2012

The festive period is over; it’s back to work.

About the BBC website

So what will 2012 bring us, here at BBC intranet HQ?

Well lots of organisational changes for a start. Changes at the (near) top of the IT organisation will impact on the Gateway team, and me personally. Whilst the final details are being sorted, it’s business as usual and we have clear plans stretching into the summer that will provide the team with new challenges, and incorporate exciting new opportunities to get more involved in activities that don’t usually fall under the remit of an intranet team.

In addition to continuing with intranet management and associated technical development, the team will be taking on the responsibility for the development of the BBC’s corporate internet activity. Some have already been done http://www.bbc.co.uk/aboutthebbc/ and http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/ with plenty more on the way.

Our approach, building on the successful implementation of intranet templates, means we will offer editorial teams a restricted number of  templates to use externally, to meet all their functional requirements, which will mean less money being spent on external design agencies, and ultimately save the BBC money. It’s a no brainer; why spend money trying to satisfy all the needs of everyone, when seven templates adequately meet the needs of the majority?

I’m in the process of clarifying the level of service we’ll be offering to the editorial folks, and we’ll be fully open for business in April 2012, whilst we ramp up our activities over the next couple of months.

So what are we going to be doing for the intranet? Plenty.

1. looking at what the Gateway homepage offers BBC users and making some suggestions to improve it even further
2. implementing improvements to our search engine
3. finalise version four of the intranet templates (which offers horizontal navigation, along the lines of the corporate sites) and make them available to publishers
4. assisting project teams in upgrade plans for existing technologies and agreeing the future role of the Gateway team
5. understand and manage the organisational changes to ensure no disruption to the current level of service/support and the Gateway team are clear what their roles and responsibilities are, and the business agrees and understands them.
6. manage the transition period to ensure additional corporate activities are successfully implemented with no impact on existing intranet support and development activities

So plenty to do, both internally and externally.

Our priorities

 A few posts ago, I outlined what we had on our “to-do” list following the launch of the BBC’s new Gateway homepage which included;

1. Creation of templates, used with the content management system to allow publishers to make use of a consistent approach and design and concentrate on the content, not site development. These will be inline with the BBC’s internet.
2. Fix the reported errors/bugs.
3. Research how people use the search engine and make improvements accordingly.
4. Look to see what additional functionality we can introduce using Sharepoint 2007.

We’ve done these, except the Sharepoint functionality, which is being constrained by ongoing commercial discussion with our IT supplier, so now what’s next?

Some of our priorities for the next three/six months – in no particular order;

• move further toward more effective “self service” for the publishing community. Beef up our on-line support materials and increase the range of “how to” videos online to further help and reduce calls/queries from the publishers.
• reduce further the number of intranet sites not managed by the enterprise content management system – delete those sites that aren’t being managed.
• improve the performance of the content management system. It’s running like a dog at times. Beef up the engine and pour more petrol in it. Not literally obviously.
• increase the number of existing sites that use the recently introduced templated approach which also includes improved measurement tools and the inclusion of the common Global Navigation Bar and standardised footer.
• widen the scope of the intranet development team to take on corporate internet activities. We’re planning on being fully “open for business” in the new financial year, and we’re currently adopting a similar business model for our development activity externally as we are internally; one content management system, a set of templates providing a wide range of functionality and clear ownership of content by editorial teams. This will reduce overall development and ongoing operational spend.
• analyse intranet survey results and recommend next set of deliverables to the business.
• understand and implement forthcoming organisational changes.

What improvements has the new homepage brought us?

BBC Gateway homepage - 10 May 2011

There were a number of business reasons why we decided to redesign the BBC’s intranet homepage and start work on sorting out the rest of the intranet;

• Increase efficiency
• Promote simplicity
• Encourage collaboration
• Make it easier to do stuff

and move on from the previous homepage that had been knocking around in a couple of incarnations for the past six or so years.

Our strategy focussed on five broad areas;

• Pan-BBC governance
• Editorial leadership
• Technical development
• Content production
• Systems and tools

And we’ve not only redesigned the homepage, we’ve started work on the top level landing pages, and soon we’ll start on the rest, including on-line applications.

This is a big gig and shouldn’t be underestimated as to it’s complexity. Not easy, but is anything that’s worth doing ?

A couple of weeks later….

Since we launched our new homepage design, feedback has been flooding in. As you can imagine, it’s wide and varied, but a couple of major themes have emerged.

1. People generally like the new uncluttered design with it’s simplistic style.
2. Users want the opportunity to add their own links. This is something our testing didn’t throw up (or we didn’t appreciate the amount of people who had added their own links to the previous site) so we’ve now introduced new functionality that allows users to add their own links, whilst maintaining the list of popular default links that can also be used.
3. There are a bunch of errors that need to be fixed.

