And again my notes were mainly in English, so no language choice for this blog!

On March 15, 2011, I visited in Utrecht the Intranet Congress, for the 3rd time organized by Entopic. For a full picture of the day I refer to the Intranet Monitor, but here my top list of quotes. And I base myself on my own tweets, from micro- to mini- and who knows some time later to macroblogging!

Forget technology – focus on behavior, Peter Hinssen. Nowadays the information bottom-up produced outreaches by far the information top-down creates. Get the outside in!

Knowledge workers spend 1 day a week looking for information they need, Dion Hinchcliffe. Apart from this quote Hinchcliffe gave some factual information, e.g. that in July 2009 social networking conquered email. He also referred to social capital: social capital belongs to the user. So business should focus on social: connect the world of workers, business partners, and customers. In a break-out session Martin White told us to find out in search logs what people cannot find instead of what people search for. An interesting observation. Confronting was his calculation about what an organisation spends on creating information: take the number of people working in your organisation times their annual salary times two. What that would do for valueing libraries :p. White also mentioned that “there is nothing in the balance sheet on social capital”. However, do not get too excited about all these numbers as White also rightly pointed out: “ignore the numbers, tell the stories” …

I know when something is good, when it is lickable, Peter Hinssen (quoting Steve Jobs from Apple). Remember this one!

The (social) digital workspace, or Intranet 2.0, needs it all: refer, do, work, create, discover & discuss, Jane McConnell.

Facebook never needed adoption, Leaseplan projectmanager quoting one of their managementteam members. No, this does not work in your company for your social media plans or Intranet 2.0. Take a look at the Technology adoption lifecycle – to get to the phase of the early majority you need extra effort and for sure commitment from your management.

It is better to talk about the future you want instead of what will be (& never trust the analysts), Tony Byrne. Byrne advised the audience to focus on front-end rather than back-end development, because “that is where the rubber hits the road”. He further pleaded to see social not as a place, but as a mindset. IT people be aware: allow people to BYOD (bring your own device). Another warning from Byrne: rethink applications from scratch. And: we need web-based mobile applications, not device-specific ones.

Whatever you do, do mobile first, Tony Byrne quoting Eric Schmidt from Google. Will your CMS and search applications deliver (intranet) content to smartphones?

Perhaps I should end with a final observation from Peter Hinssen (who chaired the congress) who mentioned the rise and fall of Google Wave by “they learned the art to kill quickly“, and I think that is surely something to take back with me.

 

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