Essays

In the footsteps of Ada: Seven women who inspired me

/ Sharon O'Dea / 2 Comments

Today is Ada Lovelace Day, an annual celebration of the achievements of women in science, technology, engineering and maths named after the first computer programmer. In honour of the occasion, here are seven women who inspired me to work in digital:

1) My grandmother

My grandmother Marguerite was born in 1923, just a few short years after her father returned from the trenches of WW1. She studied engineering at the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris, and not long after graduating met and married a young Scottish man. Sadly the marriage was short-lived. There were few engineering jobs for women in those days, still less a single mum with a young child, but her technical knowledge and perfect written English meant she found work as a technical translator.

Proving you really are never too old to learn, she took a computer course at 89, and took to it like a duck to water. She got a tablet for her 90th birthday back in January, which she uses every day. She’s not tweeting yet, but I wouldn’t write it off.

2) My mum

My mum Cathie is not a techie by trade, but a travel agent – one of the first industries to embrace computing from the back office right to the front line. She’s been using computers for work since the early 70s, and was quick to realise they’d go on to disrupt nearly every industry. She understood this would be a skill everyone will need, and so she bought us our first family computer, the Amstrad CPC464. I did my first programming on this; I never got much better at it.

She was completely right about digital disrupting the travel  trade; while the big high street chains are in decline, she now runs her own travel business from home, working with online tools and systems.

3) My year 9 IT teacher

She realised I had an interest in, and aptitude for, working with computers, and let me tinker away in the computer room whenever I liked. It was thanks to her that I got my first modem and got on the Internet for the first time, in 1993. I haven’t been offline since. She unknowingly changed my life and career. It’s a little embarrassing, then, that I’ve forgotten her name*.

* if any Maria Fidelis alumna are reading this and can remember her name, it would be great if you’d jog my memory

4) Mary McKenna

Mary was one of the first people off Twitter that I met in real life. She founded Learning Pool, an e-learning business based on open source. Female entrepreneurs are a rare breed in tech, but Mary’s ambition and no-nonsense attitude set her apart, and in a few short years she’s turned it into a successful global business.

Mary also proves that you don’t need an asymmetric haircut and skinny jeans to be a successful dotcom entrepreneur. She champions and supports other women in tech, with excellent blog posts like this one on negotiating your salary.

5) Sue Black

Dr Sue Black is an award-winning computer scientist, researcher, consultant and advocate of women in computing. She’s best known for her (successful) campaign to save Bletchley Park. In 2011 she set up the <goto> foundation, to to change public perception of, and increase participation in, computer science.

Sue had an atypical route into computer science, moving into it by studying as a mature student with two small children. Her story, which she’s written at length on her blog, is truly inspirational. Through tech education Sue was able to bring her family out of poverty, earn a decent living and create a better future for them all. She knows first hand what a difference education and confidence with technology can make and now wants to give that opportunity to other mums – so she founded SavvyTechMums, which delivers intensive,  hands-on workshops to help mums become tech savvy.

6 & 7) Hadley Beeman and Ann Kempster

Hadley and Ann are two of my firmest friends in the field. We got to know each other via the gov tech circuit, at events like Teacamp.

Frustrated by the lack of women we saw speaking at tech events, we talked about the reasons why this might be the case. Eventually we realised that we’d better stop talking and do something about it, and together we hit upon the idea of 300 Seconds, our series of lightning talks which aim to raise the profile of women in digital.

Hadley and Ann are both tremendously hard-working, clever, capable and endlessly curious. None of us would have got 300 Seconds off the ground alone, but they helped me realise that by working with brilliant people, and being creative and persistent, we can change the world.

This list could have been extended to 100 or more without much difficulty. On Ada Lovelace Day, people all over the world are celebrating those women in science and technology who have inspired them.

Who are the women who have inspired you?

In praise of web anonymity

/ Sharon O'Dea / 1 Comment

The Twitter rape threat row shows no signs of abating, as many users pledge to take a one-day break from the site this Sunday, August 4th. Author and columnist Caitlin Moran says she’s taking a 24-hour ‘trolliday’ from the site “because it will focus minds at Twitter to come up with their own solution to the abuses  of their private company”.

Twitter have already caved in to demands for a ‘report abuse’ button – which, as I argued earlier this week, is likely to cause as many problems as it solves. But many commentators claim this doesn’t go far enough, and are calling for an end to anonymous accounts on social network sites like Twitter.

Writing in the Guardian, Simon Jenkins claims that the internet has become a masked ball, “whose concealed dancers may be corporations or governments, paedophiles or rapists, weirdos or fools”, demanding that “it must be regulated”.

Jenkins echoes the online disinhibition effect, “a loosening (or complete abandonment) of social restrictions and inhibitions that would otherwise be present in normal face-to-face interaction during interactions with others on the Internet”. Anonymity, it’s suggested, is itself the cause of so much anti-social behaviour online.

Although I would certainly never condone the type of abuse that Moran describes, we need to be wary of losing the enormous benefits that anonymity on the web brings all of us.

