Ekurhuleni West College (EWC) one of the leading Further Education and Training Institution in South Africa. Spread across 6 geographical location with 550 numbers of staff, EWC offers training and development programme in Engineering, Business, ICT, Finance and Community Services

It is the second Public FET Collegae in Gauteng to obtain SO 9001: 2000 certificate from the South African Bureau of Standards (SABS) in 2008.

In order to continue maintaining high standards EWC has chosen Claromentis Quality Manager solution. They have developed a Quality Management web portal, which can be easily accessed from all campus location, and it has become a one-stop-shop system to find up-to-date policies and procedures. EWC also uses InfoCapture application to track and manage non-conformances.

Read more about Quality Management  Solution or take the tour

Intranet-Extranet, Prod-Quality, Solutions Case Study, ISO9001, quality management software

Shakespeare would not be terribly impressed but the point is valid. Although a rose by any other name would smell as sweet – users will get more excited, and participate more, in upcoming intranets launches where the system is not called ‘The Intranet’.

Peace Rose in the Sun

We have posted about intranet names a year ago, providing many project examples form our extensive experience in working with intranets around the world.

The reason for this short post is that we are currently launching an intranet for a company in New Mexico – more on our continued exciting global reach in future posts – where the employee participation on choosing a name for the intranet reached impressive standards even by our own tough benchmarks. In summary

• 93 employees suggested names for the intranet
• A total of 283 names were suggested

Why is this exciting?

• The outcome is great – a great name and a great strap line.
• Extensive participation in this process shows our client is already engaging and generating interest from a wide cross section of employees.

Our immediate challenge is to incorporate the name into the mock up design process – including logo generation – and to bring this whole concept into the intranet as a whole – obeying the corporate style guide we have already been provided with.

Hopefully there will be a celebratory fizz of some kind for the employee that suggested the winner!

Intranet-Extranet intranet names, intranet software

We talk about intranet permissioned news systems and blogs a great deal – internal Marcomms so often have a strong interest in efficient, relevant news systems on global intranets.

It occurred to me that we as a solution provider never actually discuss the content! we just provide a great permissioned news system for our clients to use – yet of course the company is thinking all the time of how they would use it – we all know that it works.

Once I took on this perspective I thought I would look for the use of reporting and distributing news to suit an end goal. I obviously did not look around our confidential client intranets – I just went out to the public internet to compare side by side reporting of the same news stories – looking for examples of spin.

I have to say this has been made so easy with aggregators – I just flipped through some relevant stories on side by side news channels :  I found the results absolutely shocking – call me innocent but I had never realized that even in the most dry, factual events the amount of comparative spin  – and therefore what you walk away with as ‘content’ – is awesome in its power.

I could have chosen much more dramatic events, like the BP oil spill and the discovery today of PhotoShop alterations to the images – but I thought that was in a way not so disturbing – this after all is a very opinionated and passionate space. So I chose instead the rather dull and factual release today by the “Committee of European Banking Supervisors” of the stress test results on European banks. Basically a bunch of numbers, very factual and very informative – if you like that kind of thing.

Totally different perspectives

So basically here are two reports of exactly the same publication.

This, I repeat, is simultaneous ( same day ) reporting of a very dry, factual summary by a relatively obscure financial organization. Fortune, as reported by money.cnn.com – side by side with the same data as presented by Reuters.

So I am no longer surprised by our client’s interest in News systems, and the power they have to provide on message communications. I am also equally understanding of our clients concerns about our corporate social networking application, Innovate, and it’s requirement to open up all communications and therefore lose all control of debates and discussions.

Intranet-Extranet, Prod-Intranet intranet software, news management

I am really pleased to say that our partners in Australia have today solved the problem of signal degradation with the iPhone4 if you hold the phone as anyone in the northern hemisphere might..

iPhone reception solved

This is just outstanding and demonstrates that old traditions have a lot of modern value!

Great job guys!

Solutions

Prod-Quality, Products, Resources-Technical

As a company that is ISO9001 certified, and also provides web based software specifically to assist in this area, it is great to get the chance to experience our own QMS software as a user – we have our own very genuine needs and its interesting  to put our own software through our own hoops – instead of everyone else’s.

We actually only have 10 policies – one of those – our core “Specifications, Development, Testing and Delivery” process does have 4 flowchart based procedures, the others are perfectly well represented as application files and version controlled inside Quality Manager itself. We don’t even need the complexity of storing those in the main document management system – another cost saving for an SME client meeting the stringent demands of any QMS framework like ISO9001.

Policy Manager and Policy Publisher

In our case we use InfoCapture to control our audits, as we don’t have multiple sites or multiple legislation – or teams of auditors and quality managers – so the efficiency gains of using Audit Manager as a dedicated and powerful QMS application are just not there for us as a user. It’s a truly great application for larger companies – but we just don’t have the requirements so why use it just because it is free for us!

