Akiva Bernstein

Akiva Bernstein's Posts

Akiva Bernstein is the CEO of V51 Consulting. In his 13 years with the company Akiva has served as Director of Sales, Account Director, as well as leading specific project teams. Akiva received his MBA from Schulich School of Business and his BA from McGill University. He is responsible for the strategic direction and growth of the business, as well as ensuring our mix of services are in line with market demand. Akiva also provides executive level leadership to a variety of clients.

Building Your Steering Committee

Monday, January 23rd, 2012

Previously the V51 blog has referenced the use of steering committee to help guide the development of intranet programs. This entry hopes to answer some of the common questions we encounter regarding the roles, responsibilities and structure of the typical steering committee.

 

What is a Steering Committee?

A steering committee is a group of specifically chosen individuals that collectively develop a mandate for, and guide the creation of, an intranet program. Most commonly they serve to help recruit departmental resources, approve and structure funding, review and keep on target project deliverables and work to resolve conflict; defusing any political issues that may arise between stakeholders. They may also provide valuable assistance in:

·         identifying project participants, experts and test groups

·         collecting and communicating employee feedback

·         ensuring all business groups are fairly represented

·         reviewing proposed and on-going initiatives

·         identifying governance models, strategies and policies

Remember, your steering committee members should be the champions of your intranet program.

 

Who’s on it?

Steering committees commonly have 6-8 participants which normally include members from various business units and levels of management. Seats are filled based on the requirements of the project and may be rotated as required. It is recommended you include a member from internal marketing, IT and an HR representative. Although difficult, it is highly beneficial to include an officer whenever possible; executive sponsorship helps on-board key people in your enterprise and ensures commitment to the project. Additionally, officers are able to provide a clear understanding of the organization’s strategic plan including previously undisclosed information including where the organization may be heading. Reliable foresight is invaluable when developing your intranet project. The ideal scenario is to engage an officer to serve as Chair of the committee but as scheduling normally makes this impossible it is best, at a minimum, to involve them in all high level decision making.

Particularly where larger organizations are concerned, project management by steering committee is the only truly reliable strategy to avoid many of the missteps organizations take during the development of their intranet programs.

 

Need Help?

For more information on building your steering committee or to speak to an intranet consultant contact us here at V51.

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The Benefits of a SharePoint Roadmap

Friday, January 6th, 2012

In today’s market, platforms like Microsoft’s SharePoint offer a plethora of programmable functionalities to help businesses meet their unique intranet needs.  However, the sheer size and capabilities of such platforms can make being given the task of managing an intranet development project cumbersome and intimidating. To help streamline the process intranet consultants have been applying the increasingly popular roadmapping technique to help simplify this complex task.

Roadmapping refers to the creation of a plan that helps to identify both the long term and short term goals of an intranet development project. Often lead by steering committee and with the help of intranet consultants, the roadmap process helps to prioritize the desired outcomes, allocate funding as well as sets boundaries; identify the scope of the project. Often and especially with larger organizations, it can be difficult to prioritize the goals of an intranet space. In these cases the roadmapping exercise helps identify at a high level where manpower, focus and funding should be allocated. After major milestones are identified the roadmap can be tailored to serve as a tool for wider spread company education; helping people understand an intranet development project from a ‘big picture’ perspective.

Roadmaps can also be designed to include estimates on when an enterprise can expect to see the result of their efforts and to help persons in the organization, who may feel that their needs aren’t being met initially, understand when the intranet will develop in areas that are more meaningful to them. The roadmapping practice keeps people onboard and focused by allowing them to understand the sequence of activities at a macro level.

Key areas of focus to consider when building a roadmap:

   Current state assessment

ž   Existing business process flows

ž   Stakeholder analysis

ž   Understanding business drivers

ž   Gap & benefit analysis

ž   Opportunity/impact matrix

ž   Governance and resources

ž   Timelines

ž   Risk matrix

ž   Costing

If you’re looking to deploy SharePoint or develop your pre-existing intranet but don’t know where to start contact us here at V51 to see how we can help you create a plan that makes sense.

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Getting Social with SharePoint

Friday, November 4th, 2011

Microsoft’s heavy hitting web application platform, SharePoint has taken business communities by storm and continues to dominate the market. Since its release in 2001, SharePoint has evolved as a sort of jack-of-all-trades in the industry, helping businesses with document and content management issues as well as clearing out long standing communication challenges common before the existence of such a powerful platform. SharePoint has made business collaboration beyond easy, but does it have the capacity to help employees connect on a social level? It sure does.

There is no denying the world has been taken by storm by social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. These amazingly successful sites have been putting people in touch and connecting folks with like interests globally for years now, but does this sort of social networking have a place in business communities? Absolutely.

Strengthening relationships and making personal connections in the workplace helps push business results; it’s why the last decade has seen an increase in team building activities – people tend to work better when they feel they belong to a bigger community, contributing to common goals. The trouble is,  how do you build these relationships when your company houses five thousand employees or the nature of your business content is too sensitive to risk being  put on a third party social networking site? What you do is use SharePoint.

SharePoint has a plethora of built in functionality for social networking. HR training and good governance are a must but outside that getting started is simple and the great thing about SharePoint’s social networking capabilities is that it uses skill sets that most people already possess. SharePoint has integrated feeds like Facebook, personal profile pages like LinkedIn and status messages with a Twitter format feel. These easy to use features are important when onboarding employees to an internal social networking experience because the bottom line is social networking only works if most everyone can and will use it.

Some features to look forward to in your SharePoint social networking experience:

My Site Profile – Each SharePoint user gets their own My Site page to tell a little about themselves, their work, skills, and current projects.

My Newsfeed – From your site you can create status messages to keep colleagues updated.