Anonymity can be a wonderful thing. Many of those commenting on blogs and forums are doing so from beneath a pseudonym, so they can speak freely on the issues that concern them without it being part of their Google footprint, drawing scorn from real-life friends and family.

internet-anonymity

Anonymity can be a powerful force for good online

Anonymity allows us to practice having different points of view; we can be a more conservative or liberal version of ourselves in online discussions, which helps us to form our own opinions and arguments.

And it’s there where the spectrum of trolling begins. At one end you have someone taking a contrary opinion in order to get a rise out of someone. This kind of anonymous trolling can be a noble art, and we saw a fine example of such this week, when Pukkah Punjabi trolled the ‘racist van’.

At the other end of the spectrum you have people shouting vile abuse at strangers. This is clearly wrong, and rightly illegal. What one woman might be willing to ignore, or consider a joke, another might find scary and threatening, especially when received as frequently as some high-profile women do.

Where trolling ends and abuse begins is difficult to define, but we should exercise caution so we don’t lose the benefits of anonymity in our rush to rid the web of abuse.

MIT academic Sherry Turkle has written extensively about the value of the anonymous web in allowing people to experiment with different facets of their personality and opinions, in order to develop our sense of self and identity. In Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, Turkle talks about how the internet allows us to engage in new ways of thinking about evolution, relationships, politics, sex, and the self.

As an example, someone who is coming to terms with their sexuality might participate in online discussions in LGBT forums. Being able to do so without risk of disapproval from friends or families can prove a vital lifeline for a young person to develop their identity and sexuality.

Anonymity can bring benefits in everyday situations. For example, when I was last looking for advice on finding a new job, I was much more comfortable doing so in the knowledge that my boss at the time couldn’t look it up.

But anonymity can equally be an issue of personal safety. I have one friend who will only comment online under a pseudonym as they have been a victim of real-life stalking.

For others, anonymity is a matter of life and death. Twitter is widely thought to have played a key role in galvanising the Arab Spring, but that was only possible because people felt they could use it anonymously, without fear of reprisals.  We should be very mindful of the implications of ending web anonymity in those parts of the world where speaking publicly can have serious consequences.

Padraig Reidy, blogging in response to Caitlin Moran, hit the nail squarely on the head:

“The web is wonderful, and possibly the greatest manifestation of the free speech space we’ve ever had, but it’s also susceptible to control. Governments such as those in China and Iran spend massive resources on controlling the web, and do quite a good job of it. Other states simply slow the connection, making the web a frustrating rather than liberating experience. Some governments simply pull the plug. The whole of YouTube has been blocked in Pakistan for almost a year now, because something had to be done about blasphemous videos.”

The web is far less anonymous than it used to be. When I first started using it, everyone was anonymous, all the time. Then, as now, there were a handful of idiots who would abuse that anonymity in order to get attention.

In the two decades since, the web has opened up communication and ideas in ways few dreamed possible. As a tool which enables people to speak freely with others all over the world, putting thousands of information sources at our fingertips, the web has fueled revolutions and overthrown governments.  But through providing anonymity, it’s also been revolutionary for individuals, allowing people to discover their sense of self, to find a partner, to form and change opinions, and much else besides.

While more can be done to streamline the process of reporting and preventing abuse, we should all be very wary of losing the real and valuable benefits anonymity can bring in a knee-jerk reaction to a small but vocal group of idiots.

(Photo credit: Stian Eikeland on Flickr)

Time to tinker: why hackdays are brilliant

/ Sharon O'Dea / Leave a comment


So, a couple of weeks back I had the enormous pleasure of working on ChaMPion, the winning project at the second UK Parliament Hack Day.

For the uninitiated, a hack day is nothing to do with phone hacking, Anonymous or GaryMcKinnon, but a themed event (usually over two days) where developers and designers get together to create usable apps or websites in a brief, intense period of work.  Hack days have been growing in popularity over the past five years or so, both in the commercial sector – where they’re a great way to generate new ideas for innovation and funding – and in the public sector, where hack days have been instrumental in turning open data into usable information for public good.

Here in the UK, Rewired State have been instrumental in championing and delivering public sector hack days, beginning with the first National Hack the Government day in 2009, and have since lent their talents (and that of their extensive and impressive network of 1,000 developers) to a host of commercial projects too, such as Honda’s Power of Minds event, in which developers worked with Honda’s own cultural engineers.

I helped to organise the first Parliament Hack last year; since moving on to financial services earlier this year, I thought I’d put that behind me. But when Mark Smitham asked if I’d join the team he was pulling together for this year’s Parly Hack, I jumped at the chance to work with such a talented, dedicated and generally rather brilliant bunch of people.

But I wondered what I, as someone with no coding skills, could bring to the project. The answer was a solid understanding of the business – the workings of Parliament and the needs of its users, gathered over two years spent there, working closely with a wide range of users and audiences.

So, what’s being on a hack team like?

They’re all different. Some people prefer to work alone. Others come to the event only with ideas and skills, and form teams on the day with others who can complement those skills.

