Many people are boldly doing 2012 predictions, which is nice guesswork if you can get it. I’m going to stick to more certain ground and talk about the 10 things that stood out for me in 2011. 1) Intranets remained stubbornly not dead. There seemed to be a rash of articles by people writing headlines [...]
Last week I was invited to join Melcrum’s Social Media group to discuss how the growth of social media impacts the function of internal communications. It was a very lively debate and what follows is my take on the topic, updated based on what I learned that day (I was actually billed to do a [...]
Post Steve-Jobs there’s been much about how Apple innovates differently, creating demand that didn’t exist before . On the surface, the implication is paradoxical: Apple is famous for usability but doesn’t listen to users. In a great blog post, Jane McConnell made a knowingly-provocative comment on how this relates to intranets: “User research is not [...]
Managing the digital workplace brings some tough challenges, and calls for a mixture of clear strategic thinking combined with pragmatism about how employees respond to the changes you envisage. Most knowledge work does not happen within processes but is more free-form and people-focussed. The appeal of social tools in this context is that they are [...]
There’s an interesting article on how Accenture used gamification to drive intranet adoption. But there’s a risk that game theory (aka gamification) on intranets can reduce creativity and co-operation because it relies on shallow motivators. There have been a number of other good posts on intranet and gamification such as: Alex Manchester: Enhancing the intranet [...]
For many years the mantra in knowledge management, and more recently in collaboration circles, has been: “We need to break down silos” Yet silos are so common that I’ve been wondering if they have a role to play, or if they’re an unfortunate side-effect of something else? Here, then, is my list of 5 great [...]
When I run workshops on intranets, I sometimes put down cards on the floor labelled “HR”, “IT”, “Communications” etc. and ask people to stand on the card that reflects who sponsors their intranet. Typically there are clusters around Communications and IT, one on “Knowledge Management” and a few people that end up playing Twister trying [...]
Since Apple launched its App Store, over 1bn applications have been downloaded. This year, it expanded the idea to cover its Mac computers and sold 1 million apps on its day of launch. Given such unequivocal success, are there things that we might learn for the intranet world? The idea could be translated several ways. [...]
An intranet roadmap is a way to communicate, at a high level, how an intranet will evolve. In some ways it is a bridge between a strategy and a project plan, and the people who benefit most from it are often the power users and site owners that make up an extended intranet community but [...]
Blending top-down and bottom-up How should how traditional intranet and social intranet approaches co-exist? Many organisations have invested heavily in highly structured and well governed intranets, but they also struggle to get regular, widespread content contributions. A social approach offers the promise of higher engagement levels and more dynamic content, but such tools are often [...]