Our next steps include;

1. Creation of templates, used with the content management system to allow publishers to make use of a consistent approach and design and concentrate on the content, not site development. These will be inline with the BBC’s internet.
2. Fix the errors.
3. Research how people use the search engine and make improvements accordingly.
4. Look to see what additional functionality we can introduce using Sharepoint 2007.

Intranet Innovation Awards

Are you planning on entering this year’s Intranet Innovation Awards? We are.

Full details available here;  http://www.steptwo.com.au/iia

Hopefully see you on the winners podium shaking the champagne bottle!

New BBC Gateway homepage

Well we went live at 8am this morning with the new homepage, plus redesigned landing pages. An all staff email has been sent out and feedback is starting to arrive.

As you can imagine it’s pretty full on here, so for now here’s a peek at the homepage and I’ll let you know what the headlines are later.

Before

Before; Gateway homepage 12 April 2011

After

After; New BBC Gateway homepage 13 April 2011

New BBC homepage

BBC Gateway homepage

So what’s been happening? Well loads actually. We go live with a redesigned Gateway homepage tomorrow at 8am, following lots of planning and activities behind the scenes. The result is very diifferent to what we currently have and this new design clearly meets three objectives;

• Communicate.

• Collaborate.

• Do stuff.

Now I could have provided you all with the extremely boring business objectives that we needed to meet, and were part of our business case and you can see them if you want, but these three sum them up. I don’t particularly like business bingo speak, so let’s not run unnecessary stuff up the flagpole and see what synergies emerge. Let’s keep it simple.

In addition we’ve done some content removal too. I have some impressive figures I could share, but won’t bore you with. Except maybe for one; we’ve reduced 78 glossaries to two. And that’s still one too many.

There are lots of other figures that I will keep to myself for the time being and use when the bosses ask how we’re getting on.

Now you’re probably wondering what the journey was to get to where we are, and what the end result looks like?

Well firstly we followed the established journey of research, design, refine, redesign, review and publish. Did we spend enough time and thoroughness at each stage? Probably not.  But you know what? It’s technology – if it isn’t right we can change it quickly enough.

What does the end result look like? Well I can’t show you that I’m afraid, not until after we’ve officially gone live. Over the past few weeks we’ve been sharing what we plan to launch with any BBC employees who were interested our work in progress so I wouldn’t be surprised if its already available somewhere on the internet, but you will have to wait another few days to see it here.

Once we’ve gone live we will go through a review period and invite BBC users to tell us what they think, then agree what we will deliver as part of the next phase.

Simple really.

Conferences in the future

I fear for the future of face to face conferences in this collaborative world.

Whilst there is nothing like meeting people in person and sharing war stories and experiences man to man/woman the current trend for attendees to tweet during the event means that perhaps we won’t all need to turn up en masse any more?

A recent example includes the Intra event in Scandinavia. A number of my former colleagues, plus folks I’ve met during my intranet travels, were either presenting or ensconsed in the audience tweeting away outlining highlights. And the presenters did similar afterwards. Its amazing what you can pick up in messages of 140 charcters or less. I prefer the less is more approach.

Add to this the fact that videos of sessions are readily available and access to the slideshows aren’t hard to come by then I think I’ve already gleaned enough information to warrant my non attendence. I don’t feel I’ve missed out too much. I can also ring people to fill in the gaps.

And when the use of video conferencing and true collaborative systems like webinars become more widely used (I do wish my IT would catch up) then we can all join in from the comfort of our own desks. This is regularly demonstrated with the IBF’s monthly "Intranet Live" virtual sessions of which I’ve co-hosted a few. .

I suppose it’s ultimately going to be determined by human behaviour. We’re social creatures who need to be with others. So whilst new approaches have their place. hopefully they won’t fully replace face to face conferences.

After all having a post virtual conference ginger ale on your own isn’t much fun.
.

http://www.bbc.co.uk
This e-mail (and any attachments) is confidential and may contain personal views which are not the views of the BBC unless specifically stated.
If you have received it in error, please delete it from your system.
Do not use, copy or disclose the information in any way nor act in reliance on it and notify the sender immediately.
Please note that the BBC monitors e-mails sent or received.
Further communication will signify your consent to this.

Digital litter

Over the past couple of months, I’ve attended two social media courses. “How to make the web work for you parts one and two”. Principally aimed at journalists the courses taught us how to exploit the internet and use it to find facts, figures, people and evidence. The idea being that journo’s would then be able to use the vast resources available to them at the touch of their keyboard, thus saving on the time it would “traditionally” take.