Our team – Mark Smitham, Giuseppe Sollazzo, Lewis Westbury, Hadley Beeman, Glyn Wintle, Brett Husbands and me  – began work some weeks earlier, with a brainstorm (in a pub, naturally), where we looked at some of the available datasets and sketched out some of the potential problems which needed solving.

These broke down into a few broad areas:

  • Increasing transparency and making the workings of Parliament – the creation of new legislation and the work of MPs themselves – easier for the public to understand (early ideas included ‘Fiddler on the House’, a comparison site showing how hard your MP works and what they claim in expenses)
  • Apps or sites which would be useful to MPs (like access to real-time information)
  • Data visualisation which, while increasing transparency, also had the potential to embarrass MPs or Parliament (e.g. looking at the correlation between the marginality of a seat and the amount spent on stamps, so an MP could work out how many things they need to post in order to retain their seat)
  • Things which would just be funny (an early contender was described as “like Grindr, but for MPs”)

After this first session we divided up tasks to match our own skills, with Mark, Giuseppe and Lewis looking at existing datasets and how these could be combined, Hadley turning unusable datasets into usable ones, and me identifying other potential sources of data.

We met for a second session a week or so later, where we whittled ideas down and threw out some of those we would like to have done but didn’t have available data for, like the idea we had to improve scrutiny of bills in order to identify those which are being rushed or filibustered. Again, we assigned tasks to team members (I was to focus on creating wireframes for the shortlisted ideas), before the planning session moved on to a game of Cards Against Humanity, the best team-building tool ever made.

On the hack weekend itself, 100 or so developers began with a tour of the Houses of Parliament before moving on the The Hub Westminster to begin coding (I couldn’t make it in, so worked remotely). It was only that morning that the judging criteria was revealed, and it was this which swayed the final decision on which project to take forward – people want to find MPs who care about the issues they care about. Often their “declared interests” are not particularly meaningful or up to date, so we decided we could look at the content of their speeches, and create a tool that allows the user to enter a given topic and returns a list of MPs who have spoken about that topic, ranked by relevance.

Over the weekend, Giuseppe, Mark, Brett and Lewis mined the data, looking for keyword distribution by MP, developed functionality and the UI.  Giuseppe’s blogged a detailed write-up  of the development side. Meanwhile, I worked on design, creating a name and logo, collating assets and pulled together a convincing presentation on what the project was and what we wanted to achieve with it.

Our project: ChaMPion

ChaMPion is a website which helps people find the MP who cares most about the causes they do. It uses an analysis of Hansard, applying text analysis techniques to identify keywords by MP, in order to match users’ interests to the MP who most frequently talks about the subject in Parliament.

We produced this in response to growing political disengagement; turnout at this month’s elections was at a peacetime low. Coverage of Parliament on TV is generally focused on adversarial politics, in particular PMQs, leaving people confused about what MPs actually do all day.

We wanted people to understand that what happens in Parliament really does make a difference, and that MPs’ workload covers a vast range of subjects and interests. Whatever you’re interested in, there will be an MP who’s fighting that corner; this app aims to show just who that is, helping to connect people with the person championing their cause in our democratic system.

The winners

Coding continued through the night, with 28 projects completed before judging began on day 2 – here’s a full list. Each team had just a few minutes to present and demo their hack to a panel of judges comprised of MPs and officials.

We were delighted to win the coveted ‘Best in Show’ prize, given the high calibre of other projects. Other winners were:

  • Parliament 2015, a visualisation of historical data
  • Have your Say, a site which enables people to debate on the issues debated in Parliament
  • Toe the Line, an interactive data visualisation on Parliament’s most rebellious MPs
  • Bernard, which uses real-time data on what’s going on in Parliament right now (one of the creators, Tim, has blogged about that here)

What happens next?

Mark, Lewis and Giuseppe are continuing to refine the hack and fix bugs. We’re not sure where to take it next, but we’re keen to get your feedback and ideas on what to do with it. Have a play with it, and let us know what you think: http://www.champion.puntofisso.net.

We each won a Raspberry Pi, so I have resolved to teach myself to code, even just a tiny bit.

What did I learn?

This was my third hackday, and only my second as a participant. Every time, I come away with a feeling that hack days are a truly remarkable tool for innovation and creativity. Every time, the quality of outputs generated in two days and with the aid of beer and pizza is frequently well above that created in months of office-based work.

Given I’m not a developer, I was nervous that I’d be a spare part. I was wrong; in fact, it really reaffirmed my feeling that teams which include someone who understands the business create better outputs, because they help to focus work on the needs of the end user and the context in which the project exists. It’s this I do in my day job, and it was great to remind myself of why it’s good to have strong working relationships with your developmer team.

This time around, I came away with a particularly nagging feeling that nearly every organisation would benefit from adopting the spirit – if not the precise method – of the hack day.

Lately I’ve been reading Dan Pink’s Drive, which looks at motivation for success. Pink argues that traditional notions of motivation – chiefly, that if you pay more you get better results – are outdated in a knowledge economy which relies on creativity and ideas. Instead, the secret to high  performance and satisfaction is the need to direct our own lives (autonomy), to learn and create new things (mastery) and to do better by ourselves and our world (purpose). If the thought of a whole book on this makes you all tl:dr, there’s a lovely animated precis from the RSA here.

