Intranet Innovation Awards 2012

You can still enter the awards here http://www.steptwo.com.au/iia/enter.

What’s this, the manIA blog endorsing something? Yes I must admit that the idea of the blog was to disseminate new ideas and approaches so I’ve generally steered clear of endorsing anything. However I was reminded recently of a time when I was sitting in an office many years ago desperately trying to figure out how I could improve my intranet when I stumbled across James’s blog at Step Two Designs.  This led me to the Information Architect Institute and then to the Polar Bear book.

Altogether the effect was not unlike that wonderful bit in the Wizard of Oz when the house lands in Oz and, while the start of the film is in black and white, when Judy Garland opens the door the world is in glorious technicolour.

So thanks James, keep up the good work and, as always, I look forward to the results of the awards.

How healthy is your intranet?

You’ve been feeling low, you have no energy and you’re starting to get worried. You go to the doctor who, after checking a few vital parameters, tells you there’s nothing major wrong and prescribes some medication that will help you get back to normal. We would never dream of taking chances with our health so we get regular check ups and, if the worst comes to the worst, we hope that anything major is caught early enough to be able to do something about it.

This is just common sense isn’t it?  Yet organizations can expend huge resources on their intranets and communication systems but generally have no idea of how healthy they are at any one time. This contributes to the all too common phenomenon of intranet boom and bust. Someday it just dawns on everyone that their intranet is not fit for purpose but shouldn’t they have seen it coming? Unfortunately it can be hard unless you have a system in place which effectively provides a regular health checkup for your intranet.

This post provides a methodology which will enable you to do just that – the Intranet Heath Check.

Lean Intranets Book

I am in the process of writing a book about the Lean Intranet © approach and its associated tools and techniques. The book will be called-

Lean Intranets 

with the strapline

How lean thinking can improve communication in your organisation.

The book will be made freely available as a PDF.

If you have suggestions for the book I’d could grateful if you post a comment.

This will mean that posts will be few and far between while the book is being written. I envisage it should take some months….

….in the meantime have a good Christmas and a peaceful New Year

 

Intranet resources – the eternal vicious circle

Intranets don’t work. Why? Because  not enough resources are given to them to ensure they have a chance of success. Why aren’t resources made available? Because intranets don’t work. A vicious circle is born.

In this post I’m attempting to provide an approach that may help intranet teams to make the case for better resources and to break out of this vicious circle for good.

Designing intranet structures – Mapping and continually improving your intranet (Part 5)

In this fifth and final post on Designing Intranet Structures I’ll be looking at what should happen once you have agreed the structure of your new or re-designed intranet with your users and stakeholders – mapping and continuously improving your intranet.

Designing intranet structures – defining and re-defining your intranet structure (Part 4)

In Part 3 I discussed how the design of URLs can play a big part in forming the initial structure of your new or re-designed intranet. In this post I’ll explain how users and stakeholders can contribute to defining the structure, why iteration is the key to a good intranet structure, why content is important and why thinking of the future is important.

Designing intranet structures – Designing your URLs (Part 3)

In all of the posts and articles I’ve read about intranets I’ve never heard much mention of URL design yet this can be a key approach in designing your intranet and will also permanently help your users in finding the content they need. If you’re worried that this might sound a little complicated don’t be.  The approach I’m proposing in this post is simple and low tech.

Designing intranet structures – using system maps (Part 2)

This post details the first step towards designing or re-designing your intranet – the system map. This map will define your intranet domains and give the first overall view of the domains that make up your intranet and the things that go in them.

Before any system map can be compiled it is important that in depth user and stakeholder research is carried out as well as a content inventory (see Content Value Analysis). The analysis of these activities will contribute towards populating the system map.

Designing intranet structures – An Overview (Part 1)

This is the first of a series of posts exploring a methodology for creating the best possible intranet structure based on research and iterative conversations with users and stakeholders. This post gives an overview of the methodology and subsequent posts will explore parts of the methodology in more depth.

The crucial question – what is your intranet for?

A good friend of mine recently asked me to present some ideas to the charity he works for who will shortly be re-designing their intranet. As they were still considering their options I reviewed the Lean Intranet presentation I was going to give and realised that there was a crucial question missing.

What is your intranet for?

This eventually became the central proposition of the presentation. Defining what your intranet is for is a necessary consideration before any progress can be made in attaining the Lean Intranet or any type of  intranet improvement. Not defining what your intranet is for is, in fact, the greatest of the intranet wastes.