Intranet Matters

Ok, this is for archive reasons more than anything else - I’m really way behind my ‘reading schedule’ and so is this compilation of things that I found worth looking at is as well…

Updated Animation of the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Information Access
New Idea Engineering wondered what sorts of trends could be gleened from these reports, so we set out to animate the Gartner quadrant a couple of years ago

The Business Impacts of Social Networking
Social networking fosters collective intelligence, collaborative work and support communities. Tools and behaviors from the consumer world are now making the transition to the corporate world, with diverse implications for changing the way businesses operate. This paper explores 10 opportunities presented by social networking, along with 10 associated challenges.

Taking the ’social’ out of Social Media - Social Tools in a Business Context
Presentation from Richard Dennision, BT at boye08

Creating strategic change
The conventional approach to change has ten structural weaknesses

Improving employee involvement on the intranet
One of the weakest areas within communication and culture is how effective the intranet is at making employees feel informed about what’s going on and that they can contribute to the organisation

Corporate Social Media Policies and Guidelines
Social Media & Blogging Guidelines Examples on the Web

5 Reasons Gen Y is Unprepared to Survive Recession, Layoffs
The current economic crisis may be the best test yet of Generation Y’s ability to survive. After all, this generation, which has been coddled by parents and educators, isn’t known for its coping skills.

Is it worth asking people what they want on your intranet?
When you go to the doctors does he ask you what drugs you want? Do you tell the tv repair shop just how to fix your tv?

Content Value Analysis for Intranets Part 2 - A methodology
When trying to tell an intranet manager or a content owner the hard truth (e.g. their content sucks) it can sometimes result in a ‘ yes it does - no it doesn’t ‘ sort of debate that usually goes nowhere.

Creating a new intranet: funnelling down to a solution
We start with a vague idea: “hey, let’s have an intranet!”. With no clear picture of what that means, our goal is now to “funnel” down to a concrete project plan. At each step, our activities should refine down what we are doing (and why).

Collaboration framework
a simple process reminding us that in business we must collaborate with a purpose, starting with business needs and resulting in outcomes

Should you have a Web 2.0 Strategy?
It set me wondering if an organisation have such a thing as a separate Web 2.0 strategy - in the sense of an agreed roadmap for the next few years?

Some recurring patterns in Intranet Strategy and Governance
This includes alignment with business strategy, senior sponsorship, enforcement of controls and risk management. In this post I thought I’d summarise some of the themes that seem to keep coming up:

Are your users always right?
However, this doesn’t mean you always get good advice by listening to what users say.

Web content management matures
“Vendor consolidation has fallen (slowed)… functions such as workflow, ease of use and multi-site management are no longer differentiating factors; they are the norm.”

SharePoint overview (pros & cons, MOSS)
“MOSS is very good for very good in smaller, workgroup environments,” says Alan Pelz-Sharpe, analyst, CMS Watch and his presentation on Evaluating SharePoint. “It’s not traditionally very good for 5,000 or 10,000 concurrent users.”

What the experts say about SharePoint (MOSS)
“SharePoint is good at a number of things,” says one SharePoint expert, addressing a group of SharePoint users and followers here in Aarhus. “But it’s bad at just as many.”

Intranet scent: best links are 7-12 words
“The 3-click rule: it’s complete crap!” says usability guru, Jared Spool, addressing the jboye08 conference in Denmark. “In fact, the evidence suggest the opposite. If you have hundreds of thousands of pages, it’s impossible to adhere to this rule… you can have 30 or 40 clicks if each click is progressively more relevant.”

Die wichtigsten Tipps für einen guten Online-Text
An dieser Stelle will die wichtigsten zusammen tragen, damit Sie sich schnell einen Überblick über das Thema verschaffen können.

Research on the Use of Social Software in the Workplace (PDF)
Shortly after launching Beehive we conducted a usage
analysis of the first several hundred early adopters and
found evidence of relationship building and ‘people
sensemaking’ throughout the site

Agile Development Projects and Usability
Agile methods aim to overcome usability barriers in traditional development, but pose new threats to user experience quality. By modifying Agile approaches, however, many companies have realized the benefits without the pain.

How Do You Define a “Failed Search” ?
But what makes up a successful search? And what are the clues that a search was a “failed search”.