Hack days tap into all three of these motivational needs – talented people choose their own ideas and projects, use the time to develop their own skills in a low-risk, low-reward environment, to make cool stuff that makes the world a slightly better place – to make things which are truly great.

A handful of organisations already build this need for autonomy, mastery and purpose into their way of working; Google famously gives its staff 20% of their time to develop their own projects, and it’s this free time which led to some of their most successful end products, including Gmail.  Insurance firm Aviva invited employees to come up with ideas for apps and  were amazed to receive hundreds, many of which made it to finished products. Wired reports that ‘time to tinker’ phenomenon is becoming increasingly widespread in technology firms.

But thinking beyond Silicon Valley (or Silicon Roundabout) is this something that more organisations could benefit from doing, even just as a one-a-year event? Having attended a handful now, I really think it is. Think what your own employees could do, given the time, space and permission to make something brilliant.

Developing trust in the digital workplace

/ Sharon O'Dea / 4 Comments

Here’s a little something I wrote for CMS Wire, as part of their series on intranets and the digital workplace this month.

In offices the world over, a quiet revolution is underway. The costs of technology have fallen, the quality of social platforms vastly improved, and senior management attitudes have changed; after many years when it was simply an aspiration, or a buzzword, the digital workplace is fast becoming a reality.

Using social and collaborative tools, more and more of us are breaking free of the office and working flexibly for all or part of the time – so that work is an activity, not a place.

While secure, reliable and usable tools are an important element of a successful digital workplace, technology is not itself a panacea; to make it work you need the right policies and processes in place too – and the people involved need to trust one another.

A recent survey by Microsoft found 82% of businesses now support flexible working. But while seven in ten managers say they trust their employees to be productive when working from home, employees are far more cynical about one another: only 52% trust their colleagues to be productive when working away from the office.

This presents a barrier to continued growth in online working; teams cannot deliver unless they trust each other. But to build trust in virtual teams – when often the members have never even met each other – employers need to ensure the right factors are in place to enable it.

So just how can organisations develop employee trust in their digital workplace?

First, realise that trust doesn’t just happen. Too many organisations introduce collaboration technologies, and simply expect silos to disappear, with productive, cross-functional teams emerging in their place. Often, silos exist for reason – because the people in them know each other, and understand their own role. Successful digital workplaces recognise that virtual teams need time, space and tools to develop solid working relationships.

Conversely, virtual teams often have a honeymoon period, a brief time when people are willing to give them a shot. Under pressure to perform, groups quickly develop what’s termed swift trust – a kind of benefit of the doubt. This tends to decay quickly, but it can provide the glue that keeps teams together until more lasting trust has developed.

Developing deeper bonds in the digital workplace requires us to use our tools in less obvious ways. Often digital workplace strategy focuses on facilitating work tasks, but not on how to reproduce the experience of a being a member of a workforce in order to reduce feelings of isolation and increase engagement.

Ambient awareness

Lee Bryant of Dachis Group champions the importance of ambient awareness – the office chatter which gives people a greater understanding of their organisation’s work – as something which “oils the wheels” of digital workforces. While some argue social activity streams are an unwelcome distraction from ‘real work’, in replicating those overheard office conversations they keep people in the loop and can ultimately lead to improved productivity.

Successful digital workplace launches have found tools have had wider adoption – and achieved greater success – when they can be used for social as well as more obviously work-related activity, for instance by including interest-based social communities. Allowing people to talk about both their personal and professional lives builds empathy and interpersonal trust between people who may not have met face-to-face.

Provide tools, not rules

This connective tissue is stronger when it’s able to develop organically, with employers providing the tools but not prescribing precisely how and when they can be used. There are parallels here between physical and online spaces; when a business creates a meeting room, it defines the rules for the room (how you book it, when it’s available), and sets up the space, but never defines precisely how the room must be used. Social spaces are like meeting rooms.

In German there’s even a word for this: Nutzungoffenheit, which – loosely translated – means the potential of technologies only manifests itself when people have made sense of them and incorporated them into their own routines.

This phenomenon means it’s difficult to predict precisely what impact digital workplace tools will have on the workforce until they have been introduced. Corporate culture also impacts heavily on the degree to which collaboration will be embraced.

Lead from the middle

However, in all but the smallest organisations the introduction of enterprise social marks a significant shift from top-down to peer-to-peer communication. While a move away from old ‘command and control’ management contributes to networked productivity, it moves the balance of power away from managers and leaders as gatekeepers of information.

One unintended consequence is that this – combined with the decreased visibility that comes with flexible working – can further undermine trust in leadership. Edelman’s annual Trust Barometer found trust in CEOs fell by 12% in the last year alone. With teams increasingly working virtually, senior execs need to find new ways to connect with their workforces to gain and maintain trust in their leadership.

