Step Two

Alex Manchester has written about intranets on mobile devices. To quote:

I’m still of the opinion that we’ll see many more mobile-friendly intranets in the future. In fact, I also think we’re not too far away from a situation where the majority of employees are given mobile devices as a matter of practice when they start.

The idea of pushing the intranet, its related tools and internal/corporate communications to a device that can manage computing and browsing, but also documents via e-ink (Kindle style), has huge potential. But it seems we’re not there yet.

Shawn Medero has written an article on paper prototyping. To quote:

As interfaces become ever more complex and development schedules seem to get shorter and shorter, you may find it useful to give up your user-interface modeling software for awhile in favor of something simpler. All you need is paper, pens, scissors, and your imagination.

I’m pleased to share the first reviews of What every intranet team should know. At a glance:

“Every intranet manager (and quite a few consultants!) will benefit from this book. It is an exceptional contribution to the development of excellent intranets, and also an invaluable book to give to those senior managers who still (amazingly) do not understand the benefits of investing in an intranet team.”

Martin White

“What’s been missing is the big picture, the integrated view, a simple approach to a complex job, presented in one easily comprehended sweep. This book, in just over a hundred beautifully clear pages, provides just that. James Robertson writes like the intranets he advocates: the book is direct, clean, attractive, simple – and above all, useful.”

Patrick Lambe

Read the full reviews

Frank Long has published a research paper on the effectiveness of personas. To quote:

The use of personas as a method for communicating user requirements in collaborative design environments is well established. However, very little research has been conducted to quantify the benefits of using this technique. The aim of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of using personas. An experiment was conducted over a period of 5 weeks using students from NCAD. The results showed that, through using personas, designs with superior usability characteristics were produced. They also indicate that using personas provides a significant advantage during the research and conceptualisation stages of the design process (supporting previously unfounded claims). The study also investigated the effects of using different presentation methods to present personas and concluded that photographs worked better than illustrations, and that visual storyboards were more effective in presenting task scenarios than text only versions.

Dorje McKinnon has posted about role titles in staff directories. To quote:

Today one of the people I follow on Twitter asked the following question.

@ChristySeason Asking all #intranet tweeps: Does your company publish employees’ titles on your employee directory/look up/phone book?

(It’s a short post, but screenshots are always valuable.)

This blog has been uncharacteristically quiet over the last few months. In part, this was due to my writing energy being devoted to a book and plenty of articles. This has limited my ability to post “meaty” items, sharing thinking on key topics.

I would also normally be reposting links to interesting articles across a range of fields. What has been striking, however, is how little is getting published at the moment. Blogging has fallen off, online magazine articles are getting thin on the ground. That hasn’t left me much to repost!

Perhaps it’s due to the worsening economy, everyone is focusing on their next paycheque, leaving little time for writing. That would be a little odd, based on past experience. In the dot-com crash, plenty of experienced people found themselves on the street, with a need to do some serious marketing and profile raising.

During that bust, most of the current crop of usability, IA and KM books were written, and many online magazines launched. This greatly added to the knowledge freely available in the world, and defined the current crop of “gurus”.

So why isn’t the same thing happening now? Why is everyone so quiet? (We’re still publishing as normal, even picking up pace.)

Your thoughts?

Jane McConnell asks the question: in times of crisis, is the intranet an afterthought? To quote:

“Placement/importance of the intranet and its teams within the organisation is by far our biggest pressure point at the moment - in economic crisis, restructures are causing the intranet to be an afterthought more than ever (i.e. ‘oh the intranet, well someone can just keep that up to date, we dont need much headcount for that, theres an economic crisis going on’). The challenges to deliver through the intranet instead of external high-cost mediums means the opposite should be happening in times like this, but it just cannot seem to reach the radars of those at the top.”

Andrew McAfee has written a post on enterprise 2.0, version 2.0. To quote:

I’m not satisfied with my earlier definition of Enterprise 2.0, so let’s propose a refinement (I’m sorry if this feels a bit pedantic, but clear constructs are important to academics):

Many web and intranet teams will be expected to create business cases at some point in their work. These may be for major website redevelopments, selection of new technology platforms, or to gain further resources.

Considerable amounts of work go into creating a business case, but success is far from certain. Too often, business cases fail to hit the mark, even when they follow the guidelines provided by the senior executive themselves.

In part, this is because these business cases fail to target the emotional elements, concentrating instead on details and evidence.

Web and intranet teams are often provided with a corporate template to fill in when creating a business case. This covers elements such as:

• current situation
• research conducted
• detailed findings
• options for improvements
• recommendations
• indicative figures

These documents can easily grow to 30, 50 or 100 pages in length. Considerable detail is captured and communicated, but the danger is that we lose sight of the forest for the trees.

The first major problem with these business cases is that they are boring. Few in the organisation have sufficient enthusiasm to read 100 pages of detailed business case, and even the executive summary can fail to inspire.

[Read the full article]

A lot of work is done to incrementally improve intranets, often focusing on resolving common areas of staff frustration with the sites.

These projects may be large or small, but most concentrate on making the intranet work better, without adding new capabilities or content.

This is not enough. If intranets are to achieve their full potential, intranet teams must go beyond just reducing frustration.

Some of the most common intranet projects and activities are designed to improve the current site, including:

• improving site navigation
• making search work better
• refining the design of the home page
• updating content and removing old pages
• restructuring key areas of the site
• improving metadata quality
• establishing governance around authoring

These individual improvements may be wrapped up into a complete site redesign, a project at least 12 months long that aims to deliver a site that works much better for staff.

