Last week in London I had the pleasure of presenting at the Interactions 2011 conference. This was the second of my presentations, a 20-minute exploration of the eternal question: user-driven personalisation or targeting/tailoring?

Key points:

• Not all staff needs are the same, and this must be addressed in some way by intranets.
• The overall requirement is to meet both global (common) and local (specific) needs.
• User-driven personalisation treats staff like adults, and allows them to configure their own intranet experience.
• A great idea, but the hurdle to get over: only 5-10% of staff will personalise (as discussed in Designing intranets).
• This hurdle can be overcome if personalisation is essential for work (such as at Framestore).
• The alternative is tailoring/targeting/customising based on what is known about staff.
• There are many ways of doing this, as shown in the sampling of screenshots in the presentation.
• Tailoring is typically done in one of three ways (see Segmenting staff information needs).
• It works, but requires work.
• Do something to better meet staff needs, and start simple.
• And in response to a question: yes, you do have to get Active Directory right first (see Clean up your LDAP or Active Directory).