thinkIntranet Strategic Intranet Management

My colleage Inma and I have been wrassling with the SharePoint web site metrics recently. You guessed it - it’s the Out of the Box site reporting that you get, well, out of the box with MOSS.

J&J also uses WebTrends - and we have an account, but we have discovered some odd discrepancies between WebTrends and SharePoint data. Our Portal was also not originally coded to “work” with Web Trends - so while the pages now contain the Web Trends tracking code required, it is still difficult to use WebTrends reporting to report on a site-by-site basis across the site collections.

I’m happy to report that in most areas - life is pretty good right now: Kids are happy, thriving, Husband appears to be happy, garden is growing .. knock knock.. but things are OK just now.

In the strange world of SharePoint, however, all is not so rosy. I’m increasingly frustrated by the obvious misses that would really enable community collaboration - these are small “duh” things that would go a long way to improving our efforts to get people engaged and connected. So I’m working on a short list of the things that really annoy me about our Out of the Box implementation at J&J. Here we go:

At Enterprise 2.0 Boston Conference this week I attended a discussion about the details of the Open Enterprise research by Oliver Marks and Stowe Boyd. While listening to folks talk about their insights into making e20 work, someone asked about stories of failure - where people are really struggling with e20 in their organization. It’s natural that those who feel their efforts have really gained ground want to share the story. Not as likely to hear from those who are frustrated in their efforts.

So I thought I might share some of challenges and lessons learned after nearly a year at Johnson & Johnson attempting to build collaboration, community and e20 for a virtual organization of about 1000 Global Procurement professionals.

Enterprise 2.0 Boston - Day 2 Edit

Day 2 of Enterprise 2.0 Boston and the conference energy is really building. The morning keynote lineup included Matthew Fraser, author of “Throwing Sheep in the Boardroom” gave an insightful overview of how organizations are challenged to change in a social, networked world (and I snagged a free book later on in the expo).

Main themes of today, and of this conference, seem to be:

Enterprise 2.0 transformation can expose some fascinating insights into the psychology of the organization. And it illuminates those leaders who are reluctant to value input from their employees. In the world of e20, where the “crowd” engages in more decision making than ever before, there’s no room for leaders who cannot listen with care. Most importantly, the presence of any leaders on new communications channels can freeze efforts to get employees engaged. It’s really important to keep an eye out for this phenomenon.