we moved to http://kbex.wordpress.com

keep things simple. now it’s all the same name.

 

http://www.kbex.eu

http://kbex.wordpress.com

Intranet managers and social media – 1950’s farmers and tractors

Intranet managers who have to consider using social media and 2.0 features are in a similar situation as farmers who were considering whether to buy a tractor or not in the 1950’s.

Why should you? Is there anything you can not do without it? Is there any real advantage in having one?

ECM Summit Day 2: Communication Controlling and Knowledge Management

Today I could listen to another four presentations.

In the morning, the topic was communication controlling: How do you know that your communication activities really achieve their goals, that you reach your audience – and how can you transform that into ideas for and ROI argumentation?

ECM Summit – some slides in multilingual intranets

EMC Summit Multilanguage English version

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: emc summit)

ECM Summit – Day 1: Social Media in the Enterprise, Multilanguage Management

I could listen to four case studies on two topics today.

Xonio.com presented it’s social media activities. Xonio is a B2C-portal focusing on mobilephones other mobile hardware stuff, mostly publishing testing reports.

Actually, they summarize almost everything in the social media topic: comments, boards, rss, even emailsupport for users.

ECM Summit: Consultants – add more power!

ECM World Congress, Frankfurt: Is this it?

Almost hundred people joined the event, at least. (www.ecm-summit.de)

Keynotes were held by german consulter Ulrich Kampffmeyer,who focused on the Human Impact-Factor of Online Media, knallgrau CEO Dieter Rappolt, who presented some general highlight of nice campaigns (of course BMW) and Headshift Founder Lee Bryant, who emphasized that oldschool intranets are boring.

I think we have to speed up.

Shaping worlds – meet the Truman Show

Just a quick thought: Managing information is like juggling between very ambitious open space models (greek agora) and the “Truman Show”.
But don’t tell anybody…

Multilingual Sites – The impact of Information Architecture (and the other way round)

Where do you make the difference between different languages or different localizations of your site?

I think we can assume that there ist actually very little information that is really the same and will be reused all over; most of the contents will have some local variations.
If you think of a site containing product information, the products may be similar in different countries, but they will have different names (what requires different pictures), different selling propositions and different terms and conditions. That reduces the reuse quite a lot.
Company information on the other hand should not allow any variations: If an international company is addressing it’s audience – no matter if customers, employees or investors – the message must be consistent and uniformous. There should be no local influence and no chance for local stakeholders to change or delay that information.
Nevertheless, this information should find it’s way to the audience like any other information, it should not be published in specific exile-sections.

So where to make the difference between local and international contents, between translated and native, between local-language-only and mandatory to be translated contents, how to display that so that the user does not get confused?
Actually,it’s easy: the user should not notice any difference.
So the difference should not be named, it should not be part of the menu,it should not make the user think about local or international contents – all contents should just be there.

 

Having a menu entry labeled “International” would require to translate everything in there – that means you have to enter enough content to make it an entry of it’s own, to translate everything and to think about reasons why certain contents are part of the international section and not of the other local channels. Maybe you will end up with having the contents in both places – that’s the best way to kill your international section.

So be careful with emphasizing multilingual features and translations, don’t make the user think about it – but invest a lot of thought in what and how to translate.

Multilingual Sites – Beyond Workflows

 When asked for multilingual features, skills and experiences, experts, consultants and tool-providers are quick to present workflows and other technical solutions.

What we know now for sure is

• there are cms- and portal solutions who bring translation-workflows out of the box
• there are best practices for handling translations, including the management of translators, change notifications and versioning
• there will be a good technical case-study for every issue we may come up with

 

Does this really answer all questions? What actually are multilingual sites?

Multilingual sites are pages that present content in different languages; some of ythese contents will be the same in all languages. That requires translation.

Pages that display different contents, are actually not multilingual sites – they are just different websites.

So one big criteria for multilingual sites is translation – and it is one big challenge to decide which contents should be translated.

In a multinational company, translation is not only a matter of cost, but also of politics and strategy: what does it mean to translate, why is it done, what are the targets? There are several possibilities:

• be close to the employees; don’t create a distance to internationally relevant information
• keep the barriers as low as possible
• ensure that all employees have the same chance to understand
• touch people in their direct environments
• give employees the right terms for their future conversation with colleagues, customers and other local environments
   

These criteria are to be applied differently, depending from

• who is talking? an international headquarter or a local subsidiary?
• who is addressed? locally or internationally woprking employees?
• what other environments are relevant? what languages do they speak?
   

That creates a matrix that can help to decide which translations are really necessary, which can be avoided because they dont fit the criteria and which have to be done even though may not seem to be the most important ones at first glance.

 

Applied Collaboration – Spread the Word

We had a long discussion today on how to publish the reports of our research department. They are of very low interest to most users, but very important to some; most of the time they are considered to be nice to have, but they can become very critical information very soon.

• Emailing the reports is the worst solution: they waste space (500k – 1 meg), they are deleted or archived and forgotten and only considered as another annoying newsletter.
• Publishing a summay of every report as a news on the intranet also takes your users straight to boredom – this will be the perfect example of a never read information.
• On the other hand, people complain that they dont find enough information if they search the intranet for business-, market- or country-specific-information.
• The complete information is published on the internet – but employees dont go there to search, and on the research-department’s share – but that’s where employees don’t have access.

We decided to start a report-channel that published only very short abstracts of the reports, containing just enough keywords so that a search on this business or that market should find it. Monthly news highlighting the most important reports will be published to point users to that service and to keep the curiosity alive.
The full reports would be found in the internet only; the summaries will link there.

What a lot of work. But we have to prevent the ongoing experience that there is nothing in the intranet.

What a beautiful solution would it be to have a common report-directory, maintained collaboratively by the researchers, descriptions of their reports on their personal pages or phonebook-profiles and downloadable reports that could be accessed from there.

That would not only mean less work for us a intranet managers, but it would also save the researcher’s time – and it would deliver a much greater value to the users: The easy combination of information empowers searching and browsing features, because the higher density brings better search results and makes menus more understandable, it creates a goof overview of the content’s context (because there is a direct relation to the authors and their environment) – and information would have to be stored only once, but linked to very often.

Other benefits:

• users get more into the intranet, they are invited to look around
• keeping a clear and strict information architecture, but mixing the access to information and providing multiple entry pages (from channels to personal profiles or phonebook entries) makes the intranet more transparent and inviting for users
• it’s actually not exactly collaboration, but it prepares people to use the intranet, to add their own views and contents and to participate and socialise.