It’s good to learn from your mistakes, but it’s much cheaper to learn from someone else’s.With this in mind, here’s a summary of 10 worst practices that I’ve seen as an intranet consultant and manager over the years. What strikes me is that, even as technology has moved on and trends such as social media and the ‘consumerisation of IT’ have risen, the fundamentals of...
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Communication vs. CollaborationImagine if you are going to buy a new sofa, and instead of entering a showroom you are taken straight into the workshop. Inside there are rolls of fabric, wooden frames of part-built sofas, others that look nearly finished but you can’t quite tell. You pick out one that you like only to be told that it’s last year’s model and no longer...
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[caption id="attachment_805" align="alignright" width="150"] photo by Roy Blumenthal[/caption]Introducing the Phantom - a character created for the social network at LexisNexis UK and vividly described by Laurie Hibbs at the Melcrum Digital Workplace Summit this week.The Phantom is an online avatar that joins their internal Yammer discussions and is able to say what many think but few would post. He tells people who post trivial comments to the...
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Day 3 from the IntraTeam ConferenceSee also: Day 1, Day 2 Sharon O'Dea - Mobile Intranet at UK Parliament Sharon (@sharonodea) wins my vote for the most entertaining session. She talked about the challenges of being an intranet manager in the unusual world of a near 1000-year old organisation. When she started there was an old intranet, but with elections coming and a new influx of younger, novice MPs, ...
Read MoreThis is part 2 of a day-by-day blog of Intrateam 2012See also: Day 1, Day 3 Tony Byrne - Latest Trends in Collaboration and Social Computing Within Larger Enterprises Tony (@TonyByrne) of the Real Story Group (RSG) began by saying: If you throw in blogs, wikis etc. at the organisation and people don't use them, it's not an adoption problem, it's a technology strategy problem; you haven't...
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Here is a quick checklist that you can use to rate your phone book 'maturity'.Count your points for the following: 1) 1 Point if all your employees are in one phone book 2 bonus points if contractors are too 2 bonus points if you have supplier contacts 2) 1 Point if all employee data comes from a master source 2 bonus points if you have a process to check accuracy (e.g. when...
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I'm at IntraTeam 2012 in Denmark and will be blogging my take on the highlights (apologies to the speakers in tracks I miss).see also: Day 2, Day 3Today's pre-conference workshops featured: Jim Ylisela on Writing for the Internal Web Jim (@jpyjr) reckons our employees are getting rapidly cynical as intranet content falls behind web content; it's boring, not interactive, words not video.For articles, nobody follows the Who,...
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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 “The Intranet is Dead” and then saying why it wasn’t. Unfortunately...
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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 ‘download’ but the irony of a one-way presentation on social...
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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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