With Wivenhoe dam at capacity, flash flooding in Toowoomba and kind tides looming, Brisbane was preparing for flooding not seen since 1974.

As a precautionary measure the power was shut down to over 100,000 homes and businesses in the CBS, because power providers feared flooding of underground substations.

The river rose and, before we knew it, broke its banks, pushing a vast amount of water into the Brisbane suburbs and CBD.

Brisbane was knocked out and organisations were faced with real issues that most were not fully prepared for.

Crises have struck across the globe in recent years, with floods in Brazil, fires and floods in Victoria and earthquakes in Chile, New Zealand and Japan.

In all these cases, organisations have been challenged to figure out how to communicate with staff and customers and what role electronic communications, including intranets, can play in this vital task.

This article focuses on what organisations can do to inform staff and improve their crisis management, before the crisis takes hold.

Insights and learnings from recent events in Australia come from a number of organisations as well as from a workshop with the Brisbane chapter of the Intranet Leadership Forum (www.steptwo.com.au/ilf).

(June article by Rebecca Rodgers, read the full article.)

When I work with global organizations to help them define the business objectives of the intranet, we do it from these 3 angles. The problem is when we push each dimension to its logical conclusion, we end up with a technology dilemma.

Over the last year or so, I’ve seen a quiet war waging between communicators and employees. Communicators passionately want to share breaking news, org changes, evergreen stories and the not so timely letter from the CEO. On the employee end they say yes, keep me in the know. But there is another want, not yet verbalized. They are really asking for a place to find what they need. Employees want to get their hands on the ever elusive employee policies, org charts, and all of the tools that will help them be good company citizens while allowing them to focus on the job they’ve been hired to do.

This is a good post written from the perspective of internal comms, and it highlights the many other roles intranets must play within organisations. (Thanks to Intranet Lounge.)

We know the number one reason people find your intranet superfluous to requirements; irrelevant information. The ‘news’ stories are often Company focussed (what ‘we’ need to tell ‘you’, the little people) rather than ‘people focussed’ (what ‘you’ need to know to get stuff done).

We know that if an intranet, or the content, ain’t useful then it ain’t used! But what about the secret, number two, insidious reason?

(Good stuff from May, catching up on my backlog of posting.)

Below is a short list of the KPIs that I put together for them on the basis that their home page functions very much as a digital newspaper. These KPIs are intended to provide an indicative view of quality in addition to drawing attention to quick wins and improvement opportunities. Importantly, as an intranet evolves into a more collaborative, digital workspace KPIs such as these would need to evolve quite dramatically.

Working through our collection of intranet screenshots, I’m struck by how pedestrian many intranet homepages are. Despite huge advances in technology, and our growing knowledge as intranet professionals, little has changed on most homepages.

Take homepage news as an example. With the exception of a handful of innovators, most intranet homepages feature pretty basic news features:

• featured news items
• list of other global news items
• additional news boxes for industry updates, media clippings, etc

I’d love to start seeing much richer designs for intranet news. To get your creative juices flowing, I’ve created a quick mockup, shown below:

Far from a complete design, it does have a few features that are hopefully of interest:

1. Featured news item, still worth having.
2. News can be published at every level of the organisation, aggregated into a single list of news. Items are clearly differentiated, and are displayed based on the staff member’s geographic location, business unit, team, etc.
3. Commenting on every news item; something that should be standard on every intranet where the culture supports it.
4. Like Facebook and a dozen other sites, users can feed back what they want to see more (and less) of; the system then uses this to filter the flood of news.
5. Everyone can post news, even if it’s just a “bake sale” announcement in their local office.
6. Staff can see what’s happening elsewhere in the organisation, and can add other news feeds to their main list of news.

This is still a very basic design, and could get much fancier if social elements are included. There are a lot of additional “web 2.0″ style interactions that are also possible.

I haven’t usability tested this design (you should). It’s also just a quick scribble, with as many problems as good ideas. But hopefully it should spark your thinking, and encourage you to play some more when redesigning the intranet.

What are your thoughts on this design? How could it be made better?

This article will explore three types of communication that can be found or deployed on an intranet. There are many others too.

Common questions

• What’s happening in the business?
• What’s the leadership team focusing on?
• What are my colleagues working on?