As always (sorry as I am about this circumstance!), this is not a list of the latest news, but rather of information worth being read that I’ve come across over the last 2-3 weeks or so:

SharePoint as a Collaboration Tool: An Independent Evaluation
Evaluation of the product against his framework for collaboration (7 Pillars reference framework for evaluating collaborative tools)

Best Buy’s “Enterprise Twitter”
But so far, no large corporation has rolled out microsharing company-wide. Enter Gary Koelling and Steve Bendt, Best Buy’s Senior Managers for Social Technology, and better known as the guys who built Blue Shirt Nation

When to Use Which User Experience Research Methods
Modern day user experience research methods can now answer a wide range of questions. Knowing when to use each method can be understood by mapping them in 3 key dimensions and across typical product development phases.

Start here: intranets
Entry point for intranet teams, bringing together the key resources into a single location, giving quick access to the best practice thinking on intranets => in my opinion this is something like the State Library for Intranets - lots of fantastic stuff brought to you by Step Two!

Best-practice approach to SharePoint team spaces
There is also a need to put in place appropriate support and governance, if team spaces are to work well.

What intranet CMS’s can learn from wikis
It is, however, a good time to take a fresh look at how we manage and grow our intranets, and to learn lessons from the wider community

Should Knowledge Workers Have Enterprise 2.0 Ratings?
But what about measuring? It’s a technical no-brainer to measure how much each individual has contributed and to generate some kind of absolute or relative metric. Would doing so be helpful or harmful?

Cut costs by expanding your intranet
It may seem counter-intuitive to some, but I often advocate increasing intranet funding during cost cutting exercises as a lower cost channel for engaging staff and sharing information.

Intranet Innovations 2008
Scroll down for free Exec Summary PDF to this year’s innovation awards

The credit-crunch - financial mis-management or information mis-management?
The problems may well have as much to do with a failure of information management than with financial incompetence

Oh, this is actually for the week before last… Sorry, for being not very up to date. But here goes:

• Rezension: Das Ende des Managements (in German)
  Review of the book ‘The Future of Management’ by Gary Hamel

• Grundlegende Studie zur Recherche im Internet - die erfolgreichen Suchstrategien (in German)
  How succesful researches search on the web

• Understanding the new breed of intranet managers
  According to an inter-generational survey of workers, the younger generations of workers are set to dominate the workforce, but have slightly different motivations.

• Enterprise 2.0: The Nature of the Firm
  The break-up of behemoth, vertically integrated enterprises commenced in the 1970’s, got a boost from junk bond financing in the 1980’s, and accelerated in the 1990’s with globalization. Now, late in the 2000’s, Social Media (aka Web 2.0) is adding another gear that will accelerate the fundamental restructuring of the enterprise.

• Site Map Usability
  New user testing of site maps shows that they are still useful as a secondary navigation aide, and that they’re much easier to use than they were during our research 7 years ago.

• 12 ways to use your intranet to save costs
  In an era of corporate belt-tightening, intranets can play a pivotal role in helping organisations cut costs. In a new paper called ‘12 ways to use your intranet to cut costs’, IBF presents some pointers and prominent examples for doing this.

10 Best Application UIs of 2008
“Many winners employ dashboards to give users a single overview of complex information and use lightboxes to ensure that users notice dialogs. Also, the Office 2007 ribbon showed surprisingly strong early adoption.”

An evaluation of build versus buy decisions for portal solutions
“This IDC white paper presents the results of an IDC study, sponsored by IBM, that
quantifies and compares the total cost of ownership (TCO) of in-house portal
development with that of portals developed with IBM WebSphere Portal.”

Web 2.0: Companies Gain Competitive Edge with Social Networking Tools
“Facebook-like apps and social networking tools are enabling companies to encourage innovation, create flexible work arrangements, establish virtual teams, bring new employees up to speed, improve collaboration, increase retention among people who hadn’t felt a strong sense of belonging, and more.”

Enterprise Search Dead? Or just misunderstood?
“These methodologies both provide the kind of enterprise-wide search that has eluded us for so long in the old model: search once, find everywhere.”

Highlights from Intranet Week 2008
“Some of the main themes of the two-days of main conference presentations included…”

Niche Cooking for Intranet Success
“Did we just cook generic food in an attempt to satisfy a wide range of people? Or did we cook a specialty food that directly targeted a particular group of enthusiasts? The word that spreads throughout the enterprise is based on this crucial experience. It will ultimately come down to either satisfying a small group of people who will become vocal advocates, or frustrating a large group of people with a mediocre experience and creating a stigma around the portal platform.”

Enterprise 2.0 : success comes from organizational approach
“First conclusion : bringing web 2.0 within the enteprise is not a fad but a heavy wide-range trend : internal, external, variois tools, wide perimeters of experiment. Second conclusion : promises are not as easy to be delivered than many thought.”