The common thread that runs through all these activities is that they are addressing the frustrations that staff express about the current site.

[CMb 2009-07, read the full article]

Intranets can grow to be thousands, tens of thousands or millions of pages in size. With content as far as the eye can see, the challenge is to keep it up to date, accurate and useful.

Sitting behind this huge volume of content are a wide range of approaches to creating and publishing pages.

The central team has a clear role to play in managing this content, as do publishing guidelines and intranet governance documents.

Yet the central team alone cannot manage thousands of pages, and a decentralised publishing model is established to give business areas responsibility for maintaining their own content. New authors do, however, require support and training.

Against this backdrop of ‘traditional’ publishing models, the growth of web 2.0 and ‘user-generated content’ is raising new questions about how to maintain an intranet.

The key challenge is to establish the right mix of publishing models, flexible in many cases, rigid in others. The intranet team needs to manage the overall process, including adjusting approaches when circumstances change.

This article explores five fundamental publishing models for intranets, providing a description of each, and a brief summary of strengths and weaknesses.

Use these models as the starting point for discussions with authors and stakeholders, and put in place a balanced mix of publishing approaches that deliver the best standard of content within resource constraints.

[May KM Column, read the full article]

Maish Nichani has written an extensive article on designing site structures for intranets and websites. To quote:

A good site structure makes users happy. They can easily find, understand and use the information on your site. For the business, this makes all the difference. In this article I’ll go through principles behind good site structures and describe a methodology for creating site structures.

This blog has been a bit quiet over the last few months due to some hard work on two seriously exciting projects. The first is a new book, released today.

Over the last eight years, we’ve published 200+ articles covering every aspect of intranets, and beyond. While these have proven to be very useful for intranet teams, what we hadn’t done was pull together all this information into a single volume. Until now.

The only book of its type in the world, What every intranet team should know provides a succinct overview of managing and growing intranets. A must-have for every intranet team, whether just starting or looking for fresh ideas.

This is the definitive ‘quick start’ guide to intranets, providing intranet teams with a to-the-point overview of how to plan, design, manage and grow intranets.

For the first time, we’ve released this volume as a beautifully printed A5-sized 110-page book. This is available via Lulu internationally, and directly from us if you’re based in Australia (we’re surrounded by boxes of books).

I’ll be very interested to hear what everyone thinks about this book!

More information

Patrick Lambe has posted a video on how to conduct a KM strategy exercise. To quote:

So here’s an introduction to some of our most important lessons learned over the years in how to approach a KM strategy exercise with some chance of it moving off the page of the consultant’s report and into some form of reality. Enjoy!

Michael Sampson has written about cultural barriers to collaboration, giving a real-life example. To quote:

“Collaboration” will fail at your firm, because of lack of freedom. Eg, you two are hand-slapped for going to talk to other people at head office (talk!). Collaborative activity doesn’t flourish in tightly controlled environments / dictatorships.

We’ve just announced a new expert session on succeeding at collaboration, to be held in Canberra on 28 July 2009.

SharePoint, wikis and blogs are bringing collaboration capabilities into many organisations, and are spreading rapidly. This intensive session will help you put in place strategy and governance that ensures that these tools are successful and valuable.

When: 28 July 2009, 9am - 5pm

Where: ACT Health, Moore Street, Canberra
(thanks to ACT Health for providing a workshop space)

How much: $750 + GST (25% discount for Intranet Leadership Forum members)

Full workshop information

Patrick Lambe has posted a series of video tutorials on how to conduct a knowledge audit. To quote:

Here’s another in our series of video tutorials to different practical knowledge management techniques. It’s taken from a workshop we conducted last week on knowledge audits and knowledge mapping. For ease of use it’s split into three short parts.

Matthew Hodgson has written a post on communications models for enterprise 2.0. To quote:

Web 2.0 technology presents the modern organisation with a plethora of means for communicating new information to staff. While some of us are now running to install wikis and blogs as a vehicle to achieve enterprise 2.0 nirvana there are some important considerations that need to be given time before we jump for, say, Yammer over Twitter, that go beyond the fear of our internal information being communicated outside the organisation.

Intranet-based staff directories are only truly useful when they contain comprehensive information about staff members.

This means going beyond just a name, phone number and email address. Staff directories should provide a photo, job title, organisational unit, reporting structure, plus much more.

The challenge is that no single system will hold all these details, forcing staff directories to pull information from a number of sources.

Typical sources include:

• HR/payroll system
• IT/security
• user contributed and updated information

Drawing this information together will require integration, a more difficult task when legacy systems are still in place.

In some cases it may be possible to have ‘real-time’ integration between these systems, although scheduled updates are more common. Often, data is synchronised between the systems on a nightly (or weekly) basis. For a staff directory, this is often sufficient.

[CM Briefing 2009-06, read the full article]

Successful intranets are delivered on the back of an in-depth understanding of staff needs and issues. This involves getting out from behind the desk and spending time with operational and frontline staff.

The earlier article Conducting intranet needs analysis outlined a structured approach to conducting user research to improve intranets.

A range of approaches can be used, but the core research technique is one-on-one staff interviews. These quickly provide a huge body of knowledge on day-to-day issues, roadblocks, needs and opportunities.

These interviews must be run well, however, if they are to deliver the greatest depth of information.

To be effective, follow some basic guidelines on interview technique:

• Find a quiet place. Interviews should be conducted in a quiet, private location free of distractions or interruptions. (The alternative is to conduct interviews at people’s desks, which can provide other advantages.)

[CM Briefing 2009-05, read the full article]