These are just some of the key questions staff ask and expect to see answered via platform like the intranet. Yet often such information is communicated infrequently or not at all.

With less resources and time, and more remote offices and home-workers in businesses, there’s an ever-increasing need for communication via the intranet. But there’s also a balance to be found. Too much information can cause information overload, and too much irrelevant information can be as frustrating as no communication at all.

Time and time again in research projects, interviewees will say, ‘I only want to see information that’s relevant to me’, but this will also be contradicted by a desire to know what’s happening in the business.

[CM Briefing 2010-05 by Alex Manchester, read the full article]

Based on what I’ve seen in Europe, US and Australia, these are my themes for 2010:

• Meeting global and local needs

  In addition to top-level corporate updates, there is an opportunity for intranets to deliver more local news that supports operational needs. 2010 will see intranets increase their volume of news, while simultaneously targeting it better for key staff groups.

  Syngenta, a global agribusiness, is an early leader in this. Their intranet allows news to be published at every level in the organisation, with an aggregated view presented to staff based on their location and business unit. GE, commended in the 2009 Intranet Innovation Awards, carefully targets homepage news, to find a balance between global and local needs.

• Two-way communication and rich media

  Beyond traditional corporate news items, communications teams are increasingly exploring the opportunities presented by social media and rich media. For example, one global firm sent out a video camera to dispersed business units and asked them to record a quick “about us” video. These were a great hit, and helped to bring the organisation closer together. Many other intranets are enabling comments on news items, and exploring other models of interaction.

  2010 is the year of experimentation in this space, and what will be delivered is much more than just a CEO blog and the occasional corporate video.

• Productive intranet governance

  The intranet has often been a battleground between key stakeholders, including communications, IT, knowledge and HR. This is reflected most obviously on the homepage, where different business units vie for space.

  In 2010, organisations will steadily put in place governance models that find a productive balance between all of these (valid) needs. Homepages will move away from single-purpose pages, and will incorporate a wider mix of capabilities that better meets staff needs.

• Useful driving news

  Intranets are most valuable as a communications channel when they are frequently used by staff. In 2010, organisations will let go of dated ideas of making intranets “sticky”, “engaging” or “interesting”. Instead, intranet teams will focus on making the intranet useful, supporting key staff tasks and activities.

  Providing productive functionality increases intranet usage, which supports communication objectives. Communication teams, recognising this, will play a progressively wider role in managing and delivering intranets.

• Collaboration and communication

  Collaboration tools, whether team spaces or wikis, remain a hot topic in 2010. Often seen as the domain of IT when first installed, it quickly becomes apparent they they need business management like all other aspects of intranets. 2009 also saw the unmanaged spread of collaboration tools creating more problems than solutions, and eroding the value of the corporate intranet.

  In 2010, a growing number of communication teams will volunteer to become the business owner of collaboration tools. Putting in place simple and common-sense governance, collaboration will start to sit usefully alongside the intranet, each supporting the other.

What are you seeing happening in the intranet space for comms teams in 2010?

As with many web technologies and trends, there are parallels between the use of such media on the web, and on an intranet. There are also some significant differences.

The other aspect contributing to the boom of rich media is the ubiquity of mobile devices capable of phenomenal levels of media playback.

With a significant percentage of employees in any organisation owning at least a personal audio player and increasingly a device capable of video playback, there are a wide array of opportunities for businesses to use these channels and devices.

Rich media opportunities include:

• video
• audio
• delivery to mobile devices

This article will highlight some issues, examples and tips on using video and audio files on the intranet, whether at a desk, or on a mobile device.

Examples will also be given where these have been used in practice. Intranet teams are encouraged to experiment with these types of approaches, exploring where they can add value.

This will help the organisation to connect better with its staff, and improve information delivery.

[August KM Column by Alex Manchester, read the full article]

Giving control of an intranet to a traditional communicator is a bit like giving a pub to an alcoholic. It’s happy days. There’s so much to publish. All the stuff they never read offline can go on the intranet. The homepage can be covered with news because the communicator with a hammer will see nails everywhere that need to be hammered home. And of course the intranet can reach everybody (in theory, at least), not like those magazines, brochures and flyers.