content

Arrange sites & spaces High level structuring of content & information sharing platforms

Posted on By Koenraad Seys
Information platforms are increasingly structured along the lines of sites or spaces at top level.
The available functional/technical capability alone however, does not guarantee a good organisation appealing to your users. The structure has to take into account their working and social context.
Coming from the image created by web sites and made popular for corporate internal use of content and information by Microsoft SharePoint, there is little thought given to the logical structuring of sites and spaces. Often they are created on request and the environment becomes an ad hoc loose collection.  Current platforms have a wide variety of functionality which make them suitable for a broader use than sharing information on projects or structures along the lines of the formal organisation of the company. More so, in current organisations, there are more dimensions to be discerned. Not only do we need to be more efficient and work cross-departmental with a stronger focus on customer and consumer needs, our work place is also a social construct in which we interact and have a richer experience than the one strictly confined to the execution of tasks. Therefore an information platform has to be more than an intranet on which static content is to be made available. Social interaction and cross functional and hierarchical conversation is increasingly expected by colleagues and employees. In ages where innovation and creativity are perceived as the most important success factor of an organisation. Information sharing and conversation should foster engagement and belongness as profound as possible. The platform should also be able to quickly engage new comers and temps.
It is while thinking along these lines we come with a meta-structure or a number of dimensions along which one can organise these information intense platforms while fostering conversation and providing direct usefulness for corporate users.
The Home space or site is the starting point when accessing the intranet.
The content of this space reflects:
• global information of and on the company
• what you should know about the company as a newcomer
• press relations (both outgoing and incoming – comments made in the global press)
• global management information and announcements of the direction/general management
• references to practical information on how to find your way on the campus or the buildings
Per organisational unit or department a space or site gives the frame for specific organisational exchanges. As such it has a more operational character than the home space.
The content of this space reflects:
• information on and about the unit
• organisation of work
• notes periodic meetings
• person related notices about department members
• departmental announcements of practical nature
• references to practical information on the workings of the department
• operational announcement
This personalised space contains everything you need. It focuses on the tasks you need to perform, the information that is addressed to you as a member of the organisation or has specific pertinence (e.g. positing in discussions you follow) and can be enhanced with information or reference that are of particular use.
These (social) group spaces are free subscription based getting togethers where information and thoughts are exchanged. They may concern professional or practical topics relating to company life, logistics or amenities that can make life agreeable. It is here that communities of interest or practice would thrive. They contain discussions, documentation, postings, polls, … Topical interest may obviously also relate to products or services of a company or group.
For each recognised project a space grouping related information is accessible for the project participants. It is here they will report on progress, post information and documents related to the project. It is also here the planning is to be found.
For project and line management specific progress dashboards are made available.
The Geographical site is similar or a sub set of the overall company home space. It contains specificities related to a specific location, campus or building group.
The HR site is common for all staff of the company provides information on global HR policy and personalised services regarding holiday planning, compensation and benefits, career planning and evaluation, training …
The Governance space is a restricted area for the actors concerned with maintenance and extension of the intranet environment. Here administrators will find tools and documentation for enhancing and managing the intranet platform.
Relating to these space types, templates or models can be devised to structure the setup of requested environments referring to each of these types.
They are documented in the specific governance space.
A personalised global navigation instrument will give an overall user experience permitting to go directly to the information one needs, without having to recall individual destination addresses.
See also the related slide doc published on slideshare.

