The Shed

I doubt they do but it certainly felt that way today.

I was in a quiz at a departmental BBQ today and I knew nothing.  I was rubbish.  Everyone around me knew so much more about art, history, geography, general knowledge, etc etc etc.

I realised I never remember anything anymore, I just rely on online resource for all of the facts.

Can’t decide if it’s a good thing or a bad thing.  One thing is for sure, I’ll never win a pub quiz if they keep outlawing the use of mobile phone!

When I started this little series of how to start an internal blog I had an idea that I would write 10 posts running through what happened.  Then I had a conversation the other day with someone and we boiled how to start an internal blog down to a very simple concept…just do it.

It’s quite simple, if you want an internal corporate blog then just get it done.  You’ll figure it out.

Here’s a quick run down though of what I was going to write.

1. Decide why.
2. Choose a platform.
3. Get management buy-in
4. Start publishing
5. Build an audience through your content
6. Recruit people willing to blog
7. Start capturing the succesful connections you make via the blog, no matter how small.
8. Revisit management and get them to blog.
9. Review, is it a success or failure. Success = good, failure = try again
10. Done.

So you’ve decided you want a blog and you’ve picked a platform.  That means the easy work is over and now you need to start the tough stuff.

If I was to do the whole thing again the first thing I would do, before writing a thing, is get management buy-in.  Why?  Because management can make or break a new internal blog in one fell swoop.  Get them on your side and at least you’ll be left in peace to do what you want.  Annoy them and it’s going to put a large dent in your audience.  Basically you need to remember that at the minute they are the ones that hold most of the power.  They will be the ones who have people’s attention and respect and even if people hate the management they’ll still be fearful of them.

Once you’ve figured out why you want to start an internal corporate blog you’ll need to figure out how.  One of the first questions to answer is…what platform.

There’s a whole bunch of platforms out there but one thing you shouldn’t do is worry that much about which one you pick.  This is likely to be the easiest thing you do when it comes to starting an internal blog so if you find yourself spending a lot of time on this decision give yourself a swift kick in the backside, make a decision and move on.  You might as well make an arbitrary decision because unless you’re an experienced blogger anyway then you’ll not know precisely what you want.

So, what’s out there?  There’s tonnes but the four I’d consider are SharePoint, Drupal, WordPress and Moveable Type.

SharePoint
If you’re in a corporation that’s a Microsoft house and you already have MOSS 2007 then probably the easiest route will be to use it’s out-of-the-box blogging functionality.  It’s pretty basic but it’ll get you part of the way there.  Just look for the “Blog” option in the sites and workspaces.  If you don’t have it then give your tech guys a call.  The good parts about SharePoint blogging all relate to the publishing side in that it’s easy to use, works well with Windows Live Writer and looks and feels much like all the other bits of SharePoint you may have already used.  The bad parts about SharePoint blogging all relate to the digestion of content.  It doesn’t do tag clouds out of the box, it’s RSS feeds suck and it’s categories don’t make up for any of it.  Given that a lot more people will be digesting information rather than publishing it seems a little arse backwards to me so I’d avoid it if you can, however, as I say if you’ve already got MOSS 2007 then your first blog will be set up in a matter of minutes.

Drupal
I don’t actually know that much about the back end of Drupal but it is what our most popular internal blogs are on.  Personally I wouldn’t have used it but it was there ready and waiting for me to use so I just went ahead.  It takes a little while to get your head round, is a little bit more difficult to use and administer than SharePoint, WordPress or MT blogs but it’s more customisable and while the publishing is generally good the number and variety of RSS feeds it spits out is phenomenal.  I don’t think anything I’ve used has bettered it for RSS.  Not sure how long it would take to set up the technical side of things though since I haven’t been involved with it.

WordPress
Probably comes as no surprise that I like WordPress since that’s what’s under the bonnet of this blog.  Open source so very cheap to get in, you’ll need someone on the technical side of things to help you set up the database but once you get going the admin and customisation aspects are a dream.

