In today’s world new solutions and applications appear every day, and some are more useful and interesting than others. It’s part of an intranet team’s role to know what’s around and be able to make recommendations about suggested improvements. However some teams are reluctant to explore new areas such as social media, mobile devices or online hosted solutions.

Whether their organisation is in a position to make use of these solutions or not, the intranet team needs to stay informed. Personal likes and dislikes should be set aside to keep an open mind on investigating tools to support the business.

To be effective, the team should be able to understand and articulate the functionality, benefits and risks of potential solutions. Often other staff in the organisation are already investigating and proposing new solutions.

It doesn’t matter if team members love or hate Twitter, or if they spend their evenings knitting rather than Facebooking or using the latest mobile applications. Intranet professionals need to be able to explore and evaluate new solutions in a range of ways:

• Practicality — how does this new element work?
• Usefulness — what could it add to an intranet?
• Execution — what is the end result?
• Emotion — how does it make users feel?

[CM Briefing 2010-11 by Catherine Grenfell, read the full article]