Announced today at the Avenue A | Razorfish Enterprise Solutions summit in Boston was a project that I was the UX Lead on – the Go! Network – affectionately called a “Blikinet” (not my choice, but you can’t win them), which is a combination of a blog, wiki, & intranet rolled into one.
This was a groundbreaking engagement for may reasons at Ford & for Avenue A | Razorfish, as it was a worldwide effort having traveled across the globe to meet with Ford Motor Company subsidiaries – Ford, Land Rover, Lincoln, Jaguar, Mercury, Mazda, & Volvo. The overall initiative was under the order of Alan Mulally, to change the way FMC does business both internally & externally, this in particular was under the effort of “communication” across brand and region.
THE BREAKDOWN
RSS
Our research showed that (not to any big surprise) that people were very pressed for time, so managers and above actually spent 5+ hours in email management a day! Another point captured was how many different places people go for sources of information and how they obtain than. We found that as much as nearly 1/3 of email for some people was from newsletters & feeds they subscribed to. Now what if anything these people did with it is another story that ends tragically as you can imagine. At best it was sent on to a few team members, at worst it was great knowledge that was never even looked at and lost completely. What was needed was a single point of “knowledge” that was diverse enough for a global audience / background, yet simple enough to navigate and find, or in this case be delivered, relevant information.
At the end of the day, what we (myself, Rob Zand, & Erin Scime) designed was a blog system that “subscribed” to all feeds so they would be available to all members in one location. Each feed and article when possible with tags that members were assigned to (see profile below) based upon their role, region, & language within the company. Each member has total control over their “feed tags” to be able to subscribe and unsubscribe to any they chose.
Wiki
Knowledge management in most companies is difficult, now image a global company with seven global brands and has been in business for more than one hundred years. While we could tackle every issue, and was trying to limit IT interaction, we discovered it was more an issue of finding & sharing information than it was posting information. Our solution was a wiki.
All information when it is uploaded is categorized and is tagged, & assigned a language. Then it is no only stored in a central location, but everyone who is subscribed to those “tags” receives an RSS update, where they can view a summary or entire piece of content.
Intranet
Technically it’s an extranet, since agencies and other outsiders have access to this as well. One thing we did NOT want to do was re-invent the wheel as far as moving other content that already existed in our data repositories onto this one. But, what about all that other content that was useful to this effort? Well, we simply let you link to it and create a (wiki) page with a summary, category, & tags so it would become as useful as if it were an asset within the Go! network.
Profiles
This was my personal favorite section of the application to design. What we did here was create “rich user profiles” for every member. These profiles were as intelligent as they could be by pulling all personal & contact info we could from LDAP and populating as much information as we could before any use ever got into the application. Upon first login we “forced” the user through the rest of the profile creation process. We limited the required fields to as little as possible, but more than what I would say I would normally recommend for public sites to ensure that we had enough info to start doing the heavy lifting behind the scenes that would be able to provide true social value much quicker. Some of the things we included were you personal history – places you’ve lived, traveled, and worked. A ‘mini-resume’ that included projects internally or other companies/external you’ve worked. Favorite foods, hotels, etc.
The strategy behind these was multifaceted. Remember our main goal for this to be successful was to break down the walls between regions & brands, and share/leverage global knowledge from those regions & brands. Daunting in any situation, but add in the 100 year company history in a secretive industry with lots of territorial lines, at a company that (at this time) isn’t doing the greatest and it’s a challenge. So, our goal became a social one. And to that end we used all the personal info, data, and tags to align, share, and promote “like-minded” people in the company across the brands, and across all the regions to each other. We called it the “Ford Dating Service”. In addition to profile build outs, we included the profiles as part of search results, so when you did a search for “green technology”, not only did all the tech specs, RSS feeds, documents, etc come up, but so did Go! members that shared “green technology” as a tag on their profile which could have been from their resume, current/previous internal project, or just a loving interest.
As user’s moved through the system we tracked user actions, which then informed our “dating service”, as well as some social features such as most popular, top rated, most active, did you know, etc. Ultimately this will be used to enhance content, navigation, metadata, etc. and on the pure analytics side our user segmentation and dynamic content targeting.
Governance
No good site/application could be complete without governance. The basic model we chose was one of low moderation, with basic constraints as to what a user could do – not say. To get over the corporate culture of being afraid to speak your mind and whatever my boss says I agree with we allowed included anonymous posting on the blog.
Blog
Now, you might be thinking, “how often would a company like Ford, or most, really use an internal blog?” And you’d be right to think that it may not be very often, but the solution itself we felt was the right one over time, they just needed to get not worry about what a “blog” is and use a tool that allowed them to communicate as effortlessly as possible. So, as uses took various actions through the site, such as post a document, comment, rate something, etc we would capture those and show them on the blog so it looked liked the blog was very active. In addition, the FMC Governance team would “seed” content by highlighting products, campaigns, projects, people, feeds, etc. that they felt was interesting and could draw people into a conversation.
This is a major step for FMC, I think this and similar applications in the enterprise are leaps and bounds in the right direction.
