thinkIntranet Strategic Intranet Management

Well, today is my first day at J&J in my new role as Manager of Portal and Collaboration for the Global Procurement function. This position is a challenge to make collaboration “really real” for a smallish (~1100) and highly decentralized organization.

The vision to reduce spend, increase quality and connect the global team is there. The ledership team is very eager to drive collaboration and work online - but after an initial Sharepoint deployment didn’t result in active adoption, the leadership team accurately realized that there’s more to collaboration than just plugging in Sharepoint. So a few months ago they brought in Andrew MacAfee from HBS to talk about how to drive collaboration, and approved new headcount for someone to drive the vision. And here I am!

My goal here is to document our progress as much as I can while respecting J&J confidentiality, and my long term goal is to turn this experience into a whitepaper or report. The nutshell: Most of what I’m reading - even in the Forrester report, seems suspiciously fluffy, still, about collaboration. How real can we make it? The challenge is mine - so here I go!

After about 10 months with IBF, I finally decided that the time is right to get back into full-time work. I’m really excited about this new stage in my career: Starting August 18th I’ll be leading Portal and collaboration for Johnson & Johnson’s global procurement function. The mandate for this newly-created role is to make collaboration “real” for the globally scattered procurement staff who need to find a better way to connect about sources and suppliers. If I can help make a real change in the way this community connects online, this could be a model to deploy across other parts of the organization. Although getting back to full-time work after nearly 5 years at a part-time pace is a bit daunting, I’m definitely ready for it. I’m also happy to get back into the familiar feeling of a big global, with all the Intranet challenges that brings. Although I’m sure I’ll find J&J is a very different place than IBM, it’s also a company with a great brand and reputation. I’ll be blogging about my efforts to deliver “real collaboration” here, in a serious effort to document our progress.

I spent part of last week at Intranet Week Boston last week. This small IQPC conference was also sponsored this year by IBF. IBF North America Director Nancy Goebel co-chaired the event, and I came along to take part in panel discussions on governance and design.

Some of the main themes of the two-days of main conference presentations included:

1. More and more about social networking: Everyone seems to be talking about how to introduce some aspect of “social media” into their organization. And most Intranet Managers seem to be attempting to do this through careful implementations of “2.0” tools, mostly the introduction of discussion forums, blogs, or “myspace” like applications. We heard the compelling story of Blue Shirt Nation, the Drupal based networking and discussion site created on a shoestring budget by Steve Bendt and his colleagues from Best Buy. Among Steve’s tips for success:

1. It’s important to understand the social contract your company needs

2. Be a listener

3. Efforts fail from poor community management, deploying overpriced, shiny features.

4. Never make an investment you are too proud to give up

I’m taking part in the Intranet Benchmarking Forum’s IBF24. IBF is doing a 24 hour online event about all things Intranet. So far, so good! I just presented a brief overview of Enterprise 2.0 technology gurutes and will be talking about Governance with some other participants later this afternoon. Then from 3-11 p.m. EST I’ll be facilitating the a few segments with my colleague Nancy Goebel.

I just blogged about the Semantic Intranet for IBF, following research I have been doing for my IBF Intranet Futures research paper. I’ve got a lot of learning to do on this topic, but after spending just an afternoon talking with Sean Martin, a former IBM colleague who left the company to found Cambridge Semantics, I’m inspired about the potential of semantic technologies to really change the face of Intranets and bring them to a whole new level.