Strategy

It’s a common observation that the big challenge with social intranets/enterprise social networks/insert your buzzword of choice is not technology but culture change. This sounds like wisdom, but is it actually useful?Let’s face it, how much influence does an intranet team have to effect such a change? If you think of all the big culture change programmes your organisation may have run: all the workshops,...

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Introduction Jane McConnell kindly shared with me a copy of her latest Digital Workplace Trends report, based on a survey of 362 organisations covering their current activities and future plans. This is the seventh time she has run her survey (it began as the Global Intranet Trends report in 2006), so can genuinely claim to be an insight into longer-term trends.The way the report defines the...

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Live blogging from Day 2 (see also Day 1). It's been a fantastic conference so far, so I'll try to do justice to today's tracks (and apologies in advance when it goes silent at the end as I've the privilege of being the closing keynote -- no pressure then!). Conference agenda.Creating Trust and Uniting staff at a global and local level. Kim Sbarcea - ThinkingShiftJames...

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[caption id="attachment_1251" align="alignright" width="200"] image: Kheel Center, Cornell U.[/caption][alert]This post has been superseded by an illustrated version of the Digital Workplace Manifesto[/alert]The agenda for the digital workplace is becoming established from an architectural perspective, but what are the things we need to preserve from the employeeworker point of view? Inspired (like so many) by the market-driven Cluetrain manifesto, here is our take on a manifesto...

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[frame]This post is part of a series that looks at what’s changed from an intranet manager perspective, in particular things employees will notice and improvements for site and content owners.SharePoint 2013 SeriesIs SharePoint 2013 worth waiting for? SharePoint 2013 for intranet sites  SharePoint 2013 social features SharePoint 2013 for collaboration (this post) SharePoint 2013 digital workplace and mobile (forthcoming) SharePoint 2013 governance, analytics and search (forthcoming) SharePoint 2013 user experience (forthcoming)See our summary webinar on...

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[frame]This post is part of a series that looks at what’s changed from an intranet manager perspective, in particular things employees will notice and improvements for site and content owners.SharePoint 2013 SeriesIs SharePoint 2013 worth waiting for? SharePoint 2013 for intranet sites (this post) SharePoint 2013 social features SharePoint 2013 for collaboration SharePoint 2013 digital workplace and mobile (forthcoming) SharePoint 2013 governance, analytics and search (forthcoming) SharePoint 2013 user experience (forthcoming)See our summary webinar...

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The new SharePoint has been released as a public preview, along with hopes by the Microsoft team of “leapfrogging expectations” (see the launch blog post). Is it worth holding out for the full release? Do the new features make it compelling to those planning a social intranet?[frame]This post is the first of a series that looks at what’s changed from an intranet manager perspective, in particular...

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Intranets have always straddled multiple functions, but with the growth of the digital workplace, balancing what is in and out of scope for an intranet is getting trickier. Often related initiatives such as SharePoint, Yammer, mobile access or BYOD risk confusing employees, but are not necessarily within the remit of the intranet manager to set their strategy. Here we present five guiding principles for that balancing act: 1. Don't Plan Your...

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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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