I've just scheduled another one of my Intranet Planning Day workshops, for 4 June in Canberra. As ever, I've packed all my best thinking on intranet management into this workshop, including my unique '6x2 methodology'. I'm only running two of these in Australia this year, so you won't want ...
Monthly Archives: January 2008
January 31, 2008
Intranet Planning Day (Canberra, 4 June 2008)
Categorised under: Conferences & presentations, Intranets
Read more | Comments Off
January 31, 2008
Changing nature of intranet content
Richard Dennison writes about the changing nature of intranet content at BT. To quote: ALL content is collaborative - what varies is the degree of collaboration involved in the four steps outlined above. So, even content that we had previously defined as 'static' (e.g. an HR policy document) will have ...
Categorised under: Content management, Intranets
Read more | Comments Off
January 29, 2008
Delivering better intranets in 2008
| View For the start of 2008, we have further grown the Intranet Leadership Forum, the professional ...
Categorised under: Intranet Leadership Forum, Intranets
Read more | Comments Off
January 29, 2008
Trend map for 2008 and beyond
Nowandnext.com and Future Exploration Network have created a trend map for 2008 and beyond, covering key aspects of the online and physical worlds. To quote: While last year’s map was based on the London tube map, the 2008 map is derived from Shanghai’s underground routes. Limited to just five lines, ...
Categorised under: Collaboration, Enterprise 2.0, Knowledge management
Read more | Comments Off
January 29, 2008
Librarians challenge Web 2.0 myths
The Register has published results of research into web 2.0 and search amongst youth. To quote: According to a British Library study many of the assumptions made about the Google generation - defined as those born since 1993 - fail to stack up to the evidence. Among these, that the Google ...
Categorised under: Collaboration, Enterprise 2.0, Search tools
Read more | Comments Off
January 25, 2008
Collaboration’s resurgence
Shawn Callahan has written a post of the resurgence of collaboration as a hot topic. To quote: Everywhere I turn recently and I hear people talking about the need to collaborate as if the idea was new. Why has collaboration become the capability organisations must have? And why now? I ...
Categorised under: Collaboration
Read more | Comments Off
January 25, 2008
BT Intranet strategy
Richard Dennison has written about the BT Intranet strategy. To quote: We’ve made a big effort in the last year to ensure our intranet strategy is very closely aligned with BT’s overall business strategy. We looked at the work in this area of the Intranet Benchmarking Forum, and then crafted ...
Categorised under: Intranets
Read more | Comments Off
January 24, 2008
Information Architecture Essentials (Sydney, Brisbane)
We've started our event calendar for the year with a new round of our ever-popular Information Architecture Essentials workshops: Sydney: 9 April 2008 Brisbane: 18 June 2008 In this one-day workshop, Patrick Kennedy will present the fundamentals of information architecture (IA), the core methodology for organising and designing websites and intranets. ...
Categorised under: Conferences & presentations, Information architecture, Usability & user-centered design
Read more | Comments Off
January 24, 2008
Perkins Eastman: Practice Area Communities
This is the last of the video interviews with the inaugural Intranet Innovation Award winners. This interview is with the Gold Award winning Perkins Eastman (USA), introducing their use of "practice area communities". Covered in this video: Why ...
Categorised under: Collaboration, Intranets, Knowledge management
Read more | Comments Off
January 23, 2008
Starting a community of practice - fostering relationships
Shawn Callahan has written an entry on starting a community of practice. To quote: In starting any community of practice, the first objective is to help the members recognise the value they will get from being and working together. Often we will help organisations kick their communities off with a ...
Categorised under: Knowledge management
Read more | Comments Off
January 22, 2008
International events
The team at Step Two have a busy schedule of international events and workshops over the coming six months. We strongly recommend all these events, and encourage you to drop by to say hi: Dates Location Event Details 5 - 6 March 2008 Copenhagen, Denmark...
Categorised under: Conferences & presentations
Read more | Comments Off
January 22, 2008
Advancing advanced search
Stephen Turbek has written an article on designing advanced search. To quote: Advanced search is the ugly child of interface design -always included, but never loved. Websites have come to depend on their search engines as the volume of content has increased. Yet advanced search functionality has not significantly developed ...
Categorised under: Information architecture, Search tools
Read more | Comments Off
January 21, 2008
Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum 2008 (Sydney, February)
Ross Dawson of Future Exploration Network will be hosting the Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum 2008 on February 19 in Sydney. Enterprise 2.0 is an important topic for many organisations, but the challenge is finding how best to deploy these new technologies and ideas. Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum will provide a ...