Senior leaders need to ‘walk the talk’, using enterprise social tools and blogs just as others might ‘walk the floor’ in a more traditional organisation, while recognising that in a digital workplace a command and control style of leadership is often less effective than modelling desired behaviours.

Jonathan Phillips suggests leaders should be highly visible on the intranet, and not just in news stories and CEO blogs: “They should ask questions, participate in online debate, solicit personal feedback, seek input to key initiatives. They should comment on other employee blogs.”

Leaders must demonstrate that they believe enterprise social is work and not work avoidance; by using social tools themselves, leaders give employees permission to do the same, and in turn let employees know they are trusted to deliver.

Successful organisations will trust their own employees to work effectively without command and control, and provide them with tools and time to establish social bonds with their peers in order to work effectively in virtual teams. Such organisations recognise that trust is a reciprocal relationship between employer and employee, where trust is repaid with greater flexibility, engagement and performance on both sides.

QR WTF: transitory technology and internet immortality

/ Sharon O'Dea / 4 Comments

Image

An unquestioning press release re-hash on The Guardian’s website today claimed “traditional graveyards are being transformed through technology with interactive headstones providing a revolutionary way for people to remember loved ones.”

A £300 QR code etched into granite, claim Dorset funeral directors Chester Pearce, will enable visitors to learn all about the person buried, rather than being limited to a name, age and date of birth and death.

Or will it? QR codes attract significant criticism for being fiddly and hard to use, but in many cases this is simply because they’re used in entirely the wrong contexts.

My concern in this case, though, is that people are being sold a transitory technology for what’s supposed to be a lasting memorial. Let’s look at the issues:

  • The QR code links through to a website giving details of the deceased, as well as providing a comment feature where people can share memories.
  • All well and good – for now. But how long will this last? Who curates the content? Who ensures the domain remains up in five years, ten years?
  • Then let’s look a little further ahead. Despite a great deal of hype, signs are pointing towards QR codes not really gaining traction with smartphone users.  People are talking about the (far less faffy) Near Field Communication protocol performing the same job, better. I would wager that the QR code won’t be around in 2030, let alone 2080.
  • If my wager is wrong, that’s ok, because I’m pretty sure this website won’t exist either – and nor will the ‘lasting memorial’ websites these QR codes point to.
  • So what are we left with, in 2030? A weird design, etched in stone, which no device can decode, and (even if it could) almost certainly won’t point to a live website.

Claims that the QR codes will be “useful to those visiting graveyards to research their family tree” in the future ring very hollow once you think the thing through.

I’m no fan of QR codes, but in the right contexts they perform a useful task. What are those contexts?

As Bruce Willis’s case against Apple over the right to bequeath digital purchases highlights the fleeting nature of online content, many are starting to look at their digital legacy. As content increasingly becomes digital-only, it’s right that we consider the permanence of what we leave behind. But leaving a QR code as your memorial means that you’re merely one whose name was writ in water, not marble.

(with thanks to Adrian Short for the Keats quote).

Networking for #intranet managers

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In my latest post over at Intranetizen, I’ve pulled together my recommendations for intranet pros on networking with others in the industry.

Always one to eat my own dogfood, this week we’re holding the fourth Internal Communications Teacamp. The theme this time around is internal comms and employee engagement.

As ever, IC Teacamp is open to all internal communciations practitioners, in any industry or discipline. No need to book or RSVP – just come along to Cafe Zest, on the second floor of House of Fraser in Victoria Street SW1, from 4pm tomorrow (18th January).

If you can’t make it, follow the action on the #iceteacamp hashtag.

Will 2012 be the end of email?

/ Sharon O'Dea / 3 Comments

end of email

2012 begins with a slew of predictions that this year will see the back of email. Back in November, multibillionaire foetus Mark Zuckerberg declared “email is dead”.

It must be true, I read it on Twitter. However, Zuckerberg is hardly an impartial observer; he’s got his Facebook Messenger to flog (a system which, ironically, has a user experience akin to using Yahoo webmail in the late 90s).

ATOS boss Thierry Breton is taking the whole business more seriously; he’s making it his personal mission to end the use of internal email by 2014, arguing that 85% of his staff’s time spent on email is unproductive.

Breton noted that his new graduate hires didn’t use email; they’d grown up on social tools such as Facebook. It was only on starting work, he claims, that this cohort were introduced to mail – and found it wanting.

Research by ComScore reckons younger people don’t use email, eschewing it in favour of IM and social networks which provide “instant gratification”. This is precisely the kind of meaningless statistic regularly used to prop up claims that email is on the way out (usually peddled by people with a messaging system of their own to promote). Until I joined the workforce I’d never participated in a meeting, made a round of tea, or heard the word Action used as a verb. Yet all of these things are still going strong in the most digital of workplaces. That people don’t adopt common workplace practices until they join the workforce should hardly come as a surprise.

Let’s get this straight right now: Facebook messenger, Twitter and Yammer aren’t about to see off a communication medium which has been going strong since 1972. Not now, and probably not for a long time.

Claims that one type of new technology will swiftly usurp established practice are nothing new; Plato claimed that the spread of writing would destroy humans’ ability to remember.

