A number of articles have recently been published on collaboration. Focusing on collaboration tools, these articles have explored when they work, the challenges involved and how to avoid these problems in practice. In many ways, these articles have taken for granted the central aspect of collaboration: the people involved. This article will explore the human face of collaboration, touching upon a range of enterprise considerations. Collaboration can't be forced It make no sense to roll out collaboration tools to the whole organisation. Collaboration takes place between people, and can't be forced or created through the use of technology. While it

A lot of confusion and misunderstanding surrounds the term 'information architecture'. The multitude of activities that can be labelled with these two words span a vast variety of people, skills and situations. If you ask for an information architecture, what exactly are you going to receive in return? Similarly, if someone tells you they are going to provide you with an information architecture, for a website or intranet for example, what exactly does that mean? A primer, not a dictionary This paper aims to explain the many faces of information architecture. A precise definition of each term would be difficult,

Collaboration tools have been used in organisations for a long time now, and the new generation of tools is spreading at an incredible rate. Tools are being deployed in parallel across many different business units, irrespective of any organisation-wide strategy or support. A planned approach must therefore be taken to the management of collaboration tools within organisations. While it is left to a future article to outline a full strategic roadmap, the first step is to put in place a model of 'gardening'. This must be done now, before the 'horse has bolted'. Any delay will leave much cleanup to

Successful organisation-wide collaboration does not happen by chance. While the uptake of collaboration tools can be very rapid, some areas will use the tools well, while others will struggle (or fail). Rolling out collaboration tools is not without its risks. As outlined in the earlier briefing Collaboration tools are anti knowledge sharing?, the fragmentation of information can be greatly increased when the number of individual spaces grows. Organisations must, however, support collaboration (and collaboration tools) as the need for these is great. This briefing outlines some practical steps that all organisations should take to help business areas and staff make

The inaugural Intranet Innovation Awards celebrate new ideas and innovative approaches to the enhancement and delivery of intranets. Uniquely, these awards recognise individual intranet improvements, and not intranets as a …

There is no one-size-fits-all solution for meeting the needs of staff. Beyond the broadest level, the information needed by staff is not generic. Someone working in HR has quite distinct needs from a staff member in finance, the call centre, or in the sales team. This is why organisations are progressively implementing personalisation or segmentation features as part of their corporate intranets or portals. While the functionality that can be implemented varies greatly, there is a single goal: to better target information to the specific staff who need it. In practice, there are three main ways of segmenting staff needs

I'm chairing a conference on content management at the moment, thus the flood of CM related posts. One of the topics that has repeatedly come up is web 2.0 and user-generated content in specific. The question was raised: what do content management systems provide in this space? The answer is: not much. There is a significant gap in the ability of CMS products to handle user-generated content. Let's explore this further... Content management systems are fundamentally designed to support a publishing process. That is, people within the organisation produce the original content, it's reviewed and finally published. There is also

In a lot of the work that I'm doing at the moment, I'm seeing very ambitious goals for content management system (CMS) projects. Bundled up in the project are many different capabilities, beyond just page publishing functionality. This is causing a lot of problems. Organisations are going out to market looking for too much, not understanding what CMS products are best designed to do. This leads to a lot of disappointment, as well as blown out budgets. So I thought it might be useful to post a quick summary table listing what a CMS does, and what should be obtained

I've just released an article titled: Does your CMS vendor have product expertise? Following on from that, I would argue that this is now the "ante" for CMS vendor to stay in the game, and will be one of the major differentiating factors in terms of who survives, and who doesn't. To expand on that... Even the big international vendors started from humble roots, and still go through periods of "growing pain" whey they have difficulty supporting their ever-expanding client base. Some vendors have also gained quite a reputation for the difficulty in migrating from one product version to the

Choosing a content management system (CMS) is not just about finding the product with the right functionality. It's also about dealing with a vendor who can support your needs for the lifetime of the solution. You need to be confident that there will be more than just help-desk support - the vendor should offer regular (trouble-free) product upgrades, a clear development plan, and good mechanisms for handling the needs of each CMS customer. The challenge is that many vendors are great at code development, but poor at product management. While they are small this doesn't matter, but as they grow