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This presentation looks at common patterns of success and
failure in intranets, based on experience of working with dozens of intranets
from small non-profit organisations to multinational businesses. As it is often
easier to learn from mistakes, points will be illustrated with some "worst
practice" examples.
The advent of social media and Enterprise 2.0 means that
users are demanding ever more from their intranets. However, responding to the
challenge is not simply a matter of installing the right tool. Nor can
organisations just throw away the investment already made in the more
traditional intranet content. Formulating the right strategy and governance is
essential, and this means recognising where to be firm and where a light touch
is needed.
In this presentation we explore 10 examples of "worst
practice", illustrated with examples of the impact this can have.
- Promoting silence. A desire
to control what is said can lead to an intranet that is too locked-down. It
becomes seen as a corporate mouthpiece rather than a place where people can
share views and feed back to the company.
- Making
it all talk. The Communications department is often seen as the ‘owner' of an
intranet. However, a site that has nothing but news is unlikely to attract much
usage, and therefore ceases to be viable even as a communications
channel.
- Runaway
experiments. Without a clear strategy, users can find themselves with wikis,
social networks, SharePoint sites and content management systems all appearing
to cover the same thing.
- Hiding
all the good stuff. It is essential to work out what really matters to people,
and ensure that it is most prominent. Intranet search, deceptively, is harder
than web search, especially when content can be spread across multiple
tools.
- Making
your intranet all global or corporate. Organisations often want to give
employees the same homepage. This means that content has to be relevant to
everyone. Unfortunately what this actually means is that the content is not
particularly relevant to anyone. As a result, employees soon dismiss it as "nice
to know".
- Creating
information overload. A lack of clear channel strategy means that communications
can feel like information "feast and famine".
- Excluding half your work
force. Few intranets are accessible to people who work outside an office,
meaning that processes have to be duplicated.
- Ignoring
generations - how do you meet the needs of both technophobes and the Net
Generation?
- Making
your intranet unreliable. A surprising number of organisations tolerate systems
that are slow, unstable or appear to randomly lose people's work. Getting this
wrong can undermine any attempts establish an intranet as a new way of
working.
- Gizmo
interfaces - loading the intranet with the latest fashions such as coverflow,
geo-tagging and word clouds.
Building on a very popular session given at Online
Information last year, this presentation updates the original "Worst Practices"
with new examples from the social media world.
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