Moveable Type
Never used it myself but I’ve heard great things.  Probably the most extensively used blogging platform in the Enterprise, primarily because if you spend a little more Six Apart will quite hapilly support you.  For a while we talked about moving from Drupal to MT but then SharePoint came in and ruined the party.  Worth checking out.

Those are probably your four big players.  There’ll be others but I’ll leave it there.  Feel free to chuck a comment in if you think I’ve missed any.

The important thing is to pick one, install it and then worry about changing people’s behaviours.  You’ll hear and read it time and time again but technology truly is only 10% of the effort, the other 90% is people related.

I’ve just been over to SlideShare for the first time in ages and found a little featured article on Scott Gavin.

It’s always nice to see a friend doing well especially since I stole Meet Charlie in order to make Meet Charlotte.

The two, along with Meet Jessica have been doing a roaring trade at work and in combination have often sold people on E2.

Before you start an internal company blog you need to understand why you want to do it.  You are going to be asked to justify your reasons on many occasions so you need to be clear why you want to do it.  Justify to yourself why you want to do it and it’ll be much easier to justify to others, including the senior management who you’ll need on your side and the users who you’ll need to convince it’s a good thing.

When I started I was a little naive and went along with the thought of, “It’s such a good idea everyone will intrinsically know why and just start using it.”  I was wrong.  Depending on what type of blog you start you will have to sell it to people.  Not only that but you’ll have to sell it to a very wide audience.

Get your selfish reasons clear and then turn them into reasons that give clear business value.  Don’t be naive either, to sell stuff you need to appeal to everyone.  One day you might be telling one person how they can relinquish control and allow their staff to connect with each other independently and the next day you might be telling another how they can use it to lead (read control) their staff more as they can keep them more informed of the business requirements.

Why did I do it?  A few reasons.

Boredom
At the time I was bored.  I wasn’t being challenged at work enough.  When I’m bored I look for things to do and ways to shake things up a little bit so that I make my own challenges.  Boredom however is only going to be enough to get things kick started.  Once they’re going you’re unlikely to be bored for a while.  Also, boredom is unlikely to get you many contributors (it’ll get you some) and it definitely isn’t going to get you buy in from management.  The way I pitched boredom to senior management was in the form of lack of flow of information.  I was bored because information wasn’t at my fingertips, I couldn’t do things on the spur of the moment.  There was a distinct lack of agility and flexibility, hence, I was bored.

Lots of ideas and no audience
I always find work progresses at the pace of the slowest person.  Great when you’re a team who need to cross the line at the same time, not so great when you feel you’re being held back.  I was constantly coming up with ideas to improve the business and my only audience was my boss.  We did as much as we could but there’s only so many meetings you can arrange and so many presentations you can give.  The classical way resulted in me leading plenty of teams but a lot of ideas fell by the wayside and nothing ever came of them.  With a blog you can just fire out ideas until the cows come home.  Again some of them will fall by the wayside but once you build your audience you’re more likely to get a foothold.  You find yourself not having to sell ideas to management to get traction but you fire out an idea, someone will pick up on it and you’ll form an ad-hoc team that just gets it done.

Fed up of hierachy
Tied in with too many ideas and not enough audience I was also pretty tired of having to go through the hierachy to get anything done.  This is the social networking component of blogs.  Social networking isn’t new.  People fundamentally understand social networking they just don’t understand it in a business context.  For example, we are thinking about putting an extension on our house and I needed some advice.  I didn’t turn to the council or some builder’s regulatory body, I went home and had a chat with Den, a carpenter and foreman for many years but more importantly the husband of Margaret whose hair my mam has been styling for over 20 years and a close family friend.  The idea is the same in business, if I wanted to do something related to mass spectrometry then why would I go to my boss whos speciality is business process when I could go direct to someone who uses a mass spectrometer day in and day out.

There’s more reasons why I did it but the important thing is to get your resons clear and then turn them into reasons that can help you sell it to people.