The first course demonstrated how social media is now part of main stream life and to ignore it would be very foolish – especially if you’re a journalist sniffing out a story.

The second day taught us how to obtain information about individuals and how to dig deeper into the web to glean information that people have left in their internet trails. The amount of information that’s out there on you and I is simply staggering; and if you know where to look then you’ll find it.

Our teacher for the second day is employed to undertake investigative work and provide evidence for TV and radio programmes and he knows his stuff. With his tuition we were all able to unearth various pieces of information about anyone we so chose (that could have been you) merely based on very basic web knowledge and a simple understanding of search engines such as Google, and exploiting what information we already had, to find out more.

This digital litter is what we all leave behind us when we surf around the net subscribing to all manner of websites, social networking sites (like this one), buying goods on-line and simply having a nosey around. You may not have realised it, but you have left footprints in the web snow. Well you can’t hover off the ground can you? So inevitably you’ll leave your mark on where you’ve been.

You’re probably aware that Facebook’s decision to open up all their accounts to the public, removes whatever privacy we once had. So in effect Facebook has now become an additional online yellow pages, unless you’ve instructed it to not share your details with people other than who you deem to be “safe”. I bet your privacy settings aren’t as secure as you think they are.

Were you aware that people within my organisation automatically (because of a corporate licence) have access to your name and address, plus what’s listed in the electoral roll or 192.com (which also gives access to 200million archived entries)? 192.com gives information about people not listed in telephone directories. Please note that these sites will usually charge a fee to access more detailed information; don’t pay it.

Oh and when I did a search on myself I was relieved to see that I wasn’t listed in the deceased list. Phew! But there was loads of stuff out there that I was kind vaguely aware of. But I didn’t find any secrets, but I shall keep on looking.

So I guess what I’m saying is. If you don’t want to be found, don’t use the internet. Oops too late – you’re reading this.

Is it ever as it seems?

Albert Einstein

How are reputations made and then kept?

In simple terms, reputations are usually earned over a significant time period, based on the delivery of promises and the constant re-inforcement and maintenance of said promises. The promises could be services, goods, facilities or all manner of things.

Reputations help brands become trusted; no matter what your personal view is, McDonalds and Coca~Cola have world renowned brands based on their reputation for delivering consistency. No matter where you consume a Big Mac or a glass of Coke in the world, it’s the same. You know what you’re going to get before you get it. There may be some regional variations to accommodate local tastes but the quality is always there.

Reputations exist in the intranet world too. I could give you ten examples of companies who excel at specific aspects of intranet delivery. Their reputations precede them in these aspects and when I want to find out more about how to improve the things that my organisation is focussing on, I approach an organisation who’s reputation goes before them.

But how are reputations gained in the first place within the intranet business? Some are earned through winning some award or other, whilst others seem to be merely smokescreens for the reality. Word of mouth has a lot to do with it, and if the tale is told often enough it will become fact.

I know of an organisation who has a reputation for being the leaders in one particular aspect of the intranet industry, but the reality is far different. The reputation was earned by two major factors;

1. identify emerging technology and introduce it because you can, with little regard to how it would be managed, supported, paid for or how it fits into any strategic approach. Play with the gadgets and by sheer will of the crowd they become an essential part of the business.

2. continually perpetuate the fallacy that because the organisation is “creative” then it’s ok to continue to do things independently of any other part of the business; just because you can. Then tell everyone and anyone who will listen, about this wonderful new gizmo that’s been around for ages on the internet and how great your organisation is by bringing it in house because it’s “just what the business needs.” This view is usually driven by personal interest.

Bingo! Reputation is formed. Other companies constantly pat you on the back and tell you how good you are and how lucky the organisation is to have such a forward thinking Intranet manager.

Then of course, you clear off to another company or go freelance and jet around the world esposing your innovative and maverick ways to the highest bidder and leave someone else to try and unpick the mess that has evolved around you. The poor soul who’s left has to then integrate, or rationalise, many disparate systems that don’t work together or talk to each other. Whilst also having to negotiate with the business to remove little used toys, that have now become the lifeblood of one small bunch of users, who would rather fight you on the beaches than give up their right to using something “you gave us in the first place.”

The same individual also has to produce numerous business cases to gain budget (because business users won’t stump up the cash) to pay third party suppliers for licences and ongoing support, which in the long term far outweighs any initial preconceived business benefits. Inevitably the more budget that’s used for exisiting technical solutions means less available for any new stuff.

But that’s ok. Because your reputation goes before you.

And for those who still work for the company, you can take reflected glory in the reputation that you’re part of a forward thinking organisation. It takes years before reputations are tarnished or lost; no matter the reality.