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Author: Sam Marshall

07 Sep 2011

5 Great Things About Silos

by Sam Marshall
in Collaboration, Communications, Digital Workplace, Knowledge Management
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[caption id="attachment_511" align="alignright" width="300"] Photo: Calvin Dellinger http://www.flickr.com/photos/cstreetus/3381285097/[/caption]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 things about silos:They can foster...

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24 Aug 2011

Intranet Strategy Needs Leaders Not Managers

by Sam Marshall
in Adoption, Intranets, SharePoint, Strategy
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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 to straddle multiple cards. Others merely sigh and shuffle over...

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16 Aug 2011

Apps for Intranets

by Sam Marshall
in Digital Workplace, Intranets, SharePoint
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[caption id="attachment_366" align="alignright" width="300"] Photo by Christiano Betta[/caption]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. Perhaps intranet interfaces...

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11 Aug 2011

4 Guiding Principles for Blending Social and Traditional Intranets

by Sam Marshall
in Communications, Governance, Intranets
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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 introduced in tension with the existing intranet. This leads to concerns...

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04 Aug 2011

Collaborating or Communicating?

by Sam Marshall
in Collaboration, Communications, Governance, Intranets, SharePoint
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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 (communication).A variant is when to put content on a department...

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04 Aug 2011

What Flavour is Your Intranet?

by Sam Marshall
in Governance, Intranets, Strategy
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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 too long and leave you with a headache.One of the reasons...

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