10 Principles for involving users in intranet design

1. User’s can’t specify what they want
2. User’s do know what their pain points are
3. …but not everything is a pain point
4. You can’t improve everything just by optimising how people work now

5 ?

Read all at Clearbox Consulting...

Source: www.clearboxconsulting.co.uk Posted by admin 99 days, 3 hours, 29 minutes ago

The Impact of an Intranet Platform on Organizational Culture for Medium-Sized Corporations

When we start developing a new intranet platform for any sized company, we always ensure that we are made aware of the company's organizational culture, as we need to make sure that modern intranets have applications and interfaces that are aligned and will stand the maximum chance of being adopted by the target users.

Source: goarticles.com Posted by admin 229 days, 3 hours, 21 minutes ago

Thanks to Chris Mcgrath at Thoughtfarmer and to Richard Dennison at BT we now have an engaging and healthy debate about terms, naming and whether they matter.

One thing we know for sure is that employees, contractors and freelancers in any sized organisation could not give a hoot what the “tech stuff” they use in their day to day work is called. So why are those engaged in the intranet and digital workplace fields (myself included) so concerned with terminology? Probably because names gives us a sense of...

Source: www.ibforum.com Posted by bee 253 days, 15 hours, 39 minutes ago

The way we currently think of working was formed by a command and control, industrial age of process, manufacturing and efficiencies of scale.

Collaboration is a different model. It depends on people, not process. It depends on outstanding communication — because collaboration requires thinking and acting together.

We are in an age where we have created technology that makes this easier, but we are still evolving our understanding of how best to do it. With this new way of work, comes a new set of critical skills.

What Needs to Change?

Source: www.cmswire.com Posted by admin 333 days, 2 hours, 29 minutes ago

This is the traditional “highlights” blog post for the Global Intranet Trends for 2011. There is so much to say that I have divided the highlights into three separate posts:

Part 1: Five megatrends are re-shaping the intranet and impacting how people work: leaders are far ahead in these areas.

Part 2: Social media are challenging the intranet: changes must happen if the intranet is to remain relevant.

Part 3: Steering and governing are more essential than ever before.

Organizations and digital teams face two major challenges in 2011:

• How to engage all key stakeholders and make the intranet the “natural” way to work.
• How to integrate the social dimension into intranets and ensure that it brings business value.

Source: netjmc.com Posted by support 452 days, 13 hours, 41 minutes ago

Much has been said and written about the importance of key figures – also in relation to intranets. Intranet managers are expected to constantly produce and provide ”relevant and up-to-date key figures” to management in order to document their every activity and essentially justify their existence.

Moreover, many intranets are being used to publish key figures and information, allowing employees to follow important developments, such as monthly results and sales- and customer- figures This can resul...

Source: www.jboye.com Posted by bee 514 days, 1 minute ago

It never ceases to amaze me how few people trust their organizational intranets. A tool that was designed specifically for the purpose of helping employees do their job better and faster is often the joke of the water cooler. Yet organizations knowingly ignore the fact that employees don’t use or trust the information stored on their intranet.

Periodically, I have the great opportunity to sit in front of a group of employees and ask them about their intranet experiences. Often, it’s in anticipation of an intranet revamp, so the need for a “do-over” or an evolution has already been defined at some level. While the individual users and comments might be different, they usually go start with something like this:

Source: www.intranetexperience.com Posted by support 576 days, 3 hours, 1 minute ago

• Launch User-Centric, Participatory Research: As a first step, begin to gather user input — and develop field skills — with interviews, card sorting exercises and scenario observations.

• Use Available Metrics to Set the Baseline: Site analytics from the current intranet tell you who uses it, for how long and what parts are avoided.

And 8 more...

Source: www.documentmedia.com Posted by support 591 days, 14 hours, 19 minutes ago

According to Dante in his Divine Comedy the inscription above the door to Hades reads “Abandon hope all ye who enter here”. For many this could also be the sign on the home page of their organisation’s intranet as, with business-critical decisions to make, they begin the daily hunt for information that they are sure should be somewhere in the application.

It could just as easily be the sign on the door of the intranet manager of the organisation, though this door usually also carries a number of other job descriptions, all of which seem to be given more priority by the organisation than the care and development of the intranet. Most organisations of any size will have a full-time web manager, often with a support team, but this is rarely the case with the intranet.

Source: www.ariadne.ac.uk Posted by support 663 days, 23 hours, 46 minutes ago