Tag and Like Profile Pages – Each user has the capability to tag and like other pages, which are then displayed in a cloud on your site and in colleagues activity feeds.

Blog – SharePoint provides rich blogging functionality for both internal and external posts.

More of a visual learner? Check out this video on how you can make SharePoint’s social networking capabilities work for you http://bit.ly/uLrcgE

Is your SharePoint social networking experience missing something? Contact us here at V51 Consulting and see what a SharePoint Architect can do for you.

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Nielsen Norman Group Selects BenNet for Top 10 Intranet of 2011

Wednesday, January 5th, 2011

Every year people ask the question “what does a great intranet look like?” and 99% of the time they end up reading research  published by the world’s leading authority on web usability and intranet best practices – Jakob Nielsen of the Nielsen Norman Group. And this year Intranet design teams will be reading about the SharePoint Intranet we developed for Bennett Jones to learn the secrets of effective knowledge management. The awards typically go to major global organizations so we are delighted to be on a list with winning companies like Credit Suisse AG, Verizon Communications and Heineken International. Nielsen Norman Group publishes a 433 page report on the winning intranets and is available for sale online. This is the second award for the Bennett Jones intranet that V51 Consulting developed and launched in February 2010.

Faceted Search Results in SharePoint

Faceted search results

Read the case study on the Bennett Jones SharePoint Intranet.

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Bennett Jones Intranet Wins Platinum

Friday, November 19th, 2010

I just returned from KM World in Washington where I had the distinct pleasure watching our client Bennett Jones receive the Platinum prize for the Intranet Innovation Awards. V51 Consulting developed the intranet with SharePoint. Brian Bawden, the National Director of Knowledge Management was on hand to accept the award on behalf of the law firm. Following the awards ceremony, Brian delivered an inspiring orientation of the intranet to a packed room of KM professionals that had come to learn the secrets of intranet success. I was not surprised by the turnout since Intranets rarely get this type of exposure. And a rare opportunity it was to take a look inside what the judges referred to as the “best precedent management system they had ever seen in a law firm ever.” Brian spoke eloquently about the firm’s mandate to unite geographically dispersed offices and how the portal could bring people closer together. He gave examples of how the firm’s people directory engages users to declare their work availability and language skills. And the audience learned how knowledge resources are successfully being shared in a trusting environment where lawyers give and receive with confidence.

Congratulations to Bennett Jones for this major accomplishment!

Intranet Innovation Award - Platinum Award - Bennett Jones

Akiva Bernstein (Left) Brian Bawden (Centre) James Robertson (Right)

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Using SharePoint for a law firm Intranet

Monday, May 3rd, 2010

For the past 10 years V51 Consulting has been developing solutions for large multi-office law firms. We were the first to implement content management tools at Oslers for their public website; for Davies we built a comprehensive client extranet platform as well as an intranet primarily focused on knowledge management. In recent years the conversation at law firms has been all about SharePoint. Microsoft has been very successful selling SharePoint into the legal vertical. Despite this success, many firms have struggled to realize the benefits of the platform. Granted, many firms started out with Sharepoint 2003 which was a markedly inferior product to MOSS 2007. But even MOSS failed to deliver on the hype.

After having so much success launching a law firm Intranet for Bennett Jones built on SharePoint, we decided to develop a list of best practices to help other law firms.

Best Practices for law firm intranets:

1. Develop a Strategy – it sounds simple but getting people within a law firm to agree on the purpose of an Intranet is often overlooked and leads to much conflict down the road.

2. Develop an Information Architecture – Bennett Jones hired consultants that specialized in information design and usability testing. Many firms think that SharePoint magically creates intuitive interfaces for navigating content. On the contrary, you must explicitly design site hierarchy and implement navigation systems that help users find information efficiently.

3. Don’t cut corners on User Experience Design – SharePoint out-of-the-box does not give you an interface sufficient enough to encourage user adoption. You really have to take users far away from the SharePoint UI to have success. Get creative and hire the best UX team you can find. The investment will generate returns measured in site visits and overall user satisfaction.

4. Knowledge Management Vision – Having a well articulated knowledge management strategy will help you determine very quickly what you can get for free and what will cost you. SharePoint is just a framework with tools like team sites, wikis, document libraries and blogs. Understanding how your KM content should be delivered to users will help assess the amount of customization required.

5. Governance Planning  -  Your new Intranet will create responsibilities for a long list of people. That’s a good thing! Gone are the days where an entire intranet is managed by one HTML programmer in a windowless office.  Your plan should address lines of ownership for business and technical teams, service delivery requirements for business and IT, information architecture, levels of support, as well as education and training plans.

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Sitefinity 4.0 is around the corner

Monday, May 3rd, 2010

We are very excited about Sitefinity CMS 4.0 for many reasons. Here’s just a few.

  1.  Taxonomy – At V51 we’ve carved out a bit of a niche in faceted search. It is particularly useful when you are navigating large collections of data and want to give users that “Amazon.com” experience of refining search results until you end up with the perfect results set. Historically we’ve provided this functionality through custom code and stored procedures in our own CMS. When we made the move to Sitefinity, the first question we asked was “how does it deal with taxonomy?”.  Now 4.0 provides a robust capability to create tags and categories that can be used ACROSS pages and modules. This is a big step forward.
  2. New Layout Builder – Ever wonder how nice it would be to sit down with a client or a designer and mock up a layout on the fly? The wait is over… The drag and drop layout builder means that you can not only create new widgets or page elements but that you can actually resize the elements right in the interface (just like using PowerPoint).
  3. Google Analytics – Now the world’s leading analytics software is integrated with Sitefinity. Right from the application and secured by Sitefinity’s granular permissions admin users can gain access to Google’s powerful reports. No need to log into another application. 

  The complete roadmap for Sitefinity 4.0  is very promising.

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