The ComScore research found visits to mail sites such as Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo fell by 6% in the past year. Crucially, however, it doesn’t find that that volume of email received and sent has actually fallen. And as more and more if us are using smartphone and tablet clients to manage our personal emails, it kind of follows that this should impact on the number of visits to webmail sites.

In the workplace, things are different. People are attached to their Outlook. This has long been a source of bafflement to intranet managers and others working in enterprise tech. Outlook, as we all know, is rubbish.

Well, it is; it’s particularly rubbish at the things it wasn’t supposed to be used for, like collaboration and archiving. But this is like moaning that a hammer is crap at cutting a piece of wood in two.

What Outlook is mostly quite good for is emailing. As a program for reading and writing emails, facilitating communication between two or more people, it’s really not bad at all. It integrates with Office. It has folders and a calendar, and if you’re very clever you can add voting buttons, which at least half of the recipients will miss.

And the fact is, people like email. They know what to do with it. They can attach stuff to it. Crucially, at some future date they can retrieve their email from the bowels of their Personal Folders in order to cover their own back. Granted, it does mean that disk space is optimally used, or that versions aren’t ordered, or that they’ll definitely be able to find what they’re looking for, but for most this is a small price to pay.

The times, however, are a-changin’. Attached though users are to Outlook, the fact is that IT teams are not. If 2012 is anything, it looks set to be the year of the cloud. Usability and functionality of cloud-based office apps has now improved to the point where they present a genuine alternative, while at the same time budgets are being squeezed. For many IT departments, switching to cloud based email is fast becoming a no-brainer.

It’s this, together with the increasing use of smartphones as the primary means of reading emails, which may finally break the office’s addiction to Outlook.

And that, my intranet-loving friends, is an opportunity. If people are – for other reasons – going to change their workplace tech habits, then for the first time ever they might be genuinely interested in your collaboration platforms and document management solutions.

If your organisation is aiming to move to cloud-based mail this year, then now is the time to get planning.  While we know the benefits of a social, collaborative intranet, in most organisations they haven’t yet taken off; 72% of employees use internal social functionality less than once a month.

This isn’t because they don’t know how. The same group of users will happily update Facebook daily. No: it’s because they haven’t figured out the point yet, and find your collaboration platform fiddly.

So what can you do about this?

First, make your internal social network better. Find out what people want and need and give it to them. What do they want to communicate about, and with who? What features do they need? File sharing, task management? These are all things people do (badly) in Outlook. For your internal social network to take off, it needs to be genuinely useful and help people to do their jobs better.

User experience is a vital component of this. Facebook has the traction it does because it’s intuitive and easy to use. Internal networks need to watch and learn. People won’t put up with a clunky interface simply because they’re being paid to be there.

Many will claim to have already cracked step 1. Good. Then why aren’t people using it? Perhaps they don’t know it’s there, or don’t understand the benefits of using it.

Employees need to understand how internal social can improve their productivity, or they won’t see the point in using it. Make sure the benefits of using the system are clearly spelled out. As well as marketing the product, you need to cultivate the network.  Like any social network, internal ones need to reach a tipping point – a critical mass of users and a decent range of content – before they really become interesting and useful.

Here, 2012 provides another opportunity; with many being asked to work from home during the Olympics to reduce demand on the transport network, people are actively looking for solutions to support home and flexible working.  These newly homeworking employees could provide a valuable case study, demonstrating how intranet 2.0 can improve communication and collaboration, leading to more innovation, better knowledge-sharing and ultimately increased revenue.

Start talking to these people now and ensure they have the right tools in place by the time the Games come around. If the tools work for them, they’ll have an incentive to keep on using them after the Olympic flame is extinguished.

Email isn’t dying. If anything, it’s suffering from growing pains. But with the changes to workplace technology in the pipeline for 2012, this is the time to develop and promote the alternatives in order to make your organisation work more effectively. Your workforce needs you.

Internal Comms Teacamp returns!

/ Sharon O'Dea / Leave a comment

Tomorrow is Internal Comms Teacamp! This time around we’re talking about intranets, social media and the digital side of internal comms – so it’s right up my street.

When: 16 November, 4-6pm

Where: Cafe Zest, House of Fraser, Victoria Street, London SW1E 6QX (it’s on the second floor at House of Fraser)

It’s open to all internal communications practioners, in any sector. No need to book or RSVP – just turn up.

If you can’t make it, follow the action on the #iceteacamp hashtag.

You shape your intranet. Thereafter, it shapes you.

/ Sharon O'Dea / 7 Comments

In his book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, Marshall McLuhan said “we shape our tools. Thereafter, they shape us”.

McLuhan’s focus was language; he argued that language doesn’t describe that which is in the world, but rather, we can only see the world through the medium of language. Language is limiting; our tools don’t let us do whatever we want, but instead limit and often dictate what we do.

His thesis is that while the way we work, think and communicate have led to tools being designed the way they have, once this design is finalised it closes the loop and that tool influences how you think or behave.

