izone

1. What is your experience from collaborating in the IZONE in aspects of Knowledge-sharing and English learning?

Critical view: Collaboration - working together in an intersection of common goals – I have uncertain feelings about the „working together“ in iZone. Project posts slowed down any communication and made me wait sometimes for weeks for an answer. I've been enabled to share my knowledge but an interest of colleagues to discuss issues, related to the topics published, was very low. Discussions, if any, lost dynamics very quickly. An unclear goal and rules of the language use, and contextless compulsion to accept communication in English, even in discussions where the subject itself is complex enough, brings low quality content, very little value as an outcome of a discussion and decrease of motivation of the broad user audience to attend such discussions. Is this site multilingual? I miss feedback a lot - I miss results or conclusions on Portal Training events, I miss feedback on blog, I miss feedback in discussions led via comments. There has been one comment made on iZone Strategy. Is this an extent of an internal discussion that we need to streamline our effort?

Constructive view: We need to support internal discussions, but we need goal-oriented discussions and a role of moderator would be helpful here to keep people on track and no to let discussions end without any conclusion. English zone could be set up to enable anyone to train communication and composition. Compilation of the best content there should be published and represent NTG publicly. MyZone should list all the content streams that one didn’t provide feedback on and enable moderator to provoke members to provide their feedback in informal way.

2. Which innovation Idea posted (yours or others) you consider as the most relevant one and why?

Idea: Register of NTG skills, products and technologies.

 Because to build healthy operations and ambitious goals is possible only if we are aware of what are our capacities and competencies. Such registers would provide a precious raw material to build new innovative ways to achieve our objectives easier, faster, cheaper and more reliable.

3. Your suggestions to improve IZONE functionality and/or rules of collaboration?

I suggest simplifying of iZone's UI as much as possible to get easy basic workflow of the innovation process. If contributions to an idea are just a "Hyde Park", I suggest we can use comments, for this type of communication so the content will be accessible directly with the idea in evaluation or the other way round – enable users to see contribution ever after. I suggest focusing on small innovations (maybe workarounds) achievable with very little effort within very short time, but keeping the life of iZone going – to learn quicker with visible outcomes. Let's get quick wins to start up whole lifecycle and to be able to keep it going and grow.

What concerns the knowledge sharing, I think we have a lot to improve. There are still domain areas which are kept private (I think not intentionally). Nobody cares to share, nobody cares to ask. Such as infrastructure maintenance, modelling methodology, Sharepoint development best practice, .. And what's the worst, it is valid for me as well, so I should start sharing my knowledge and findings by myself. The same applies for idea contributions.

What concerns improving my English - unfortunately there is nothing good to say :(

2. Which innovation Idea posted (yours or others) you consider as the most relevant one and why?

I don't think I can say what ideas are relevant, but the most valuable I found are

• common gateway to portals - if implemented, it can become a crystallizing element for the very needed NTG Knowledge Base.
• help desk - if successfully implemented, it can improve our own customer care processes, we can learn the SP technology on the project and the most important - it can become a product to offer and build on.
• ibpm - the project could build a solid and complete solution framework for BPM/OSS solutions.

3. Your suggestions to improve IZONE functionality and/or rules of collaboration?

usability aspect - sometimes it takes "too many clicks" to fulfil a task or to navigate into relevant data. So sometimes to think about a design prior implementing would be appreciated. I know the iZONE portal is built-as-go, never-less as its complexity increases, we have to be careful not to create any mess we won't be able to clean up.

security aspect - finally there is a possibility to change my own password, but to use unencrypted connection for login, keep my password plain text, no DRP (or am I wrong?) and an unclear rights management is a little worrying and I'm loosing my confidence in the iZONE portal as a sustainable production environment.

content - I think iZONE portal needs more internal marketing, get all employees to use it actively. And if the project/task sites are part of the izone, then I would suggest to create manuals for PLs.
E.g.: for every project there must be a document library (or a view) for project related documents, specify how to evaluate task budgets, the meaning of the assigned budget, their responsibilities (deadlines) for accepting tasks,...