Tags // Intranets
Filenaming Conventions and Knowledge Sharing
Patrick has posted an article on file naming conventions. Good. Now I don’t have to hunt for them every time!
knowledge management, intranets Add tag Permalink | Wednesday, March 10, 2010
2010 Intranet Innovation Awards are open for entries
The 2010 Intranet Innovation Awards are open for entries. Entries close on Friday 23.
I like this award. It highlights how teams are thinking of making their intranets useful and productive. It starts a discussion on ideas and themes. I met some of the winners at the KM World conference in San Jose last November and I could clearly see their enthusiasm and determination in making their intranets work. I walked away with more than a few ideas to try out.
intranets Add tag Permalink | Monday, March 08, 2010
Designing collections for the web
Designing collections for the web - my new article over at PebbleRoad. The idea of the article came up when the team was discussing how best to leverage and surface homogeneous information. We were doing a redesign of a hospital website and found out that patients wanted to be connected with getting care in many different ways - by clinic, by doctor, by diseases and conditions etc. This idea let us to investigate collections, first as used by libraries, and then modified and as used by social media. This article compiles our experimentation and learning on the subject.
“A collection is a list of homogeneous items. A collection on the web can be as simple as a blog (a list of posts) to as complex as a library collection (multiple lists of different library materials). Collections are an integral part of many websites, but not all collections are designed with ease-of-use and ease-of-retrieval in mind. In this article, I’ll cover some theory and give practical advice on designing online collections for the websites and intranets.”
information architecture, intranets, interface, social media Add tag Permalink | Monday, March 01, 2010
The culture of collaboration and what it means for your intranet
I’ve written a new article at PebbleRoad, The culture of collaboration and what it means for your intranet.
Here’s my punch line: the adoption or participation you’re going to get on your intranet is directly related to the culture of collaboration that exists in the organisation. Having the right collaboration technology does play a part, but only as a sidekick to the culture of collaboration.
intranets, collaboration Add tag Permalink | Tuesday, December 22, 2009
Implementing Enterprise 2.0 at Booz Allen: Part One Overview of Business Drivers and Components
Bill Ives: This is the first in a six part series on Booz Allen’s award winning implementation of Enterprise 2.0.
“To meet these challenges, Booz Allen developed and implemented Hello, a suite of web-based enterprise tools designed to strengthen collaboration, connectivity, and communication across geographical and cultural barriers. It was created from vision to launch in under 6 months leveraging a blend of Open Source, COTS, and custom-developed products. Since August 2008, more than 80% of the firm has logged into Hello and more than 53% of the firm has contributed original content. There are more than 4,000 individual searches a day.”
intranets, social media Add tag Permalink | Wednesday, December 09, 2009
Get ready for intranet 3.0! it’s coming, it’s real and it will change the way we work
I like how the intranet conversations are shaping up these days. It’s all about thinking ahead. James started it with this article on future scenarios. Now we have Sarah Bates on Intranet 3.0. I hope this is a start of something new and a push that will take intranets into the next level of business integration.
“If anything, intranets are driving services forward at such a great pace that, post-recession, the organization that emerges will be fitter, leaner and more adaptable. Prior to the downturn, the rate of development was already intense, but market conditions have caused a new wave of intranet acceleration to arrive.”
intranets Add tag Permalink | Wednesday, December 09, 2009
Intranet tips by Jane McConnell
I found Jane’s list of things to consider when sorting out global content (common content) and local content (specific content) to be a really useful recap on good intranet practices. It is always an uphill task to convince departments used to working in silos that they have some really useful content that they should be putting up in the common content area.
Here’s an example of Jane’s #2
Think of the global intranet as collection of spaces, with each space having a purpose from the user viewpoint.
Examples of spaces: News, Workplace, Employee Services, About. These spaces will later become the components of the global navigation bar.
Develop several hypotheses, each one with a combination of spaces. You should be able to make a simple statement about each space for each hypothesis: “This space is designed for (user) to (action)”.
intranets Add tag Permalink | Tuesday, December 01, 2009
Wells Fargo editors’ newsroom model wins Ragan laurels
Interesting write up on how Wells Fargo goes about publishing their corporate newsletter. What amazes me in this story is the discipline that the team of 4 have to create a compelling newsletter over and over again. Now why can’t we follow the same model on our intranets?
