Intranet Focus

There is certainly a lot of information being published on intranets.  There are excellent reports  from Jane McConnell, James Robertson, Toby Ward and the Nielsen Norman Group, as well as the range of books and reports from the team at Step Two Designs. There are many very good intranet blogs , an increasing number of intranet-related conferences and the technology evaluation reports from [...]

I suspect that many SharePoint implementations are justified on the basis of improving collaboration, even though there is usually only at best anecdotal information about poor outcomes of collaborative working. Anecdotes usually form the basis of most books offering advice on collaboration, and the result that it is difficult to take advantage of the advice [...]

This is a list of companies and other organisations that have been profiled in the Nielsen Norman Group Intranet Design Annuals over the last four years. It may help you track down profiles of interest to your own organisation, either by sector or by country.  The reports are still available from the Nielsen Norman Group [...]

The subtitle of this report is The Year’s Ten Best Intranets, but this report is more than just very detailed profiles of ten  intranets.  The NNGroup have been running this competition since 2001 and so can place trends and developments into a long term perspective. What marks out these profiles is that they are not written by journalists [...]

There has been a lot of discussion about what a digital workplace might look like, especially by intranet managers who are not sure whether to embrace the concept or to resist it.  Jane McConnell has come up with four digital workplace scenarios,  Paul Miller’s new book on this topic is due out in March and Mark Morrell has been [...]

The tag line of this book, written by Gartner Inc. analysts Anthony J. Bradley and Mark P. McDonald,  is “how to use social media to tap the collective wisdom of your customers and employees”. At the JBoye Aarhus conference this year I was struck by an insight from Claire Flanagan (CSC) that you can’t plan [...]

Much of my career has been in the publishing business and on many occasions I have been faced with the problem of how to change a directory or report published on an annual basis into something that has renewed impact but maintains the quality and reputation of previous editions. It is not at all easy!  I [...]

This is the time of the year when consultants like to test themselves by forecasting what is going to happen in the year ahead. In this post I have brought together a personal selection of these forecasts on a range of intranet-related topics. Intranets What’s in store for the world of intranets in 2012  Paul Miller, Chief Executive [...]

I am an information scientist by profession, and sufficiently proud of the fact to tell prospective clients at an initial meeting. The Wikipedia definition of information science is a good one, but the historical background is weak, and for example makes no reference to founding of the (UK) Institute of Information Scientists in 1958.  Information [...]

I thought I would start the 2012 blog year by looking back, not just at 2011 but at some information issues that were emerging in 16th century Europe. One of the most fascinating books I read in 2011 was Too Much To Know by Anne Blair.  This very erudite book is all about the problems [...]