James Robertson is one of the global experts on intranet strategy and design.
He is the author of Essential intranets: inspiring sites that deliver value, What every intranet team should know and Designing intranets: creating sites that work, the three best-selling intranet books in the world. He has also written over two hundred articles and a variety of best-practice resources, including the Intranet Roadmap.
James is the founder and managing director of Step Two, a vendor-neutral consultancy located in Australia. In this role, he has helped high-profile organisations to develop intranet strategies, both within Australia and internationally.
James has keynoted conferences around the globe, including in the UK, USA, Denmark, the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, Singapore, Malaysia, New Zealand and Australia. As a certified trainer, he regularly runs one and two-day practical workshops on intranet strategy and design, both within Australia and internationally.
James is also a leading specialist on the topic of web content management. He is a founding member of the CM Professionals association, and has helped many organisations to select a suitable CMS.
See James in action
What others have said
Choosing the right CMS was a challenge. With time and budget constraints, we felt it was best for us to get professional advice to help us procure the best CMS for our website redevelopment.
Getting James to help identify the company’s requirements and restraints helped us fast track the process. His vast and unbiased knowledge of CMS products provided invaluable mentoring experience to us. We were able to assess the vendors according to our business requirements rather than what the products can offer.
- Chris Poon, Australian Health Service Alliance (AHSA)
Pleasure to have you here speaking at the Digital Workplace Experience conference in Chicago. Thanks for all your excellent contributions – much appreciated and your sessions were all highly rated by attendees.
- Paul Miller, Digital Workplace Group
“Step Two, and founder James Robertson, supported us to deliver our first-ever company intranet platform. We worked with James for over a year to deliver an exceptional MVP intranet tool and craft an internal communications strategy to support the intranet and inform our practices moving forward.
James was a wealth of knowledge. The team learnt so much from him, and James enabled us to turn what was initially a cross-functional group of employees with little formal internal communications background into a fully-fledged internal communications function. The research he does to understand your company is something I’ve seen very little with external vendors. James cares about internal communications and knows the value it can provide if successful. Hence, he seeks to understand your business to deliver a customised strategy that will work for your business and your people.
Myself, and our entire team, would highly recommend James & Step Two to support you if you’re ever thinking about launching an intranet and/or building your internal communications strategy. Working directly with the vendor will never give you the level of support and expertise you need to deliver a platform that will continue to impact your business for years.”
- Saskia Starck, Program Manager, Consensys
“As an incoming digital workplace manager, working in a team experiencing major workplace change, I was so grateful for the support and guidance of James and Step Two to help me untangle our priorities and deliver on our new remit. James’s wealth of knowledge helped me to set a course through managing change in the team and the wider organisation, gather stakeholder feedback, develop a roadmap, create our new graduated governance model and initiate digital skills support. We collaborated through workshops and personalised mentorship over a number of months and by the end of it I had a clear path forward – albeit with a mountain of work ahead of me! As I have set into action these new ways of working with my team and our partners, I’ve seen increased trust and positivity from our stakeholders, better engagement from the business, improved relationships across the organisation and a team that is genuinely excited about our next steps. I couldn’t have done all this without James’s support at the start of the journey. I’ve also found great value in the Step Two webinars and forum posts and have made new connections across my sector through these channels. Thanks, Step Two, for the amazing work you do!”
- Rina Garner, Deakin University
The University of Sydney struggled for six months to capture our requirements for a new CMS. When we asked James Robertson to facilitate a two-day workshop, we hoped that he would help us develop a requirements document that would enable us to confidently make the right final decision. James worked with us to streamline our requirements, engage with the relevant stakeholders, and prioritise which selection criteria would actively help us pick the best CMS for the University. In short he helped us to make the hard decisions to choose the best product for our needs.
Similarly, James helped us to procure vendor demonstrations which showed us how each system can create the type of content we regularly produce. He helped us to write scenarios for the demonstrations that were reflective of our requirements, rather than allowing vendors to demonstrate the aspects of their product that they wanted to show us.
These two pieces of advice and assistance really made the difference and helped us to select the right CMS for the University’s needs. We are delighted with both the process and the CMS that we purchased. We would never have been able to acquire this CMS without James’ expert guidance.