Saturday, August 02, 2003

Klognets give faster payback than tradtional Intranet portals. John Robb asks: Can blogs can replace portals? If so, what are the relative costs, benefits, ROI? His answers (and I concur): Yes for everything except "adding a web front end to business apps" Blogs look better: Costs: $142 vs. $807 per desktop (Costs 82% less) Benefits: $1,658 vs. $1,886 per desktop (Delivers 88% of the value) ROI: 1,170% vs. 240% (or 4.9 times the ROI) Considering that so many projects: Aren't funded at all in this economy Fail completely (around 25% are cancelled or aborted) Fail partially (blowing scope, schedule, or budget) Setting up a klognet seems like a low risk, high payoff proposition. [a klog apart] 11:36:38 AM

Machine Blogging: Microsoft SharePoint to intranet RSS.. The folks at NewsGator share a case study.  Triple Point Technology has transformed the way they share information within the enterprise. From critical build and release notifications, to internal publishing and collaboration, publishing via RSS has dramatically changed their information landscape. Michael Sippey summarizes:  It's not really about weblogs at all, rather it's about how RSS (or whatever you want to call it) can be used to augment typical email- and web-based collaboration systems. Key points: Feeds are generated not only by individuals, but also by teams, and by software. They publish the output of their release management system in RSS. They've retrofitted Sharepoint to output RSS streams for watched folders. They're driving the posts right into their mail client (Outlook), which is where info workers seem to spend an inordinate amount of time. No need for training on a new piece of software, and power users can customize views to their heart's content. The subscription model is much more efficient and user-driven than internal mail archives. A couple of years ago I wrote a piece for theobvious on how I wanted Yahoo Groups for my intranet. The key thing there was (a) discovery and (b) user control over subscription. An OPML directory and user-controlled aggregator solves that problem. No more sysadmin time dealing with "hey, can you put me on this list for the next few weeks while I monitor what's going on with this project?" If the blog/feed/echo/rss whatever thing takes off inside large organizations, and thousands of people, teams and systems inside companies like IBM or HP or Sun start blogging, there's gotta be a market for the intranet equivalent of blo.gs where users could learn of recently updated feeds they don't subscribe to, find new ones based on existing subscription lists, etc. (Question: is anyone selling software like this today? To slurp up user's OPML files and discover relationships and create an interlinked directory?) Sippey gets it. So does Triple Point. [a klog apart] 11:31:44 AM

Knowledge is power: KM remains vital to firm success. Nina Platt has written up the results of a recent informal survey of knowledge management in law firms. To quote: Knowledge management became a buzzword in law firms throughout the world in the 1990s. As firms learned how acquiring and... [Column Two] 11:27:08 AM

ROI calculations: K-Logs vs. traditional Intranet Portals. John Robb has written a weblog entry that compares the ROI of enterprise portals and k-logs (k-logs are weblogs used inside an organisation). In it, he finds that k-logs provide similar benefits at a fraction of the cost. What is... [Column Two] 11:24:28 AM

K-Log productivity: Time to find and availability. John Robb has written another weblog entry on K-log metrics (k-logs are "knowledge weblogs"). This one focuses on the time taken to find information in an organisation. To quote: An oft quoted statistic is that "knowledge workers spend 35% of... [Column Two] 11:23:26 AM