Column Two

This week Stephen Byrne has joined us as a senior member of the Step Two consulting team. Stephen is a specialist in knowledge management, combining this with years of experience as an organisational psychologist. With his first qualifications in engineering, this makes for an ...

This blog has been uncharacteristically quiet over the last few months. In part, this was due to my writing energy being devoted to a book and plenty of articles. This has limited my ability to post "meaty" items, sharing thinking on key topics. I would also normally be reposting ...

Well, this is my last working day for 2008, looking forward to a serious break over Christmas. Thanks to everyone I've had a chance to work with, chat with, learn from, or generally hang out with. It's been a busy but stimulating year, and I'm proud of what we've managed ...

This week we're pleased to welcome Alex Manchester onto our team as another senior consultant. Having helped to setup the Australian office of Melcrum, Alex brings with him expert knowledge on intranets, internal communications and social media. With a keen interest in evolving uses for ...

Ok, so we thought with only 3 weeks lead-time, a room with space for 200 would be enough. We were wrong. :-) As of this morning, the Presentation Zen session in Sydney run by Garr Reynolds has sold out. It's going to be a great session. If you've missed out, we'll ...

Having received a good crop of submissions for this year's Intranet Innovation Awards, we're now starting into the first round of evaluation and scoring. Since the closing date, however, we've had a few people get in touch to ask whether it's too late to get an entry in. This is ...

Thanks to all those who entered this year's Intranet Innovation Awards. Just a quick note to say that if you had technical problems with submitting (such as overloading email servers), or haven't had confirmation of receipt, please do get in touch as we'd hate for you to miss out...

It's now only a few days until entries close this year for the Intranet Innovation Awards. It should only take about an afternoon to put together an entry, and we had some strong winners last year. Looking forward to seeing what this year brings!

It's not every day you need a world map to plan a project. We're just starting work for WWF, researching intranet needs in field locations across the globe. This was a draft map, and the final list of locations we'll be visiting ...

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 ...

Just a quick note to say that my blog still hasn't been upgraded, so no comments yet. Looks like we've run into some problems with our webhost, but I remain hopeful of getting them resolved soon. In the meantime, the old software keeps chugging along...

Ok, that's it, I can't take it any more. I must have commenting on my blog again, as I'm really feeling like I'm missing out on valuable discussions. Now, I'm stuck on an ancient version of Movable Type, which can't cope with the comments spam. Thus I had to turn off ...

Yes, our team is growing again. I'm very pleased to welcome Rebecca Rodgers onboard, particularly as she'll be based in Brisbane, giving us the ability to even better support clients in that region. We're also swamped with work at the moment, so ...

A kind face (III) I spent four days in Marrakech (Morocco) on my way to Europe, having a holiday and taking too many photos. This old man was sitting beside one of the city gates, and made eye contact with me, inviting him ...

As per my previous post, we moved offices on Friday. Needless to say, we had some technical problems as a result, which we've only just polished off today. So: if you sent us a fax or email between last Friday and today, and you haven't heard back from us, it's ...

San Diego shrouded in fog I've arrived in San Diego, and was amazed at the sight when I looked out from my balcony late at night. The fog shrouding the city created a cityscape reminiscent of Blade Runner, truly extraordinary. (You'll want to view ...

Just a quick reminder that the early bird rate for Bob Boiko's Australian tour in March closes in just a few weeks. The dates for the events: Melbourne (Crowne Plaza): 15-16 March 2007 Canberra (Hyatt Hotel): 20-21 March 2007 Sydney (Mercure Hotel): 22-23 March 2007 Bob rarely gets a chance to visit Australia, ...

As I blogged earlier, we've been applying the 6x2 methodology to our own internal planning, to identify what we're going to be delivering over the coming six months. In the end, it took us two days to work complete the process, which included evaluating 119 different ideas for activities or ...

Yesterday we held our very first yearly internal planning day, bringing together the whole team to identify what we will be tackling in the year to come. It was great to devote the time just to ourselves, to position us for the coming year. The core of the day was using ...

The practice of intranets is evolving. Intranets are moving beyond the metaphor of the "internal website" to become a more integrated and effective business tool. To meet these objectives, intranet teams need to have key skills in many different disciplines. The Intranet Leadership Forum is specifically structured to expand the knowledge ...

Male: defect! I don't think this was the intended message when the sign was taped to a lavatory door in the World Trade Centre in Rotterdam...

London Bridge The lighting of the London Bridge across the Thames makes for a spectacular sight at night. There are lots of other lovely views to be had when walking beside the river...

It's going to be a busy few weeks in terms of conferences, four in three weeks: Southern Currents (Melbourne) I'm going to be giving an extended presentation to a room full of legal librarians on the design and enhancement of search. Should be good fun! Oz-IA 2006 (Sydney) I think this is ...

Sunset at Watsons Bay On Sunday I headed out to South Head to take some photos around sunset. This is one of my favourites, taken at Watsons Bay.

Our team has just grown again, with the addition of Catherine Grenfell, who is a former manager of a successful intranet team, along with other roles in the corporate world. In the last 8 years she has been dedicated to leading and ...

Sanskrit carvings The ruins of My Son are still magnificent, even after the Vietnam War bombings by the Americans. It was certainly the first time that I'd seen Sanskrit writing in the flesh. (See the rest of the My Son photo set.)

