Column Two

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.

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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.

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March 3, 2010

What drives my passion for intranets

Categorised under: Intranets

I’m very passionate about intranets, and the opportunities they provide. Where does this passion come from?

I’ve spent a lot of time in organisations with staff who do the actual work, particularly in front-line and operational areas. I’ve interviewed countless staff, including nurses, accountants, call centre operators, consultants, engineers, sales people, researchers, council planners and many more.

This type of needs analysis allows you to deeply understand how staff work, their needs and points of pain, their successes and failures. It builds an incredibly rich view of how organisations actually work, and the way that services are delivered.

It generates a real sense of who the “users” really are, and shows the impact that we can have when we do great intranet work. It puts a face to the projects that we do, beyond the abstract, conceptual and strategic.

Most importantly, it highlights the huge gap that exists between the needs of staff, and what corporate solutions deliver. Time and time again I’ve seen staff struggle to do their jobs because they don’t have the tools or information they need. They can’t find what they want, and are baffled and confused by the IT systems.

We have to close this gap.

Organisations can’t function efficiently if staff are struggling in this way. We also have an obligation to help staff do their jobs.

This doesn’t need to be hard. There are often simple changes that can be made to dramatically assist operational staff. By designing and delivering usable solutions, much of the pain can be removed.

So I see our role as an advocate for staff, bridging the divide and helping intranet teams deliver solutions that delight and amaze.

This is the source of my passion for intranets, and what I return to when looking for answers to intranet challenges. This passion underpins everything that we do at Step Two, and is why we continue to spend more time with staff than any other activity.

What drives your passion for intranets?

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March 3, 2010

Reworking the HR section

Categorised under: Intranets

Mark Tilbury shares his experiences and approaches to redesigning the HR section of his intranet. To quote:

Finally getting a stakeholder session with our HR guys and owners of ‘people’ related content on our intranet. Negotiations over the process and protocols have been as torturous as organising the Nixon/Frost debates, but I felt this was essential before we begin any part of the process. All is now agreed. Echoing James Robertson’s theme of putting ‘people at the centre’ our aim (if we get our way) is to avoid the hierarchy titles used by HR and focus on a ‘tab’ called ‘People.’ Part of my thinking behind this is the ability for us to incorporate other ‘people’ related content into this area, that is not owned by HR, providing a richer, broader experience for the user.

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March 3, 2010

Senior manager blogs and non-blogs

Categorised under: Collaboration, Intranets

Jane McConnell shares concrete numbers on adoption of enterprising blogging. To quote:

The figures in this year’s report clearly show that senior managers in many large organizations are using blogs to improve communication flow, to break through some of the barriers and silos. However, there is still a lot some of them need to learn about blogging!

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