Monthly Archives: January 2008

January 31, 2008

Intranet Planning Day (Canberra, 4 June 2008)

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 ...

Categorised under: Conferences & presentations, Intranets

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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