To take an offline example, albums are around an hour long simply because this was how much music would fit on a vinyl record. But this persisted long after the physical media was replaced with one where length was no longer so constrained; the shared understanding remains that the art form of the album is “a collection of approximately an hour’s worth of music”. Even after the arrival of the MP3 player, the concept of the ‘album’ remains, with the download market set up so music can be sold in two sizes: single songs, or ‘albums’. An arbitrary decision about vinyl production has shaped the listening habits of four generations.

The same is certainly true online. It’s years’ worth of your reading and searching habits which determine the priority Facebook gives to updates from your friends. But this quickly becomes circular, so that in time you no longer see updates from some friends, and they’re filterered out of your life, while others get more of your attention. In the early days of Facebook, it was us – as consumers – who shared our updates, uploaded our pictures and moaned every time a new feature was rolled out.

But here we are years later, with Facebook serving us up a homogenised diet of updates (in a feed feature no one seems to like), stalking us across the Internet, and auto-tagging us in pictures – and we just suck it up. Because, well, what choice have you got? You’ve got to be on Facebook these days, don’t ya? etc.

As on the Internet, so in the enterprise. In its infancy, it’s the organisation that shapes the intranet, designing it around the needs of internal users. Or at least, that’s the theory. In truth, organisations get the intranet they deserve, with flaws and compromises and sometimes just bad decisions.

But thereafter, it’s the business that has to live with this, and it’s the people within it who have to suffer the consequences. The decisions you make at the design stage will affect the way employees work every single day, for years.

The language used on your intranet – from labelling to tone of voice – both reinforces and shapes company culture. So, too, does visual design, technology and content; all of these things say something about the type of organisation you are. They impact on engagement and retention. Claims to be a hyper-efficient organisation working at the forefront of technological change cut little ice with the workforce when they still need to download a form in Word, print it, sign it and post it to apply for remote access to your network.

Intranet design shapes the way the business works. Done well, social functionality can break down silos, enable people to work more effectively and support flexible working. Done badly, design costs money – in reduced productivity, disengaged staff, abandoned processes and channel shift. A badly designed form might be a necessary compromise right now, but it’s a big bundle of irritation that could be annoying colleagues long after you’ve left.

What do we do about it?

  1. Don’t make your intranet bad in the first place. This seems obvious, but it happens all too often. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve heard intranet managers describe the latest feature on their intranet as “well yes, I know it’s a terrible idea, but the CEO’s insisting on it”. Time invested in getting all your senior stakeholders to sign up to the principles of User Centred Design early on will pay dividends later on as it gives you the option to suggest any Bright Ideas are user tested (and changed) before being bolted on to your intranet.
  2. Identify your fail points and make the business case for making changes. Got a bit of functionality that everyone hates? Find out why, work out what it’s costing (not necessarily in cash terms – task completion time, or numbers of abandoned transactions are all powerful arguments for change) and sort it out.
  3. Design for the organisation you want to be, not the one you used to be.
  4. Focus on making things work the best way they can, not replicating offline formats or existing practices on the intranet. I’m yet to experience a single instance where anyone loves a printed document so much that they’d rather have a PDF than a page properly formatted for web.
  5. Improve, all the time. All too often, intranets are seen as a project, to be overhauled over the course of a few months then left for another five years until it’s once again woefully out of date. Good intranets continue to innovate, adding on new functionality to support changing needs and deliver organisational goals.

It was McLuhan who coined the phrase the medium is the message. Your intranet is your medium; what message does it convey to your organisation?

Agile for communications

/ Sharon O'Dea / 6 Comments

In my former life as a communicator, we planned communications campaigns using the ROSIE principle:

  • Research: Why is this needed, and what do we already know?
  • Objective: What (SMART) outcomes are we trying to achieve?
  • Strategy: How, broadly, are we going to achieve our objective?
  • Implementation:  Specifically, what are we going to do and when?
  • Evaluation: How will we measure what we’ve done and prove we’re successful?

 Diagram showing the ROSIE model of campaign planning

As the old adage goes, fail to plan and you plan to fail. But problems arise because projects, be they in communications or software engineering, can fail to deliver results when they focus on the plan and not on the objective.

ROSIE, much like PRINCE2 and other project management methodologies, works on the waterfall principle of sequential design.

Waterfall is the model which is used for the step-by-step production of physical products, in which after-the-fact changes are difficult or impossible. The problem with this approach is that by sticking to the plan you bet large, and if you fail, you fail bad.

So from the late 80s onwards, software engineers slowly came to the realisation that their products are fundamentally different, and so a different approach is needed.  The result was Agile software development, a group of software development methodologies based on iterative and incremental development, where requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration between self-organising, cross-functional teams.

There are, broadly, three main reasons why agile methodology has taken off in software engineering:

  • First, there’s an increased awareness of complexity. There isn’t always one answer, and there’s rarely one means of getting people to where we want them to go. Realities are usually more nuanced. This means focussing on incremental progress toward goals rather than a ‘big bang’ win.
  • Secondly, there’s an understanding that work doesn’t exist in isolation, and its success (or otherwise) is often a result of factors outside of our direct control.
  • Finally, a realisation that we’re working with systems and people, not tangible things, so we need to stop thinking like engineers.

