When dealing with the legacy of intranet initiatives that have failed, Catherine says: “You can’t undo the past; you can influence the future.”

Establishing communication channels and setting expectation when everyone wants everything requires good negotiation skills.

Unlike other managers in the organization, intranet managers deal with staff at all levels. They need to have an elevator pitch about the intranet.

Intranet managers need to learn to “let go” of content. They need to empower others.

To start: I was interviewed by Gerry Gaffney for the User Experience Podcast. 29 minutes in length, we cover a range of intranet strategy and management topics, and where information architects can add value. To quote:

Yeah, it’s interesting, talking with intranet teams to say: Where are you spending your time? And after a little bit of chatting it becomes apparent that, say, 80% or 90% of time is spent maintaining the current site. And the lack of time is the single biggest point of pain for intranet teams the world over.

What we would say, and maybe it’s easy for us to say, is that only 30% of time should be spent maintaining the current site. 30% of the time should then be spent on relationships. So that’s relationships with end users but particularly with stakeholders and managers. And what we’ve observed is the most successful intranet teams are people people. They’re great at building relationships, maybe ahead of everything else.

BT needed a cheap and easy way for people to explain by ’show and tell’ with other people how to do something. They say a picture paints a thousand words and demonstrating how to do something in a few minutes is much better than screens and screens of guidance and tips.

(15min 54) There are a huge amount of content management systems (CMS) available, from free open source platforms through to advanced commercial solutions. That means you should be able to find an out-of-the-box solution that does exactly what you want.

So how do you determine those exact requirements? Today on BTalk Australia Phil Dobbie talks to James Robertson from Step Two Designs about how to select the right CMS for your business.