Categorised under: Conferences & presentations, Enterprise 2.0, Information management, Intranets
Read more | Comments Off
January 21, 2008
Book review: Change to Strange
Change to Strange Create a great organization by building a strange workforce Daniel M. Cable The core idea at the heart of this book is very powerful: if you want to create an extraordinary organisation, you won't achieve it with an ordinary workforce. Instead, you will need staff who are "strange", obsessed ...
Categorised under: Book & product reviews
Read more | Comments Off
January 21, 2008
The elements in the social software stack
Thomas Vander Wal has presented a model of the elements in the social software stack. To quote: When thinking through social software (also known as social computing, social media, and social web) I have been influenced by many ideas, but at the core there are two things that stick in ...
Categorised under: Collaboration, Knowledge management
Read more | Comments Off
January 18, 2008
Enterprise intranet predictions for 2008
Toby Ward writes his intranet predictions for 2008. To quote: Your intranet home page is poorly designed and far too busy (well, for most). Employees are screaming for simpler home pages, with fewer links, more white space, and less color. Time and time again when I test different home page ...
Categorised under: Information management, Intranets
Read more | Comments Off
January 18, 2008
What is an ‘intranet’?
Richard Dennison asks the question: what is an 'intranet'? To quote: The idea behind such a broad ranging definition is that when a BT person turns on their PC, they should be offered an integrated, seamless on-line experience - essentially, they don’t care what is or isn’t part of your ...
Categorised under: Intranets
Read more | Comments Off
January 17, 2008
Self-service publishing: Implement with care
Abigail Lewis-Bowen writes about carefully implementing wikis and other enterprise 2.0 tools. To quote: First of all, it's important to provide Wikis and Blogs only after processes for publishing “formal” information channels to the Intranet are well established. If the right people are publishing to the right place on ...
Categorised under: Enterprise 2.0, Intranets
Read more | Comments Off
January 17, 2008
Bottom-up approach to taxonomy development
Simon Goh has written about a bottom-up approach to taxonomy development. To quote: In my previous post, I brought up a topic on the implementation challenges of taxonomy and suggested a few points on overcoming pitfalls for multi-faceted taxonomy implementation. This time round, my reflection is based on ground 0, ...
Categorised under: Content management, Document & records management, Information architecture
Read more | Comments Off
January 16, 2008
Intranet resources: numbers, ways of working, what next with 2.0?
Jane McConnell has written a post on the size of intranet teams, in comparison to the overall size of the organisations they serve. To quote: The third source is my own Global Intranet Survey of 2007 where I reached the average of 1 headcount for 2,300 employees. This is ...
Categorised under: Intranets
Read more | Comments Off
January 16, 2008
Look how far intranets have come…
Paul Miller has written on the history and growth of intranets. To quote: At the start of 2008 we have already seen a good deal of trends and predictions from the intranet industry (from myself included) but it strikes me that before the year gets into full velocity, this is ...
Categorised under: Intranets
Read more | Comments Off
January 15, 2008
BT web 2.0 adoption case study
Richard Dennison has written about the adoption of web 2.0 at BT. To quote: The power of social software is undeniable in the free, anarchic world of the global internet. But what happens when you bring these tools into the constrained, policy-driven, risk-averse world of the corporate intranet where the ...
Categorised under: Enterprise 2.0, Intranets
Read more | Comments Off
January 14, 2008
Nycomed: product collaboration
The third in the series of video interviews of the Intranet Innovation Award winners... Products are clearly the core of any pharmaceutical company. When the business is global in scale, however, it can be almost impossible to bring together all ...
Categorised under: Intranets
Read more | Comments Off
January 14, 2008
Doing KM one person at a time
Patrick Lambe writes about a fascinating approach of doing KM one person at a time. To quote: Yesterday, for the first time in my KM consulting career I did something that I had not had the chance to do before. My colleague Paolina and I held a “clinic” at our ...
Categorised under: Knowledge management
Read more | Comments Off
January 14, 2008
Are you making the right CMS promises?
The CMS Myth has written a piece asking: are you making the right CMS promises? To quote: We talk a lot about the expectation gap between vendors that beat the drum of 'out of the box,' and 'easy' compared to the reality on the ground of a complex implementation. But ...
Categorised under: Content management
Read more | Comments Off
January 12, 2008
Intranet masterclass in London (7 March 2008)
I'm pleased to announce that I'll be running a once-off intranet masterclass in London on 7 March 2008. The workshop is being organised by Martin White of Intranet Focus, UK's foremost intranet expert and a close working partner of Step Two Designs. This is the first time that I've run a ...
