Column Two

October 3, 2008

Building a better Vic whole-of-government intranet

Categorised under: Intranets

Craig Thomler has written about the Victorian Government’s whole-of-government intranet, CentralStation. To quote:

Being the only state government in Australia I am aware of with such a tool, I was surprised to learn that it had been originally created in 1996. To my knowledge that makes it one of the earliest whole-of-government initiatives in the world supporting public servants across state departments, authorities, local government and other public bodies to collaborate and share information more effectively for the benefit of citizens.

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October 3, 2008

Enterprising times - a case for search best bets

Categorised under: Information architecture, Intranets, Search tools

Nic Price has written a post on search engine best bets, in an intranet context. To quote:

The top 25 search terms accounted for half of all searches. The top 50 terms accounted for 75% of all searches made.

We tried searching for the top 10 terms, including “training”, “expenses”, “ariel” (the BBC in-house weekly newspaper) and “jobs”. The results were worrying to say the least. Few of them returned the result expected on the first page of search results.

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October 1, 2008

Cut costs by expanding your intranet

Categorised under: Intranets

Craig Thomler has written an article on cutting costs by expanding your intranet. To quote:

It may seem counter-intuitive to some, but I often advocate increasing intranet funding during cost cutting exercises as a lower cost channel for engaging staff and sharing information.

However for this to get traction, there are some preventative steps I believe an intranet manager needs to take to position the intranet.

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October 1, 2008

Intranet names

Categorised under: Intranets

Stephan Schillerwein has written a post about intranet names used in a wide range of organisations. To quote:

Here’s a little collection of Intranet Names. Please feel free to add any intranet names your company might be using or that you know of by using the comment function on the corresponding blog post “The Name of the Intranet“.

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September 30, 2008

Best-practice approach to SharePoint team spaces

Categorised under: Collaboration, Information management, Intranets

SharePoint is rapidly spreading through organisations at the moment, and in terms of team collaboration, this is a good thing. There is a very real need to be met, and it will require a mix of tools, including team spaces.

That being said, we’ve argued before that the unmanaged spread of collaboration tools can be anti-knowledge sharing. There is also a need to put in place appropriate support and governance, if team spaces are to work well.

Without this framework, team spaces can quickly get out of hand. We’ve seen this before: thousands of team spaces scattered across organisations, with difficulties even finding the right space, let alone getting the required information.

The problem has been finding an organisation who has tackled this well. Without an example, it can be difficult to convince management of the necessity of this support and governance work.

To our great relief, we can now declare: problem solved.

Gold winner: Transfield Services

Diagram courtesy of Transfield Services (not to be reproduced without permission)

Transfield Services, a global services firm headquartered in Australia, is one of the Gold Winners of this year’s Intranet Innovation Awards. Their innovation was a “Team Sites in a Box” approach to collaboration, described by the diagram to the right.

The key elements of their approach:

1. Anticipate

   This step is about anticipating the ‘how, when, who and why’ questions that users will have during their first encounter with the new collaboration system, and preparing the environment accordingly.

2. Educate

   This step is about educating and inspiring users and champions for the online collaboration service and, importantly, emphatically addressing the “What’s in it for me?”

3. Establish

   This step is about establishing new sites efficiently and effectively, inlcuding an online request form which captures ownership details, anticipated use, and other key metadata, and feeds into the Site Directory and supports ongoing auditing of the environment.

4. Enhance

   This step is about enhancing the user experience throughout the team site life cycle, including extensive team site FAQs, video tutorials (developed in-house, for customised guidance), and how-to materials on key topics.

5. Extract

   This step is about benefits realisation – extracting the value created along the chain of components in ‘Team Sites in a Box’.

The Transfield Team, with limited resources, have taken a comprehensive approach to team sites, putting in place the much-needed frameworks before usage explodes. The screenshots they have shared paint a compelling picture of how to “do this right”.

If you are heading into a SharePoint team space rollout, you should definitely purchase the Intranet Innovations 2008 report. At US$189, this is likely to be the cheapest part of the project, but invaluable in terms of the information it provides. (You’ll also get value out of the rest of the intranet innovations shared by this year’s winners.)

Congratulations to Transfield Services for all their hard work, and for winning a gold award!

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