Don't try to boil the content ocean

The phrase 'trying to boil the ocean' refers to tasks that are clearly and heroically impossible. This is exactly what most teams take on when they try to get every intranet page up to the same high standard.

In the earlier article titled Intranet authoring: a hobby?, the role of intranet authors was explored, highlighting that many are required to maintain their content 'on the side', with little training or support.

Most intranets struggle to deliver consistent, accurate, readable and valuable content. Despite this, the goal of many intranet teams remains to deliver universally 'good' content.

This briefing will discuss common approaches to improving content, focusing on those that have failed. Suggestions will then be made on ways to target efforts for best effect.

Failed: content cleanups

Many teams attempt a content cleanup on a regular basis, perhaps every year or two. These involve reviewing most sections of the site, and the content contained within.

These reviews are looking for ROT (redundant, outdated or trivial), generating 'hit lists' of content that can be removed.

While these very easily remove hundreds or thousands of pages, the long term impact is negligible. As fast as content is reviewed by the central team, more is published by decentralised authors.

The process drains the energy of the intranet team, and often frustrates content owners. Even after a major cleanup, the intranet rapidly accumulates more content problems, and reverts to its previous state.

[CM Briefing 2008-06, read the full article]

Posted by jamesr at 08:45 AM | Permalink
Categories: Content management, Intranets, James' articles

Searching more is not always better

The rise of enterprise search has put an increasing focus on searching ever broader collections of content and documents within organisations.

While enterprise search projects generally start with simple intranet search, attention quickly moves to searching document management systems, collaboration tools, business systems and fileshares.

Underpinning this work is the belief (or hope) that business value will be delivered to users by deploying a more extensive search tool.

Unfortunately it is often the case that searching more is not better than searching less.

This briefing will look at some of the challenges involved in implementing enterprise search, and provide practical tips on how to proceed.

Relevance and value

The fundamental goal of any search tool is to provide users with useful and relevant search results.

Within the enterprise, this means finding valuable information across the many different repositories, sources and systems.

The difficulty is that increasing the amount of information being searched almost always reduces the relevance of search results. Once called the 'Altavista effect', this was seen in the millions of hits generated for any set of terms entered into that search engine.

This is equally significant within an enterprise, and the challenge is to maintain (or improve) relevance as the volume of information grows.

Consideration also needs to be given to user needs and expectations. What types of queries are being entered into the enterprise search, and what sorts of results are expected? Gaining a deeper understanding of these questions helps to shed light on what to search, and how.

[CM Briefing 2008-05, read the full article]

Posted by jamesr at 08:34 AM | Permalink
Categories: Information management, Intranets, James' articles, Search tools

Intranet (re)design wrap-up

So you're sitting at your desk and you have to redesign your intranet (or design one from scratch). Where on earth do you start?

By any measure, this is no easy task. The multitude of factors that need to be taken into account can be overwhelming.

Over the years, we have published a vast amount of information on intranets, offering the benefits of our experience and giving practical advice on intranet management, information architecture and content management.

In this article, we attempt to wrap up all the activities that form part of an intranet (re)design into one concise checklist.

Along the way, references will be given to our most popular articles, giving you more detail on particular topics. The goal is to give you an excellent starting point for undertaking an intranet (re)design and also to provide support throughout the process.

User-centred design methodology

As a basic framework for this article, a simplified intranet (re)design process has been devised, illustrated in Figure 1.

Before going through each of the steps in order, it's important to point out that best practice for designing interactive information systems -- such as intranets and websites -- involves using a user-centred design (UCD) methodology.

This simply means that input from the people who will actually use the intranet is given equal weighting with the business objectives and the information (aka content).

[May KM Column written by Patrick Kennedy, read the full article]

Posted by jamesr at 08:00 AM | Permalink
Categories: Information architecture, Intranets, Usability & user-centered design

Photo: Pale cross (I)

Pale cross (I)

This is a photo I took late at night in the cemetary at the top of Wellington city centre. A beautiful and haunting place, even after they put the road through the middle of it. The highlight was created by a small LED torch I happened to be carrying.

By the way, I'm posting this photo from my new Flickr account, which I'll be using to share just my best work. My old account will still be in place, and you can follow this for my work-in-progress shots.

(I don't know whether having two Flickr accounts is sensible or practical, but I guess I'll find out over the next couple of months.)

Posted by jamesr at 10:53 AM
Categories: Photos

Enterprise social tools: components for success

Thomas Vander Wal has written about achieving success with enterprise social tools. To quote:

Social tools require much more than just the tools for their implementation to be successful. Tool selection is tough as no tool is doing everything well and they all are focussing on niche areas. But, as difficult as the tool selection can be, there are three more elements that make up what the a successful deployment of the tools and can be considered part of the tools.

Posted by jamesr at 05:22 PM | Permalink
Categories: Collaboration, Enterprise 2.0, Knowledge management