Spring rolls for lunch As previously blogged, I've just come back from two weeks of holiday in Vietnam. Many (way too many!) photos were taken, and I'm slowly uploading them to Flickr. This photo comes from the now-completed set of photos taken during our two-day ...

The lack of posts over the last two weeks is a direct result of being on holidays. As a spur of the moment thing, I had an opportunity to spend two weeks travelling through Vietnam, which I jumped at without hesitation. It's a lovely country, and we managed to travel from ...

Patrick Lambe and Marita Keenan have written an article that gives guidelines on developing an information and records management policy. To quote: It's often difficult to approach KM in any large scale way in an organisation without bumping into the policy infrastructure. The organisation will need to make decisions and ...

I am currently staying in Singapore, having just finished speaking at a conference. Having been upgraded at check-in, I'm staying in a modern and beautifully appointed room. All very nice. Of course, being modern and minimalist, you wouldn't want to spoil the sleek lines of the controls with anything like labels. ...

We had a lively meeting of the CM Pros Australia group in Sydney on 11 May 2006. A facilitated discussion format was used, which allowed everyone to contribute to the exploration of content authoring challenges and processes. (PS. join the mailing list to hear about future meetings in ...

Jonathan Downes and Joe Walker have written an article on Ajax and CMS products. To quote: For the Web CMS world, Ajax offers the possibility for a better user experience for content authors as well as site visitors. But what of its limitations? While Ajax delivers many benefits, it also ...

Donna Maurer has written an article outlining four modes of seeking information. To quote: In my work on intranets and complex websites, I noticed a range of situations where people didn't necessarily know what they needed to know. Additionally, when I opened my browser history to look for examples from ...

It's been a while since I last apologised for the lack of commenting on my blog, so it seemed like a good time to make mention of it... A while back, my blog was overwhelmed by comment and trackback spam, to the extent that I was receiving 100+ spam entries every ...

We've just finalised our workshop calendar for the first half of the year, and we'll be visiting Canberra, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth. Dates as follows: Dates Location Event Name 17 February 2006 Melbourne Intranets as a Business Tool 22 February 2006 Canberra Improving Intranet Search (free) 5 April 2006...

2005 was an incredibly busy year, and I'm expecting 2006 to be much the same (but hopefully not more so!). Some other thoughts and plans for the year ahead: We'll continue to grow, further building the consulting team (we're still looking for new consultants). I'm looking forward to even broader travels ...

Just a brief note to wish everyone a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. It's been a busy year in 2005, with a lot of excitement, and plenty of challenges. I'm looking forward to 2006 to bring even more opportunities to chat with (and work with) really interesting people...

Toby Ward has written an article on the consolidation of intranets at IBM. To quote: At one time, in the late 90s, IBM had 10,000+ intranet sites. No, not pages, 10-THOUSAND intranet sites (representing millions of pages). I call that gross intranet sprawl. What's a megalithic corporation to do with ...

Garrett Dimon has published a set of IA templates and stencils for Viso. To quote: The wireframe stencil focus mainly on form design by including a variety of form fields and common form elements. Specifically, it includes radio buttons and checkboxes that enable you to easily switch their state. Just ...

The corporate intranet must be more than just a "dumping ground for second hand documents". Instead, it should be a valuable business tool that delivers tangible and visible benefits for the organisation as a whole.This intranet planning day is designed to give you an opportunity to focus on intranet strategy, ...

Business has been going very well, and we've been having a lot of fun working on many interesting projects. Our biggest challenge is keeping up with the demand for our services. To that end, I'm looking to further grow the consulting team, in time for the start of the 2006 ...

I landed back in Sydney this morning, after my three week around-the-world trip that included the UK, Denmark and the US. The trip was a lot of fun, most of all meeting up with the many people I've been chatting with via email, but had never met face-to-face. Thanks to everyone ...

Forwarding details provided by Ash Donaldson: Yes, OZCHI is now on us, starting next Monday (21st Nov) in Canberra with 2 full days of tutorials and workshops, and then 2.5 days of presentations. Full details about the tutorials on offerRegistration to tutorials are still openKaren Holtzblatt, author of the ...

I'm really enjoying the KMWorld & Intranets conference, most of all the discussions with other content management and intranet people. What these recent conferences have really highlighted to me is that there is actually a fair bit of intranet expertise about, within organisations or consulting firms. These intranet folk, however, ...

Today I visited the Dansk Design Centre in Copenhagen, Denmark. Plenty of fun things to see, but the one thing that really jumped out at me was the widespread and comfortable use of "designing with users" and "user-centred design" in a number of the displays. Yes, there was a fair ...

Nick Besseling has written a blog post discussing some issues on portals. To quote: My main concern about 'Portal' software is the lack of accessibility and usability standard compliance with the software as well as taking the ability away from organisations to ensure that the code of their intranet is ...

Having spent a few days in London, I've arrived in Aarhus (Denmark). I must say, it's a lovely city, very easy to walk around, with plenty of good shopping. I've also been made to feel extremely welcome, by not just the conference organisers (thanks Janus and Flemming!), but by Danish ...

Martin White has published a new report, the Enterprise Search Guidebook. These are my thoughts on the report: Publishing content within an organisation is one thing, ensuring staff can find it when they need it is another. Organisations everywhere are realising the importance of having an effective search engine within ...

Peter Merholz has written a blog entry asking: is lab usability dead? To quote: I would love it if we could simply put a stake into the practice of lab usability. It's run its course, and it's simply not well suited to truly measuring the effectiveness of designs in the ...