Dion Hinchcliffe from the DachinGroup is talking about “Rethinking Intranets as Social Workplaces.” Dion is the EVP at DachisGroup. I haven’t been at the same conference as Dion since Enterprise 2.0 2007 in Boston – I was presenting a workshop on the IT Manager 2.0, and Dion was presenting a workshop at the same time on the big trends in the space.

Key points:
– Dion is going to talk through the ideas at the leading edge of intranets.
– He is the co-author of “Social Business By Design,” with Peter Kim.
– Dion does a lot of writing for various places – ZDNet, Social Computing Journal, and more. And at DachisGroup, he works with big companies dealing with various big issues.
– lots of the case studies that Dion will address today come from the Social Business Council. It used to be the 2.0 Adoption Council.
– … the DachisGroup holds the council at arms-length, but does mine them for research data and case studies.
– the drivers for next-generation business
– … pervasive global connectivity
– … friction-less interaction platforms – eg., every major business is trying to stamp out Evernote and Dropbox, but workers find them so wonderful. Gartner says – 30% of IT is under user control today, and it will only move more towards the employees.

– … network effects
– … information super-abundance
– … inherent transparency openness and broadcast
– … the rise of social capital.
– research data:
– … from mid-2009, social traffic was more than email traffic in consumer web. Today … email traffic and usage is dropping.
– … but this isn’t being mirrored at the enterprise. How do we take advantage of this in the enterprise?
– social business is about (a) innovation, (b) growth, (c) cost reduction, and (d) transformation.
– the 50 foot collaboration rule – Tom Allen (1977) – workers are not likely to collaborate very often if they are more than 50 feet apart. This hasn’t changed even with new technology tools. BUT – the new social tools have changed this (at least partially)

– various motivations and trends – helping knowledge workers find things easier, support collaboration, help solving collaborative problems, creating reusable knowledge, and making data accessible to most workers.
– what does a social intranet include?
– … (1) a holistic social view community that meets business needs
– … (2) software that puts people and relationships at the core of their function
– … (3) user profiles that list connections
– … (4) activity streams – events and messages in your social environment
– … (5) other social applications – eg., time keeping systems, document management. The important distinction is that they make most activity public by default.
– driving the agenda – huge innovation on the Web, trust / engagement / reputation between the enterprise and consumer markets, etc.
– … eg., the social platforms on the web are much better than what the enterprises have.
– … the big change in the enterprise space is the move from enterprise portals to social intranets.
– what might a social intranet look like?
– … theme 1 – most work is unstructured. Therefore it needs to support collaboration. There’s a lot of interest about simultaneous document editing – see the work by The Executive Board.
– … theme 2 – being able to replay what’s happened in the future – business knowledge.
– case studies:
– … Alcatel-Lucent – been working on this since 2008, starting with a blog with the CEO. Launched Jive in late 2009.
– … Cemex – started at the beginning of 2011, with a programme about collaborative literacy. Also gave the system to the executives two months ahead of everyone else, so the executives could get comfortable with it.

– … BASF – started in 2007. See my notes from Lotusphere 2012 on connect.BASF.
– … Burberry – better connection between workers and customers.