We do however store the primary flowcharts of our core “Specifications, Development, Testing and Delivery” process in our ‘Process Diagram’ album in image gallery. This gives the designers the ability to work on them as we refine the process, and also makes them available in smaller resolutions for presentations to interested clients and partners.

Flowcharts and online policies

Importantly whereas 9 of our policies are maintained as version controlled application files, the flowchart based process is totally online within Policy Publisher. This is a single policy with automatic inclusion of the latest version of each of the flowcharts – keeping the main policy up to date is therefore completely automatic – if a lead developer changes the process, the policy is automatically kept up to date.

Summary

We ourselves are very typical of any SME company that has some flowchart based procedures, a set of policies, and a requirement to schedule and manage internal audits, with in our case one additional external ISO9001 audit every year.

Of the 5 applications we could use from the Claromentis framework to meet this need:

• Document Management
• Policy Manager
• Audit Manager
• InfoCapture
• Policy Publisher

We as our client actually only need to use 3. Policy manager ( there is a new policy manager tour available here ) provides its own version controlled document management specifically for policies, and InfoCapture is great for scheduling audits, managing non conformancies and moving each audit through the appropriate stages towards a successful conclusion.

For our core development processes we maintain those online in Policy Publisher, removing the need for any application files and allowing us to maintain and present the relevant flow charts and showing how all these processes relate.Since each process chart is maintained as its own procedure, the policy will auto update whenever any chart is changed, as we continue to evolve our own processes.

As a final conclusion we made fast access buttons on our intranet home page to both Audits and Policies just to make sure we are all aware of everything, and nothing is more than a couple of clicks away.

Fast acces links to our Quality Management

All in all I can honestly say we are a very satisfied user of our own QMS software, and I believe we are a typical example of an SME company that has a real need to get proactive value out of compliance – in our case with ISO9001.

This software is helping us break down the barriers between the intent of the legislation – improving quality – and actually achieving that goal with minimum administration and maximum returns.

Intranet-Extranet, Prod-Quality intranet software, ISO9001, quality management software

You might be wondering what on earth such title for a software company blog, in fact there are many similarities when you compare family trip to IKEA and delivering IT project for an organisation.

I begin with a little story that the state of my kitchen is dreadful, the look is so dated and it needs total refurbishment and I’ve been promising my wife a trip to IKEA so we can have one of those shinny looking kitchen just like the one in the brochure.

So we take a look on the brochure and we really like this one.  At £860 It’s a bargain! So let’s go and get it!

Then the reality starts to emerge you don’t came out the store with that kitchen; in fact you ended up with these.

All the good things isn’t included, definitely not the coffee and the laptop, but fittings and lighting, all the things that make it looks good.

If you think about isn’t it an elaborate con? They are selling you the picture with the price tag but you ended up with pile of flat pack?

Have we actually factor-in the cost and time required for transport, unpack, build, other fittings, disposal of the old kitchen units, daily disruption, and possible error?
Of course not we are so blinded with the image in the brochure and the low price!

It makes me wonder how many of the proud purchaser that successfully ended up with the picture just like in the brochure. Perhaps the percentage is not dissimilar to the percentage of successful IT projects.

Now back on the software business. I am seeing the similar attitude of “Honey let’s go to IKEA’ to sort out problem within an organisation.  Many of us still believe that to sort out internal communication problem is to go out just buy the software.

How about that “intranet” Dear? It looks sexy and cheap? Surely it’s within our budget.

How about other things, which we need to factor-in? Such as Planning, resources, preparation Check out 10 steps planning your intranet project.

At Claromentis our attitude is always to go for extra miles, we believe unique solution is required for unique problem, the value it’s not in the product but in the complete solution based on our experience that we’ve learnt deploying more than 100 intranets and bespoke web-based software across the world.

The reality is we are only one side of the coin; the other side is you Mr Customer. We can’t solve your problem if you don’t want it to be solved.

No offense to Mr IKEA, I still think your business model is brilliant, and this post is based on my personal view.

Services Case Study, commercial, fun, humor, intranet, intranet consultancy

Hearing about how our government spending tax payer money are juicy topics to share. I was staggered after reading this article from BBC after recent stories about government website spending and iPhone apps, and I thought I would share it for the fun reading.

http://www.businesslink.gov.uk £105m for 3 years with only around one million unique visitor a month

http://www.hmrc.gov.uk £35m a year

http://www.nhs.uk £21m a year with six million unique visitor a month

Intranet-Extranet fun, internet intern program, UK

• How do you select applications in the Mac apps store?
• How do you select books to buy online?
• How do you chose a hotel?

If like me – and almost everyone else – you flick to the reviews then you are an advocate of social media and a natural believer in the wisdom of crowds. As I am sure you already know.

