Category: Communications

A review of the 2011 in Intranets and the Digital Workplace

January 4, 2012 7 Comments by Sam Marshall
blue_calendar_2011

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 [...]

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The Changing Role of Internal Communications

November 24, 2011 5 Comments by Sam Marshall
1930s typing pool

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 [...]

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5 Great things about silos

September 7, 2011 9 Comments by Sam Marshall
Grain silos

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 [...]

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4 Guiding principles for blending social and traditional intranets

August 11, 2011 No Comments by Sam Marshall
269532233_a6ac897bb1

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 [...]

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Collaborating or communicating?

August 4, 2011 No Comments by Sam Marshall
pyramid

One of the questions I increasingly encounter with intranet governance is when to use team sites (collaboration areas) and when to use publishing sites (‘intranet’ pages). It’s important to be clear about when somethign is still work-in-progress and you want people to make changes (collaboration), and when it is a product that you are disseminating [...]

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