Mike Bares, editor, explains how the newsroom atmosphere works: “Sources pitch stories, and we make decisions on which ones to cover,” he says. “We have story-planning sessions and spend a lot of time interviewing sources. It’s intense, as breaking news crosses our desks, but interspersed with periods of calm.”
intranets, newsroom Add tag Permalink | Sunday, November 29, 2009
Intranet Innovation Awards 2009
Here is my review of the Intranet Innovation Awards 2009 report by of Step Two Designs (thank you James for the review copy).
The report has 10 case studies from around the world, each showcasing an idea, an innovation that serves a specific business requirement.
The areas judged cover business solutions, frontline delivery, communication and collaboration and core functionality.
I recommend that you read Alex Manchester’s summary of the award winners to get a glimpse of the detail and richness the report provides.
Given below are the main reasons I find myself carrying the report along when meeting clients or when discussing intranet designs.
- Doable solutions: the winning solutions are all doable. This sense of it being ‘within-grasp’ does wonders getting a conversation started. I can see people thinking “Yes, that’s something I’m looking for”, or “Now, why didn’t we think of this before?”
- Structure of the report: The report is structured to encourage action. There are sections on why this entry won, how the innovation was implemented and on principles to consider if I’m going to try it out myself. I find this really useful when it comes to take the discussions to a higher plane.
- Ample screenshots: Yes, a picture is worth a thousand words when it comes to understanding an idea and the report has ample of these screenshots. The good thing is that many of the screenshots show actual information and not blurred-out lines. This is extremely useful to get a sense of context and how it might apply to my case.
If you are an intranet sponsor, intranet manager or intranet consultant, this report will help you get discussions off to a good start. Getting a packaged report like this that includes screenshots and commentary around good solutions is hard to come by. This report fills the gap and is a valuable addition to the literature.
The report is available for online purchase at US$ 189.00 from the Step Two website.
intranets Add tag Permalink | Saturday, November 28, 2009
Communities of Practice: Optimizing Internal Knowledge Sharing
Michael Hawley has written an article describing how ‘Communities of Practice’ or CoPs can save intranets from the findabilty problem.
“The key to intranet success is to provide value to employees and give them a reason to visit the site repeatedly. One of the primary ways to achieve this is to connect employees with the people and groups with whom they need to collaborate. Workgroups, or communities of practice, provide the basis for a living, growing, vibrant space in which people can access the information they need, share best practices, and contribute to a shared knowledge base.”
I don’t think CoPs can save intranets. The CoPs may solve the local findability problem but not the global findability problem. What if a staff from another department wants to find something that sits in a siloed CoP? We’ve seen this again and again. A new technology comes along and people get excited with it, start using it and then find out they are doing the same things with the new technology as before.
In my experience, intranets have seen progress when changes are made to the process—the way the work is done.
In his talk yesterday Michael Sampson mentioned that when e-mail and shared access came to the enterprise we learned to work with them and became comfortable with them because the technology worked and because there was nothing better for a long period of time. Now we’re seeing a fast pace of change in the technologies available in the enterprise. These are much better and more efficient but we resist giving up our way of working.
There is always going to be this gap and if we don’t do something to bridge it then CoPs and whatever comes next will just add to the chaos.
intranets Add tag Permalink | Friday, November 06, 2009
7 principles for decentralized publishing
Jane McConnell writes about 7 principles for decentralised publishing on the intranet.
“If you are a large, global organization, you will have many different types of content with varying degrees of ownership depending on the source: business unit, country, function, etc. Ask the different business units and functions to define their own guidelines for what type of content require approval by what level or role.”
intranets, content strategy, content management Add tag Permalink | Saturday, October 10, 2009
Barriers to Intranet Use from Forrester
Bill Ives has summarized a Forrester report on “What’s Holding Back Your Intranet?”. The findings are not surprising.
“They found that 93% of employee respondents said they use an intranet or company portal (Forrester uses the terms interchangeably) at least weekly, and more than half reported daily use. However, they found that these intranets were mostly accessed for basic functions such as company directory, benefits information, and payroll. Access to collaborative tools, what some might called an enterprise 2.0 capability was ranked fourteenth.”
intranets Add tag Permalink | Thursday, October 08, 2009
1-day Masterclass in SharePoint Collaboration with Michael Sampson
We’re organizing a 1-day Masterclass in SharePoint Collaboration with Michael Sampson. This is taking place on 5th Nov at Grand Hyatt in Singapore. We’re offering an early-bird price of S$420 if you register before Oct 20th (a real bargain folks).