Deep content is what will remain in a digital world

Posted on By Koenraad Seys
Currently there is a lot discussion going on about the digitalisation of our lives. Even though we find it disrupting we are still in the early stages of fundamental digitalisation of products, work processes and services.
Like with other new technology introduced, it takes a while to understand its full capacity and potential. It is already clear that in the evolution to a real digital society and business model we should leverage technology better. An increasing volume of data will be captured in original electronic formats, ready for direct consumption by back-end applications. It will certainly have an impact on what documentary information will be created and how it will be edited. Today still a lot of data is collected through paper forms, as a relic from the traditional administrative processes or bureaucratic tradition. Often scanning solutions with extensive form recognition capabilities are used to digitalise the capture of data filled out by customers, consumers and citizens. This however, does not change processes, services or user experience fundamentally.
Citizens are increasingly invited to launch transaction and interact via the internet. Although not everybody is already sufficiently computer literate we are all taking up more of the administrative processes ourselves, ousting administrative clerks. Nevertheless filling in forms is a burden. The device we use for subscribing to a service or the launch a business transaction like an online sale should be able to help us. Certainly smart phones contain a lot of data on the user and the situational environment he is in. It can be used in contexts of data analysis but should also be able to support us when filling out the umpteenth form. Identification and address data could be filled in automatically saving us time and focusing on verifying and releasing the data. This with the increasing spread of easy to use carry on digital devises will lead to a diminishing of traditional paper documents used to capture structured data, for which computer apps or forms can guarantee more structure and quality control than the lenient paper form.
Shifting to digital will be enabled on the level of the user devise, that is increasingly compact, light and cheap. Tablets and smart phones have not only sleek tactile and intuitive user interfaces they also attain processing power capacity of standard desktop or portables. Interaction with applications is increasingly supported with apps and applications best adapted to the device used, thus encouraging the use of digital native data and information formats. Also important is the increased connectivity, permitting to be online at all time and nearly everywhere. Increased screen quality, size, enhanced setting and flexible positioning invites to more on screen reading and increasing the number of people, currently mainly confined to younger generations, consuming information on screen. From a content provisioning point of view fluent transition into content made available, needs to be provided. The traditional document paradigm will make room for richer content that is however easier to access.
The document, as currently supported by document management and file sharing solutions, are individual files made up in their specific binary format only accessible using specific editing or viewing software, resulting in a cumbersome process opening the document which incurs long waiting times. In their formatting they inherit directly from the paper age, adapting the text presentation to the borders laid out by paper formats such as A4, folio or other printing standards. Digital screens are not confined by these measures, they permit for continuous scrolling. Features available in software and supported by globally accepted standards as applied in browser support hypertext features permit hopping between content parts. This supports a more liberal consumption of textual materials than through written cross references used in printed materials. The use of smaller components will of course have an impact on the writing styles used in non-fictional prose.
This will most certainly lead to a broader adoption of wiki-like technology letting us focus on the actual content or text rather than formatting and inviting us to collaborate even more intensely in the creative process of writing.
A similar evolution is to be recognised in the context of structured data and reporting. Usability and intuitiveness of data analysis tools will push us more to active interaction with data sources, building our own reports and dashboards, based initially on internal data but increasingly enhanced with external sources, either coming from customer tracking or public sources provided by governments in open data formats or from commercial partners collecting data coming through users interacting with their systems (think of the data google has available). It will not only permit to analyse current population but extrapolate on larger demographics exhibiting trends and highlighting fundamental needs.
Further enrichment of information and explicit or implicit interaction with information and data will reveal other information and insights.
The use of multi-media content mixed with more traditional textual content will certainly impact education. Enriching the learning experience using richer media appeals to all learners. It permits to interact calling upon various learning styles and predispositions. The use of digital interfaces permits to mix audio, video and gaming elements in educational and informative content. Why not include interactive graphics with 3D aspects permitting the information consumer to navigate through the elements in any chosen way.
On a lower, more granular level working with real digital content also permits to increase value like through adding index elements. In a document environment, indexes or meta data were added external to documents submitted. A dedicated document index could be added but would only function within the context of the document, like we are used to in books. Native digital content or text larded with index and index barrier markers can be exposed on larger collections and used as navigating instruments adding an additional reading experience. Enriched with search and semantic web possibilities it will increase usability and potentially interact with personal context, terminological preferences and frame of reference. The same can be applied to classification engines, working on paragraph level rather than on document level.
Traditional documents will disappear. Maybe not in the short term, certainly those designed to support administrative processes capturing data. Personal data will almost certainly be a system commodity provided by individual devices we use daily to communicate, to come online and to interact as social beings regardless the location of others.