About Patrick C. Walsh
I have lived most of my life in the Midlands in the UK where the automotive industry used to be king. Having spent thirty years or so climbing the greasy pole from a lineside inspector to becoming a Quality and Environmental Manager in a large automotive group I became interested in information architecture and usability through setting up an online integrated quality/environmental/health and safety manual. I left the automotive industry to set up an intranet from scratch for a large local government department and now work at the BBC as an Information Architect. Projects have included BBC Homepage, GEL (Design Pattern Library), BBC Music, BBC intranets and the semantic web. For many years I was a rock musician but decided when I was fat and forty that it was time to quit. For me IA is definitely the new rock and roll!
September 11, 2008 at 5:08 pm
Patrick,
I write articles for publication on the website of my employer, Prescient Digital Media (Toronto, Canada) http://www.prescientdigital.com
I would like your permission to use your lean intranets posting as the basis for an article, with full credits given to yourself of course. As I commented on the posting I found it fascinating, and instead of just writing a couple of response postings on my blog, dealing with some of your points, I would like to give it fuller treatment in a longer article if thats OK with you. Let me know if your OK with this please at jcawthorne at prescientdigital dot com
Cheers
Jed
September 16, 2008 at 11:19 pm
Hi Patrick, good to read your blog.
Which part of the BBC do you work in/which part of the intranet do you work on?
Cheers
Nic
[Ex-BBC intranaut]
September 18, 2008 at 8:40 am
Nick,
Hello! I am doing some consulting for the Gateway team and looking at the intranet as a whole. I think they picked me because of my experience in the auto sector. Although I’m also involved in other projects (see the great Archive collections http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive) I’m looking forward to being involved with taking the intanet to the next level (I hope!)
Regards
Patrick
September 18, 2008 at 9:33 am
Excellent stuff. Onwards and upwards!
March 26, 2009 at 2:37 pm
Patrick,
I was thrilled to find your article, A Map-Based Approach to Content Inventory, last night. Do you mind emailing me? I have more questions. Thanks.
DH
April 8, 2009 at 12:36 pm
Hey Patrick, where abouts is the link to your RSS feed? I would like to subscribe.
April 9, 2009 at 3:34 pm
Andrew,
Finally found out how you can add an RSS button. Hope it works!
Patrick
August 24, 2011 at 10:26 pm
Hi! I loved your article!I am starting a community on Facebook called “Corporate Intranets”. I posted the first link there today. I noticed there are no pages, or groups dedicated to this topic matter. I would love to share some of your articles, do you mind?
August 25, 2011 at 8:18 am
Mary,
Thanks for your interest. Please feel free to link to anything on the blog.
Best of luck with the community,
Patrick
November 2, 2011 at 6:12 pm
Websites You Should Visit…
[...]very few websites that happen to be detailed below, from our point of view are undoubtedly well worth checking out[...]…
November 10, 2011 at 7:19 am
Patrick, your career story gives me hope. I’m a corporate communicator who’s been focused mainly on sorting out a corporate intranet mess for about 3 years now. Why 3 years? Well, because of the vicious cycle you talked about in your recent post.
Anyway, I really want to move away from corp comm and into IA and usability. I love it and your story has given me hope that it’s not a pipe dream.
November 10, 2011 at 10:25 am
Thanks.
I think that ex-intranet or internal comms people might often make good IAs because they have had to live with and try to solve problems that IAs coming from other disciplines may never see in their working lives. When you have lived with poor usability you know good usability when you see it.
Best of luck