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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Often discussions on intranet adoption tend to focus on launch or training activities. But what role should adoption play in digital workplace strategy? Indeed, what does ‘good’ adoption look like?It’s not even clear cut that people spending more time on an intranet is necessarily a good outcome – it could just mean that they’re lost.We also need to move beyond “what’s in it for me”...
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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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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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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 better adapted to this kind of work than enterprise workflow...
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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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