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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Sometimes there are postings on intranet discussion forums where people say “I’ve been asked to write an intranet strategy and was hoping I could have a look at somebody else’s”. To me that’s a little like saying “I’m planning to have a really enjoyable holiday and was hoping I could come on yours”. Although seeing [...]
At the IntraTeam Event in Copenhagen earlier this year, the ever-popular debate about how much news should feature on your intranet homepage was given another outing. There are other variants such as “who should own the intranet?” and “should we have one intranet or several?”. Like relatives at Christmas, these pop up periodically, hang around [...]