Categorised under: Conferences & presentations
Read more | Comments Off
January 11, 2008
Attitudes & activities for intranet managers in 2008
Jane McConnell has written an entry on attitudes & activities for intranet managers in 2008. To quote: As an intranet manager, you are in a unique position: you may well be one of the few people in your company who realise the full potential value of the intranet, how close ...
Categorised under: Intranets
Read more | Comments Off
January 11, 2008
Account sign-in: 8 design mistakes to avoid
Jared Spool has written an article on designing account sign-in. To quote: Designing an account registration and sign-in process that doesn't frustrate users turns out to be very difficult to achieve. It looks easy at the outset, but a pile of subtleties can sneak up on your experience, making something ...
Categorised under: Usability & user-centered design
Read more | Comments Off
January 10, 2008
Is this preaching rebellion against IT?
Michael Sampson has written a post on the Forrester survey into collaboration. To quote: Forrester reports that 68% of its respondents indicated plans to invest in "real-time collaboration software", a phrase which generally means instant messaging. Technology for enterprise instant messaging has been widely available for many years, so what's ...
Categorised under: Collaboration
Read more | Comments Off
January 10, 2008
Implementation challenges of taxonomies
Simon Goh has written an entry on the implementation challenges of taxonomies. To quote: The number one issue now is to avoid complex metadata profiling. It is a nightmare for staff to browse the tree of each taxonomy facet to profile a document uploaded. Profile it once, twice and if ...
Categorised under: Document & records management, Information architecture
Read more | Comments Off
January 9, 2008
The life of a knowledge manager: nasty, brutish and short
Patrick Lambe has shared the results of a global survey into KM initiatives. To quote: Last October we ran a global survey through iKMS to find out how much organisations invest in their KM initiatives – in terms of the senior management attention and support they get, whether they invest ...
Categorised under: Knowledge management
Read more | Comments Off
January 9, 2008
10 best intranets of 2008
Jakob Nielsen has announced the winners of their intranet awards for 2008. To quote: Consistent design and integrated IA are becoming standard on good intranets. This year's winners focused on productivity tools, employee self-service, access to knowledgeable people (as opposed to "knowledge management"), and better-presented company news. It's particularly pleasing to ...
Categorised under: Intranets
Read more | Comments Off
January 8, 2008
To structure or not to structure
Gadgetopia have written a superb post on the pros and cons of structuring content in a CMS. To quote: We were meeting with a client the other day about applying some content management to their Web site. We came upon a page of “business partners.” It had a repeated HTML ...
Categorised under: Content management, Information architecture
Read more | Comments Off
January 8, 2008
Sketchboards: discover better + faster UX solutions
Brandon Schauer has written an article on "sketchboards" as a design technique. To quote: The sketchboard is a low-fi technique that makes it possible for designers to explore and evaluate a range of interaction concepts while involving both business and technology partners. Unlike the process that results from wireframe-based design, ...
Categorised under: Information architecture, Usability & user-centered design
Read more | Comments Off
January 7, 2008
Preparing content for an intranet redesign project
Simon Goh write about preparing content for an intranet redesign. To quote: In my experience, preparing content authors through web writing trainings and briefings on how and which templates they should be using is not enough. Most content authors will normally chuck what they have learn aside, and if we're ...
Categorised under: Intranets
Read more | Comments Off
January 7, 2008
Pick the right content management approach
Tony Byrne writes about picking the right content management approach. To quote: The lines between all content technology families are notoriously blurry. This is especially true of portals, Enterprise Content Management (ECM) systems and Web Content Management (WCM) system, where there's lots of overlap in vendors, product functionality, and marketing ...
Categorised under: Content management
Read more | Comments Off
January 6, 2008
Book review: Strategy and the Fat Smoker
Strategy and the Fat Smoker David Maister, 2008 David Maister is the undisputed guru of professional services firms, and this is his greatest work yet. The premise is very simple: every professional firm has much the same vision, strategy and operating principles. Yet few firms ever deliver on these promises. This is ...
Categorised under: Book & product reviews
Read more | Comments Off
January 6, 2008
Why intranet news is under threat
Paul Miller writes about the decline of news on the intranet. To quote: My prediction for 2008 is that communicators and those generating news specifically will be under mounting pressure to prove the business value of news in intranets. I also predict that many people in these roles will fail ...
Categorised under: Intranets
Read more | Comments Off
January 6, 2008
Records management and KM
Julian Carver reports on a talk in New Zealand on records management and knowledge management. To quote: Sarah Heal presented today for NZKM in Christchurch on Records Management as a part of KM Strategy. Over the last year she has detected some unexpected and at times inconvenient signals, a growing ...
Categorised under: Document & records management, Knowledge management
Read more | Comments Off