For over a year now I’ve been plodding away trying to get an internal corporate blog started.  Now that I figure it’s become pretty successful I thought I’d let you into how I got it done.  Usually when you look around there’s a lot of talk about why you should do it, why you’ll never be able to do it and all the politics that go along with it but I wanted to give some practical advice and hopefully help some of you guys and gals out.

First off here’s a little background.

The blog I started is hosted in a large multinational pharma.  It’s main target audience/contributor base was around 600-700 staff, mainly bench scientists but spreading through to senior management.  It was left completely open so anyone in the organisation could contribute.

The blog started off with a small contributor base of around 1, me, and has now grown to a readership of over 650 unique users a month and a contributer base of approximately 30-40.

So, keep reading if your interested and I’d love to hear any other similar stories as I’m planning on doing it all again very soon.

Sid.

Euan Semple over on The Obvious just came up with another great one liner…

The raised profile of E.2.0 means you have to ask bigger, uglier people for permission.

I’m inclined to agree with him.  Although I’d go a little further.  In the very early days of E2 (you could argue we’re still in the very early days) it was classed as something only “mavericks” did.  The kind of people who wanted to buck the hierachy or were seen as rebels or renegades. Now though it’s got a foothold in large organisations and everyone wants a piece of the action.

That means turf wars.  Turf wars means politics. Politics in the business mean a lot of wasted time when you should be getting on with stuff.

It seems a little uncomfortable but I’ve decide to put my CV up here on my blog.  I thought it was about time I started touting myself a little bit.

I don’t consider putting my CV online to be the best way to get attention, it’s more of a psychological step for me to make.

Why am I doing it now?  The usual reasons I guess.  Feeling a little bit insecure at work, looking for a good challenge, looking to move to my dream job etc etc.

Comments and thoughts on it would be appreciated.  Job offer would be appreciated more!

Sid.

At work there’s been a lot of talk about content security and generally how we should set up site security in SharePoint (SP). Here’s my take on it.

If you’ve used SharePoint you’ll know that the security settings are extremely granular. You can set different security settings at virtually any level. For the classic security conscious employee this is great, they can lock down whatever they feel the need to lock down. For the new generation of knowledge workers this gets in the way of what they expect, information at their fingertips whenever they need or want it.

Left unchecked SharePoint develops into a security nightmare. In an ad-hoc experiment we deployed two site collections, one managed and one not, both to around 500 users. On the managed site we have 2 levels of security, one access control group that gives “contribute” rights to anyone in the company with an NT account and one access control group that gives “full control” to a small set (about 15) admins. On the unmanaged site we allowed the users to control their own access. After approximately 6 months there are 228 access control groups.

You could discuss the hows and whys of the growth of access control groups if the site remains unchecked, fear, paranoia, misinterpretation of IP guidleines etc etc, but the point is leave a SP site security unchecked and it’ll soon turn into a mess.

The solution is to manage it once, manage it well and accept no excuses.

Typically in any organisation you have three types of content, open, regulated and confidential. The open content is the stuff where there is no good reason to keep it locked away from people or unavailable for editing. The regulated stuff is the stuff where you need to manage who has edit rights since the ultimate destination has legal consequences. Things like SOPs or documents submitted to regulatory bodies fall into this category. The confidential content is the stuff where you need to manage who has edit rights and who has read rights. This is generally the stuff that has big financial, legal or personal consequences. In-licensing content, salaries, acquisitions etc etc falls into this category.

Rather than mix all of these content types together I’d say you should keep them apart.  For the open content take your SP site give everyone in the organisation contribution rights and leave it there.  For the confidential content take it and squirrel it away into a secure site collection, your bound to have less confidential content so you will have less to administer even if you choose to break inheritance and manage each sub-site individual.  For the regulated content, well, get something other than SP.  Out of the box SP just sucks at version control and workflows.

Would be good to hear anyone else’s thoughts.

Sid.