thinkIntranet Strategic Intranet Management

If I had a dime for every Website launch that got off to a rocky start … This Monday morning I was greeted by an exciting new email in my inbox. It seems that the J&J HR function has been busy transforming itself, and part of that transformation is a new Website. The new site is called… “OurSource.biz” … I thought for a second I had received a joke email - OurSource.biz? What does that have to do with HR and J&J? Consumed with curiosity, I faithfully followed the link, to be presented with a log in page. Now, J&J does a pretty good job with common authentication. There is not true “single sign on” yet, but most applications rely common identifiers to log in. Which is great. So on this page, I was asked to use my existing worldwide ID to sign in.

I’m on day 9 of my new job at J&J, managing the Portal and driving collaboration for global procurement. The vision is great: use the integrated MOSS 07 environment to enable innovation and collaboration, improve business results and build community for this decentralized function. What I’ve been spending most of my time doing is getting a picture of how the organization functions today - how people work, what their tasks, activities and workflows are, and how they might, or might not, move these activities into the new portal environment.
On a more pragmatic level, I’ve jumped on to a moving train with a portal launch scheduled for mid-September - and the current staged site is nowhere near ready. There are some design issues and some functionality problems, and lots of requirements, tasks, fixes, etc. So I’m in that familiar “launch a website” role while trying to build a sense of the bigger picture.

Today I’m focused on defining and documenting content management roles for the site. Tomorrow I think will be guidelines for using blogs and wikis.

I know I wont’ be able to blog every single day, but I want to make sure I capture these early days as first impressions are really important, and easily forgotten as you get “used” to things in a new organization. I spent my second day with J&J briefly sitting in on some Sharepoint training and then workign closely with the PM on this portal project to understand deliverables and where things are in the project delivery cycle.

I’ve come in right in the middle of a soft-launch of Sharepoint ‘07 - the second deployment of Sharepoint for this function, where the expectations are high that the ~1100 members of this global (and again, highly decentralized) function will easiliy start using the platform to work, communicate and collaborate. My role will be to help drive that adoption, and as I start to synthesize all the pieces of this challenge, I’m identifying some early challenges (I’m sure this list will grow!):

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.