Top Five Articles From 2023

By Janus Boye

In March I met with Kate Tarling in London. She wrote a helpful book on leading and delivering successful services, sustainably. The notes from our book launch were among the most read articles this year.

It’s that time of year, where we look back at another year of learning and networking. We really like to have a good conversation and meet in person, but sharing openly as much as possible is also an important part of what we do.

The big stories this year covered AI (surprise!), intranets (an oldie, but goodie) and also a book launch on delivering services.

Keeping with tradition, here are the five posts, which seemed to resonate the most based on readership and engagement numbers.

It’s clearly unfair to select just five out of 53 blog posts, but here you go in alphabetised order:

#1: How AI will transform internal communications

A screenshot from the live demo that Kevin from Haiilo showed us

Being pressured for time, it’s tempting for internal communications to use services like ChatGPT to help with creating content.

Using the example of creating a sustainability strategy for retail companies, Kevin Hähnlein from employee communications software vendor Haiilo simply wrote a very brief text as a prompt:

“Intro paragraph on why it is important to have a sustainability strategy for retail companies”

He then marked the text, and then selected: Make longer. ChatGPT then worked its magic in the background and just a few seconds later created a longer text.

#2: How work changes with AI and copilots

With AI Copilots already in the marketplace and many workplaces, we are now beginning an accelerated transformation of work.

How is work changing today? What's different this time? How are organisations measuring, managing and leading this change?

Industry leader, Microsoft MVP and past Boye conference speaker, Richard Harbridge joined us from Toronto and shared key insights to help you better understand, prepare and lead improved AI enriched communication, collaboration and management experiences.

As shown on the slide below, a key point was the path from creating an average piece of content to something outstanding is now faster and shorter.

#3: Intranet strategy trends for 2023

Intranets have been around since the mid-90’s and during the past decades, we’ve seen quite a few waves of different intranet concepts like the employee portal, the social intranet or even the digital workplace.

According to Frank Wolf, co-founder of employee communication software vendor Staffbase, we are now right in the middle of the next wave with intranets playing an important role in organisations, in particular when it comes to improving the employee experience.

According to Frank there are three elements to a good intranet and traditionally an intranet portal would address all three of them:

  • Front Door, which is all about communication, community, service and information

  • Library, which is equally documentation and knowledge library

  • Collaboration, which is team communication, documents and meetings

#4: The missing manual for service organisations

All organisations are becoming service organisations. But most weren’t built to deliver services successfully end-to-end, and the human, operational and financial impacts are abundantly clear.

In the digital era the stakes are even higher, given how rapidly services change. Yet default working practices (governance, planning, funding, leadership, reporting, programme and team structures) inside large organisations haven't changed. Rather than modernise just one service at a time, it's the underlying organisational conditions that need to be transformed — anything less is futile.

Kate Tarling has written the must-read guide: The Service Organization, which came out in February 2023

#5: What’s Dennis cooking: AI & Creativity

Dennis Oswald is Brand Experience Manager at Netgen in Zurich and like most of us, he is just another curious human being trying to figure out what's going on with AI.

In a very popular member’s call, Dennis looked at how AI will change the creative process and the broader impact for design leaders. 

AI explorer and design leader Dennis Oswald also made it to Aarhus in November and talked to a packed room about The Future of UX: Leveraging AI for Design, Research, and Career Growth (download slides as PDF)

As expected from a field that’s cooking faster than a microwave dish, we covered quite some ground. Doing the slides for the call was a creative wakeup call according to Dennis, but I think that his presentation had the same impact on most attendees. A spicy dish that Dennis served up.

Experts of the month

We’ve done it since way back when before the pandemic and this year we’ve kept up the tradition. Sharing the story of someone in our community. It’s about a human touch, but also a way to connect and expand your network beyond your usual circles.

Each expert is worth knowing, but again, similar to the unfair spirit of this post, here are the 3 experts who made the biggest impact in 2023:

Andreas Ramos was on stage in Aarhus City Hall at the Boye Aarhus 15 conference. His topic: Use content strategy to make your organisation win. Photo: Ib Sørensen

  • Andreas Ramos, a true Silicon Valley legend, who’s did a doctorate at Aarhus University in the 80’s

  • Eric Greenberg, who’s developing and running one of higher education's first Marketing Operations teams at Wharton

  • Tina Schmechel works as the Alumni Communications & Digital Marketing Officer at Imperial College London, one of the UK’s leading science-based institutions

Learn more about what matters to our community

How about some more reading to satisfy your curiosity?

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