So why are we doing this? There are many SharePoint projects taking shape these days and that’s good in one way—it tells us that collaboration is getting the attention and budget it deserves. But many of these projects are done solely from a technical point of view, and this is a problem. Collaboration as we’ve come to understand demands more than just a technical perspective. It requires asking the right questions, planning to get the right answers and making the right decisions along the way that align with business objectives. This is the gap that we hope to bridge with Michael Sampson in the seminar. So if you’re in Singapore or in the region, this is an opportunity to understand the many paths ahead with SharePoint (or any other collaboration tool) and how to choose the right ones (and how to avoid the wrong ones).
intranets, collaboration Add tag Permalink | Tuesday, September 22, 2009
Intranet governance cycle
I’ve posted a new article at PebbleRoad on intranet governance.
This article offers a system view of intranet governance. It is based on a simple strategy that can be applied across different areas. The areas that I’ve covered are: information organization, publishing, collaboration and applications.
This article is based on a presentation that I put together for the KM Singapore conference.
intranets, governance Add tag Permalink | Monday, September 21, 2009
Training intranet editors - the intranet cafe?
J. Boye describes a method that he observed when discussing how intranet editors are trained—the intranet cafe.
An interesting alternative to the usual options was presented by a retailer that had successfully introduced a regular “intranet café”. Every other week on Wednesday afternoons the intranet manager and his team made themselves available in a training room to anybody interested, who could then show up without the need for any prior registration. Some would show up with specific questions, while other occasional intranet editors would show up simply to get intranet work done while knowing that a helping hand was nearby. These intranet cafés had become tremendously popular and really made an impact on training staff on using the intranet. Quite a nice bottom-up approach!
intranets Add tag Permalink | Saturday, September 12, 2009
Better Practice Checklists & Guides
I stumbled upon this site by the Australian Government's Department of Finance & Deregulation. They have a comprehensive collection of guides and checklists for managing their online properties. The collection covers IA to content strategy to intranets to KM. Cool!
intranets, content strategy Add tag Permalink | Monday, August 10, 2009
Social networking on intranets
Jakob Nielsen's latest Alertbox
"Social software is not a trend that can be ignored. It's affecting fundamental change in how people expect to communicate, both with each other and the companies they do business with. And companies can't just draw a line in the sand and say it's okay for employees to use Web 2.0 to communicate with customers, but it's not okay to use it when communicating with each other."
intranets Add tag Permalink | Wednesday, August 05, 2009
Review: What every intranet team should know
The idea of having a team to manage and sustain the intranet still raises eyebrows. It was not that long ago that the intranet had the same position in the organisation as the e-mail exchange server -- a tool from the IT department that needs little intervention. Hopefully all this is changing. But this change also means that the organisation has to deal with skills gaps. They either have to groom internal talent or source talent from the industry. Both are frustrating affairs when you don’t know what you’re dealing with. This is where James Robertson’s book, What every intranet team should know, shines.
I was consulting for an intranet redesign when James announced his book. I ordered multiple copies immediately. I gave one copy to the client’s project team and I’m happy to say that the conversations are at a higher level these days -- more focused on action rather than on conceptual understanding.
Many of the ideas that James presents in his book are ideas that he’s already touched upon in his resourceful blog, ColumnTwo. However, having all these ideas arranged for a quick read, and in fine print I must add, is quite priceless. It just works better.
So if you want to have more focused conversations with your clients or stakeholders around intranet management, just grab a copy of this book and give it to them.
intranets Add tag Permalink | Friday, July 10, 2009
Calendering: Are we there yet?
Michael Sampson has written an interesting article on state of calendering applications out there.
“There” is the nirvana of calendaring, whereby you can set up a meeting with anyone, viewing their free-busy time within the context of your standard calendaring client. It’s seamless—it works across Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes, Google Calendar, Meeting Maker, Apple iCal, and other systems. It’s automatic—the free-busy information shows anytime you enter their name, adding them to an upcoming meeting. Basically, it just works... That’s not the case today, even for products from the big vendors...
intranets Add tag Permalink | Wednesday, July 08, 2009
Intranet offers bright future for internal communicators
Gerry McGovern on new skills for internal communicators:
"Intranet internal communications is radically different from print internal communications. The intranet internal communicator facilitates rather than dictates. They help people find. They guide rather than lead. They support the completion of a task such as checking up a procedure or a job vacancy. They focus on creating clear menus and links... This is a call to arms. You young ambitious communicators, get involved in making search work better, focus relentlessly on the quality of menus and links, simplify the steps and words used in software applications, make policies easier to understand and forms easier to complete. There is so much to do, so many areas where you can make your organization more productive, efficient and effective."