The depressing thing is the low number of UK B2B company sites that directly give these kind of potential customers the information they so obviously look for when making purchasing decisions.

There are several possible reasons :

•    The company has so little traffic that the minimal level of engagement would actually influence such buyers in a negative way. No feedback looks to impatient prospects like bad feedback.

•    Engagement takes energy – but recession and continued political incompetence in the area of encouraging business has hit energy levels hard in the UK.

•    Engagement takes a strategy – but the whole world of corporate social media is too unfamiliar for most UK SME companies to set strategies for engaging with it.

•    They don’t have an appropriate technology platform.

•    They are genuinely a local business – anything more than a cursory presence on the internet is perceived as a distraction.

•    Companies are just too afraid of what the public will say about them.

I am sure there are others, and I look forward to any comments and suggestions,  but is the last one that I want to focus on – fear of opinions. In general I have noticed a hierarchy of comfort across the main audience lines as follows:

•    Intranets – companies allow engagement provided this is moderated by a ‘manager’ – which amounts to paying lip service to engagement and frustrating contributors.
•    Public – companies remain scared of negative perceptions on lead generation
•    Extranets – marketing view : our customers are the most important assets we have and we will totally control that space to make sure all content is on message.

Modern intranets are at least some way down this path of increasing user engagement, even though very few employees are comfortable engaging with blogs on the corporate intranet compared with the large number that are interested in reading them.

I have already posted on the depressing lag in the UK compared to the USA in adopting openness and engagement, so I will refrain from comparing engagement levels across these spaces. But for interest, in the best of the USA extranets the customers are welcomed to provide feedback precisely because they are the most valued asset – the company wants to learn to do a better job and has identified senior staff ready to engage with and work through any negative feedback in exactly the same public arena.

Lets go back to my original point. We use reviews. But the truth is we also use the content. We look at photos of the hotel, a location map and then read the comments. We know of an author, find their books, then read the reviews. It is a question of balance.

Balance

This is how it should be in corporate B2B websites and extranets as well as intranets – and not just in public large scale e-commerce B2C sectors. The information and the interaction both have an important role to play, but should be directly complimenting each other – and for that reason products like Claromentis Innovate are of great interest. When you can follow a document that is actually in your own corporate infrastructure, and by doing so extend the information layer seamlessly – the results are much greater participation and increased innovation.

In my view significant interaction through corporate social media but without adequate information is just as useless as lots of marketing information with no interaction. Both are increasingly liable to generate a cynical response from the visitor.

The companies that develop strategies to balance the two in a truly integrated environment will provide not just a more engaging and informative online presence, but  generate significant innovation benefits that will ultimately feed through into higher margins and increased sales.

Intranet-Extranet, Prod-Intranet, Solutions corporate social media, engagement, extranet, intranet software

Frustrated user

Does it sound familiar? It’s a human reaction when we encounter a system which is difficult to use or doesn’t work as we expected it to.

When usability touches a personal level the effect of a simple usability error feels like it has been multiplied tenfold. This post reminded me of one of the best usability books by Steve Krug “Don’t Make me think”. Usability is simple, it’s just common sense yet it’s also an incredible form of art.
I’ve spent more than 8 years working as an Information Architect, designing complex web-based software and many times I feel that I am still learning. Things that are obvious and logical from a technical point-of-view may be totally wrong from the novice users perspective.

We’ve just completely revamped our holiday planner application and one of our clients is currently running a beta test for the application. From a technical point-of-view the new holiday planner is much better than the old one. Some of the new features include an interactive holiday calendar, overview screen, automatic calculation, and a team/manager dashboard.

Apparently things are not going so well with our users. They don’t appreciate all of these wonderful features, what they care about is one thing and one thing only “Their holiday allowance”.

Here is a snapshot of the screen showing a user booking a half-day holiday.

Holiday request

Taking a closer look you might notice several things:

1. The icon representative a half day holiday is correct, a half red square indicating that the user only booked a half day holiday.
2. Duration is shown as 0.5 day, which is correct but in brackets (1 calendar day) which is causing major confusion.
3. Users are very sensitive to their holiday allowance, when they book a half day they only want to see a half day, without any reference to calendar days.

Here are some reactions from the users:

• “Why is duration showing 1 day, I booked a half day only”
• “What is calendar day? How’s that different to a normal day?”
• “Does it mean if I took a half day off, the system took 1 day from my allocation?”

Again, from a technical point-of-view, the reason we display calendar day is simply to give useful information about the overall duration of a users holiday.  For example you may have booked 2 half-day holidays, which means 1 day has been taken out from your holiday allocation. But you may want to know that you have booked 2 calendar days with each half-day holiday.

I can see this piece of information is actually quite useful but having to display both day types has caused major confusion to the user, after all, when a user books their holiday the only thing they care about is their holiday allowance.

Intranet-Extranet fun, humor, intranet development, user interface