I've just finished another two days of work with the Area Health Service, and I'm back in Sydney. The review of existing documentation and reports is now complete, as is the expert review of the current intranet. Overall, the current intranet scored high marks. It is consistent, fairly well structured, and the majority of the content is well-written and to-the-point. There is a lot of good information on this intranet. And yet, looking at the web usage statistics, it is clear that the intranet is not being used by most staff. The question is: why? Unlike most intranets, it's not

Just got back from the initial meeting with the Area Health Service. I spent most of the day finding out more about the history of their intranet, the challenges of their culture, and their future plans. Overall, I was very impressed with how far they had managed to get, considering that they have had essentially no budget, and the intranet is just one year old (next week). The intranet was initially created by a single person within Public Affairs, and there are now just two staff dedicated to managing the entire system. They have implemented a simple distributed approach, with

When in Canberra this week, we talked about CMS implementation issues. The same problem arose that has existed for all my other clients, with the potential to make the CMS very difficult to implement. Here's the issue: Before starting to develop a CMS solution, you need to deploy a fully-functional staff phone directory ("whitepages"). This should have the following features: Provides standard contact information: name, phone number, e-mail address, etc. Records which department and team each staff person belongs to. Identifies each staff person's job role. Records the relationships between staff (such as "reports to", or "managed by", etc) Accurate

I've just spent the day in Canberra, doing some consultancy work for one of the government departments. With the plane flight there and back, it makes for a long day, but well worth the effort. The organisation currently has an intranet, of sorts. It has grown organically, and is developed using Frontpage. Each group has been trained to use Frontpage, and has gone away and created themselves a little subsite. Every section of the intranet looks completely different, and all changes are made directly to the live version. A scary system all round. Needless to say, they are looking at

There is no ‘correct’ answer to this question. To get the best business outcomes, you must understand the strengths and weaknesses of both approaches.

Why spend millions on managing content that no-one understands or needs? This article provides tips for getting the best value out of your business content.