Column Two

March 10, 2010

Try a self-managed intranet

Categorised under: Intranets

Mark Morrell has written about following a decentralised publishing model for intranets. To quote:

So who is responsible for publishing, reviewing, updating and removing content? “You!” is the answer to any publisher in BT. There is NO central publishing team to do this on behalf of anyone.

Make a comment »

March 9, 2010

Getting the “intranet model” right

Categorised under: Information architecture, Intranets

I’ve just spent a day with a well-known global company at their headquarters in Sweden (and no, it’s not IKEA). They are in the early stages of a large intranet project, which has been thrown a curve-ball by a huge global reorganisation. My role in this one-off day of consulting was to provide expert insight into the intranet project, and the reorganisation became the focus of discussions.

This organisation was previously structured by market units (roughly equivalent to countries) and business units, but with the size of customers growing, a decision was made to shift to a regional model. This immediately raised some important questions about the intranet.

On the current intranet, there is a global site, market unit sites, individual country sites and business unit sites. What should role should these now play?

With the creation of regions, there is a natural assumption that regional intranets will be required, but what should go on them? The default approach was to replicate the existing market unit sites to create the regional sites, but it quickly became clear that this didn’t make sense.

What should staff have as their homepage? How will global and local news be distributed?

What is needed is a clear and concrete sense of the overall intranet model. This defines the shape of the intranet, and the role of individual sites and sections. This could be very simple from a technology standpoint, or make extensive use of personalisation and segmentation.

This is something that we’ve written about before, and Jane McConnell has also covered it extensively.

The intranet model is not easy to work out, and we’ve seen many intranet teams avoid the challenge. Instead, overly simplistic models are put in place that work poorly for both the organisation and staff.

It’s not just global multinationals that have this challenge. We’re starting work with an Australian government agency formed by the merger of previous departments, and they need to work this out. We’ve also been engaged by the Australian arm of a global company, and this is their central challenge to resolve.

We’re now including several days in our intranet projects specifically to work out the intranet model. As these projects unfold, we’ll share our insights and solutions.

What approaches have you taken to delivering intranets in the scenario outlined above?

Make a comment »

March 9, 2010

5 intranet trends for business managers in 2010

Categorised under: Intranets

Janus Boye writes about 5 intranet trends for business managers in 2010. To quote:

Social; The big buzzword at the moment with social business, social media and obviously also social intranets. Jane McConnell recently stated that 2010 will not be the year of the social intranet based on a survey by Toby Ward. Whether this is happening or not in your enterprise, ’social’ is a key trend that business managers need to understand.

Make a comment »

March 7, 2010

The future of intranets in Copenhagen

Categorised under: Enterprise 2.0, Future intranet, Intranets

I’ve been talking about future intranets since late last year, leading up to my keynote at the IntraTeam Event in Copenhagen.

As expected, this turned out to be a wonderful conference, with Jane McConnell’s keynote a real highlight, along with many other interesting sessions. As always, plenty of great conversations in the corridors, including with Mark Morrell from BT.

My goal of my “Intranets in 2015″ keynote was to show what the future might look like, if we move intranets beyond their current role. I used the two stories blogged earlier, and added rich visuals and examples. I’m pleased to say that the storytelling approach seemed to connect with the audience, and many insightful questions were asked.

I’ll blog more about the examples I showed shortly, but I did want to share some of the ideas contributed by audience members, going beyond the scenarios I’ve already outlined:

• Martin White suggested that there was no need to wait for Sarah’s first day to connect up with her. What about making contact before that point, and helping her to get up to speed before she even arrives?

  I then had a conversation with a Danish company who is doing exactly that, with the functionality planned to go live mid-year. I look forward to seeing this in the 2011 Intranet Innovation Awards.

• Martin also highlighted the additional value of providing intranet access on mobile devices: location-aware services. The intranet should know what country someone is in automatically as well as the nearest office. Information could then be automatically tailored to match, a perfect example of acting proactively.
• It was suggested that the intranet should piggyback on public social networks. For example, If allowed by Sarah, the intranet could identify her Facebook friends who work within the same organisation, and use that to suggest connections on the enterprise social network. (Privacy would need to be carefully managed.)

This week I’ll be spending a whole day with some of the leading companies in Switzerland working through the future sceanrios, so I look forward to further insights. Please do continue to contribute to these conversations, and together we can uncover where intranets should be heading.

Make a comment »

March 4, 2010

Stop letting people use your CMS

Categorised under: Content management

Jeff Cram tells us all to stop letting people use your CMS. To quote:

I can’t tell you how many times we’ve seen organizations buy a CMS, take their same content structure, and simply distribute authoring ownership to every far flung corner of the organization. And let’s not entirely blame the organizations. It’s how CMS is sold. And it’s a myth, straight up.

Make a comment »