friends and connections … She’s able to browse through the updates and comments made by the team, and quickly becomes aware of a big deadline that everyone is working towards this week. … What also pleases Sarah in this new job is that she’s able to use her own Android phone …. Following a helpful email from Morris – who’s proving to be her invaluable digital assistant – Sarah is able to quickly establish a secure connection to her office tools on her phone … It seems that there re also other tools that she can add to her phone. … Morris ask Sarah “I see you are travelling with us for the first time, would you like to arrange travel insurance?”

It seems futurist but has been inspired by real examples that Step Two Designs has been witnessing over the past few years. Meet ‘Morris’ and get inspired by downloading a week in the digital workplace

If you are interested in the subject, there are great #digitalworkplace discussions on Twitters! including a recent quote by @jensalmgren

When do we finally decide that an intranet is just another channel? Calling it an intranet narrows it’s actual purpose. Intranet RIP #iec12

Any thoughts on this last quote? Can the digital workplace be the new accepted term? Know any other good resources?