For many intranet teams, funding and resourcing is incredibly tight. The intranet is often a poor cousin to an organisation’s public website, and its worth to the organisation is rarely demonstrated well.

Intranet teams also rarely have direct lines of communication to senior management who, as infrequent users of the site, have little understanding of its complexity or potential.

As a result, when it comes to getting funding for a new content management system (CMS), or developing and adding new applications and services, making the case is an uphill struggle.

Yet there is great potential in intranets; we only need to look at the winners of the Intranet Innovation Awards to see how useful, powerful and valuable intranets and related services can be.

Read some compelling examples

Source: www.steptwo.com.au Posted by support 1088 days, 19 hours, 28 minutes ago

Intranet homepages are always contentious. In most organisations, every stakeholder would like a piece of this valuable real estate, and debates rage around the overall purpose and design.

Within the intranet industry, the homepage also inflames passionate debate. This is particularly true on the question of how long the intranet homepage should be.

In the earlier article Seven roles of the intranet homepage, a range of purposes were identified:

1. news
2. navigation
3. key tools
4. key information
5. community and culture
6. internal marketing
7. collaboration

Effective designs find a productive balance between these seven roles, without any one being excessively dominant.

Source: www.steptwo.com.au Posted by support 1088 days, 22 hours, 57 minutes ago

Rick Freedman explores four agile method variants that bring the theories into real-world practice. He also discusses criteria for selecting an approach based on your IT project.

• Extreme Programming (XP)
• Dynamic System Development Model (DSDM)
• Crystal Methods
• Lean Development (LD)

Source: blogs.techrepublic.com.com Posted by support 1089 days, 11 hours, 31 minutes ago

It lies there just over the horizon and just below the surface of any new intranet implementation. It is the factor that is most often forgotten or ignored as the intranet barrels toward launch. It is often left out of the project plan altogether but can take longer than the build itself. It is content migration.

Content migration is underestimated and misunderstood.

Many organizations moving to a new intranet have never been through a migration before and get blindsided by the amount of coordination and planning required to get through it

Source: www.thoughtfarmer.com Posted by support 1089 days, 12 hours, 12 minutes ago

The so called Organizations 2.0 or Enterprise 2.0 (the term has no direct connection with technology, and I think it’s unfortunate) see their business model, their operations, hierarchy, relationship with employees and customers and their market orientation in a different way, one I am particularly fond of (this article sums up my romantic view on the topic).

Some of the main characteristics that define them:

• They adopt the openness and transparency as a leitmotif
• Talent Search and Management
• The learning organization

and more...

Source: blog.whatever-company.com Posted by support 1090 days, 10 hours, 13 minutes ago

I will be speaking at the Advanced Intranet and Portals conference in Amsterdam held on 27 and 28 May.  It aims to ‘Connect your employees to anybody, anywhere, and drive business growth through social media, Web 2.0 and collaboration tools whilst increasing employee usability and engagement’.

My presentation will cover:

• Analysing the need to use social media tools and knowing how to get it adopted in your organisation
• Drawing up guidelines to minimise the information, security, legal and brand risks
• Selecting an effective governance strategy that minimises risk and increases adoption
• Studying whether a social media working group and/or Chief Social Media Officer will enhance internal promotion, adoption rates and general management
• Meeting the demand from younger and new users
• Overcoming internal barriers and resistance
• Weighing up the benefits from social media

Follow the link in the post to the presentation.

Source: markmorrell.wordpress.com Posted by support 1091 days, 20 hours, 34 minutes ago

Getting ready for the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston, June 14- 17, I've been thinking about the value of the online collaboration tools most of us are beginning to embrace. My early take is that the positives are engagement, empowerment, and the potential to spur innovation. The downsides are the dangers of groupthink gone wild and the security risks of exposing valuable company data.

Here are my Enteprise 2.0 minuses

• Security, security, security
• Collaboration as a time-waster
• Enterprise 2.0 as false collaboration

Now for the positives

• Breaking through the org chart
• Better business responsiveness
• Empowerment and engagement

Source: www.informationweek.com Posted by support 1092 days, 11 hours, 29 minutes ago

Customers crave speed on the Web, and they reward organizations that make things fast and simple.

Why is Google successful? Because it delivers better and faster results than its competitors. Google truly understands the customer's need for speed. "At Google, we've gathered hard data to reinforce our intuition that "speed matters" on the Internet," Jake Brutlag of Google wrote in 2009. "We've always viewed speed as a competitive advantage."

"We may be the only people in the world who can say our goal is to have people leave our homepage as quickly as possible," Google states.

Source: www.gerrymcgovern.com Posted by support 1093 days, 11 hours, 24 minutes ago

Social media has evolved from distracting fun to hype to significant mainstream adoption over the last 18 months or so. Will the intranet remain unaffected by this? Or are there any emerging signs from intranets in social businesses that could provide some clues to what the future is likely to bring? Consumer organisations such as BMW, BT, Coca Cola, Red Bull, Virgin and WWF have invited their customers to participate in conversations and taken their usage of social media tools, such as blogs, Facebook,...

Social media has undeniably become a dominant phenomenon everywhere; yet most intranet experts continue to discount it as simply a collection of interesting features and emerging technologies with little relevance. Social media is indeed much more. Notably, some progressive social businesses are going out of their way to facilitate culture change through increased employee participation using mature, “enterprise-friendly” technologies.

Source: www.jboye.com Posted by support 1095 days, 10 hours ago

Intranets are getting more recognition as important business tools but there are still a lot of intranets out there that keep making the same mistakes. Based on my experience of what I see work really well and what does just ok I have compiled a list (in no particular order) of the top 10 common mistakes business’ make with their intranet:

• Busy and cluttered homepages
• Architecture that relies too much on organisation structure
• Inconsistent look and feel between sections

Source: katrinamarquesweb101.wordpress.com Posted by bee 1098 days, 11 hours, 24 minutes ago