And here’s where I see many parallels with communications strategy. Campaigns, too, are not tangible objects, so we shouldn’t apply the same project management methods to them as we might for a car or a widget.

In creating and delivering a communications campaign, you’re dealing with people (notoriously fickle as they are), complex organisations and myriad factors beyond your control – whether that’s a cultural trend, a rival campaign or even some freak weather.

All this leads me to think that agile project management could drive success in strategic communications campaigns. By being aware of complexity and externality, communicators can free their resources up to focus on the objective rather than simply the plan.

So what does that really mean in a communications context?

When planning communications strategies, we treat the strategy as unmovable. But really, it’s the objective which should be the constant. Our strategy and our implementation plan should shift in the face of changing context in order to deliver the outcome.

Agile privileges individuals over processes and tools, outputs over documentation, collaboration over documentation, and responding to change over following a plan.

Twelve principles underlie the Agile Manifesto. And while these don’t easily map to communications work, there’s some broad principles here which could bring agility to communications campaigns (this borrows heavily from Catherine Howe’s session on Agile Policymaking at UKGovCamp).

Proposed model for agile in communications campaigns

Keep in mind your goal rather than your plan. Catherine notes the old army adage “no plan survives contact with the enemy”; keep the objective in mind but change the plan and circumstances change.

So in practice this could mean that while you have a series of printed communications planned for successive months, an agile approach would mean reviewing honestly after the first one and changing your approach in the face of success or failure. This means senior stakeholders need to sign off on the objective but trust their teams to deliver it as they see fit.

This means having a different attitude to risk. Agile breaks things down into smaller chunks to make it manageable. This means you can fail fast, but fail cheaply.

There are myriad examples of comms campaigns that just haven’t clicked at the off. But there’s often also an unwillingness to admit when things just haven’t worked, leading us to pretend all campaigns are somehow successful (this is especially true for agencies, in my experience). We need to be mature enough to admit failure and change our plans accordingly in order to achieve our objectives. That way we can support innovation and reduce the cost of failure (with campaigns failing early and cheaply rather than late and expensively).

And that means looking at small, incremental changes rather than a ‘big bang’ approach. For communications this makes a lot of sense – our focus is people and we usually want them to change their  attitudes or behaviours. That’s a slow process, and rarely should we expect anything other than incremental change.

Expecting a ‘big bang’ change in people’s mindsets or long-held habits is setting ourselves up for failure – real people just don’t work like that. We need to work in manageable stages and learn from success or failure as we go along. This way we can show incremental improvements while reducing communication failure.

And in order to do that, we need to test our work as we go along. Then you can adapt your approach based on evidence of what works or doesn’t.

Granted, there’s a world of difference between testing code and testing communications campaigns, but using things like metrics and pulse surveys we can begin to build a robust evidence base on which to plan our next steps. This, in turn, can reduce risk and reduce costs.

But testing shouldn’t be for testing’s sake; we need to work flexibly and adjust our plans in the face of new evidence. As Catherine Howe comments “Good ideas can be the wrong solution and serendipity can happen”.

In agile projects teams are usually cross-functional and self-organising with a flat management structure. Team members normally take responsibility for tasks that deliver the desired outcome. They decide individually how to meet requirements, increasing accountability.

It’s a team-based approach in everyone’s skills are valued and everyone has a responsibility for making it happen.

Central, too, is the end user or audience. In web development we use User Stories, which take the format of:

As a…

I want…

So that…

Using a similar user-centred approach to communications would help shift the focus from pleasing senior stakeholders to simply achieving the stated objective (for instance, changing the thoughts, feelings or behaviours of the target audience). In agile we constantly refer back to the user stories, placing the user – not the person with the purse strings – at the heart of what we do.

In employee engagement, we talk a lot about co-production as the engagement holy grail. Agile seems to me an important shift in the right direction, with campaigns and messaging driven by user (audience) requirements rather than the whims of stakeholders, and increasing their sense of ownership.

Finally, being agile relies on frequent, open communication, with people being kept in the loop every day. This is helped by working in small teams and open offices, with the aid of a quick, daily meeting called a stand-up. Communication should be open and honest, focussing on what’s going wrong as well as that which is going right.

But…

Like any project management methodology, there are dangers of sticking to it rigidly like some kind of cult. Practitioners can and should borrow those elements which work for them and adapt them to suit the circumstances.

The language of agile – with its scrums, stand-ups, smells, pigs and chickens – can be offputting. But the principles of making work more flexible and responsive to change have potential to drive forward projects in communications and many other fields besides.

In many, probably most, organisations, taking an agile approach to projects and campaigns outside of IT is going to mean a big cultural shift. The waterfall mindset is deeply ingrained in almost every project; changing that mindset so that stakeholders accept plans will constantly change isn’t going to be easy. It requires trust on the part of stakeholders and bean-counters, and getting that is going to require a hard selling job emphasising the rewards that come from reducing large-scale failure, and in some cases a big leap of faith.