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.

Planned serendipity for innovation in the workplace

In reply to a comment on one of my posts regarding knowledge activities I used the phrase ‘planned serendipity’ to describe how, in my opinion, the conditions could be created in which seredipitous ideas stand more of a chance of being generated. In this context serendipity = innovation.

Knowledge (Part 2) – an enterprise-wide methodology

In Part 1 of this post I gave an overview to the process of levering knowledge and creating information (KLIC) in the workplace through carrying out a simple knowledge gap analysis or ‘information audit’.  This approach works well when levering knowledge from an individual or small group of people for a particular purpose. But what about an approach that can work across a whole organization as an ongoing knowledge initiative? I was prompted to think about this by a response from someone to the original post who admitted that a lot of this ‘knowledge’ stuff was confusing and was asking for a simple, practical and above all logical methodology or set of tools that could be used by virtually anyone in any organization.

Therefore in this post I will attempt to outline a metholodolgy for carrying out an organization wide knowledge initiative based on an approach that I have found to work very well in the past - the Quality Circle. The approach is fairly non-prescriptive and should be scalable for organizations of different sizes and with varying resources.

Knowledge leverage and information creation in the enterprise

In my posts on the Enterprise-wide Information System (EIS) and articles on the Lean Intranet I talk about the role that knowledge  should play in the enterprise. Apart from James Robertson you don’t hear many intranet commentators mention ‘knowledge’, yet no organization can function without  the knowledge held in staff member’s heads and the shared knowledge that constitute the informal systems that are often at the heart of an organization’s success. If organizations don’t consider knowledge as part of their overall information strategy then they are missing a very big opportunity to improve their processes through the innovative ideas of their staff. They are also in danger of letting important knowledge walk out the door when employees leave.

It is my belief that intranet and internal communications workers should be contributing to the knowledge debate, especially when it comes to knowledge in the workplace, if only to ensure that a simple, practical approach is arrived at that can be of value in the enterprise. In this post I will try to outline such an approach in the hope that knowledge issues in the workplace might start to get attention I think they deserve.