Organisations often envisage their intranets as integral to the way staff do their jobs. Staff are expected to visit the intranet daily. While this is an admirable goal, it doesn't necessarily match the reality of most intranets today. There are clear reasons for staff to use the intranet, but these are not always well understood. In practice, there are two key reasons for a staff member to come to the intranet: to find a specific piece of information, or to complete a specific task. Recognising this, intranet designers can ensure that intranet resources are targeted in ways that will have

Scenarios are narrative descriptions or stories that concisely outline how something will work in practice. In the context of a content management system (CMS) project, scenarios are a very effective way of documenting key CMS requirements, and they complement the formal lists of functional requirements typically found in tender documents. Content management scenarios provide a 'day in the life' description of how the CMS will be used, for example: Richard enters the text for the page, and creates a link to the supporting PDF. Once the content has been spell-checked, Richard submits the page for review by Jane, his manager.

I've just had my book review of The Myths of Innovation published on Boxes and Arrows. To quote: Innovation is a hot topic at the moment. Actually, innovation has been a big thing for last hundred years or more, but perhaps we needed the profusion of business magazines and books to bring this observation into sharp focus. With the tech sector on the ascendancy (again), driven in part by the Web 2.0 movement, examples of innovation are everywhere. We've moved beyond the notion of the knowledge economy to recognize that innovative ideas can be the foundation for disruptive business models.

Something has really crystallised for me over the last few months in my discussions with many intranet teams. More often than not, these teams are quietly working away, delivering valuable but unseen improvements to the intranet. This includes implementing a new CMS, cleaning up content, developing taxonomies and adding search functionality. All of these activities are valuable, and probably necessary. They are also invisible and often unrecognised within the organisation as a whole. Now I've talked often about the importance of focusing on tangible and visible improvements, but let me state that more bluntly: When it comes to improving intranets,

Intranets have now grown to be core tools for most organisations, tools they cannot do without. Despite this, it is still a struggle for intranet teams to gain the resources and support they need to sustain and grow their sites. In general, it is not hard to describe what the 'perfect intranet' looks like, and each intranet team can generally paint a clear picture of their desired future site. What is needed, however, is a roadmap that helps intranet teams to get from 'here' to 'there' within current resource limits and other constraints. The 6x2 methodology provides a powerful new

Implementing a new website or intranet is a unique opportunity to work with new functionality and ideas and push the bounds of what the site will do. When a new underlying platform is being implemented, such as a content management system or portal, the scope for rethinking the site can be increased further. Yet, despite all of this opportunity for change, the simple rule of thumb is that the new site will be at best 20% different from the current site. There are fundamental reasons for this, which will be explored in this briefing. The implications of the rule for

“We’re extremely busy, and so are all the other vendors.” This is what I heard from a number of the vendors at the recent Open Publish conference in Sydney. More …

There are a lot of content management system (CMS) products in the marketplace, over 140 in Australia alone. There are new products springing into existence even as this is written. …

When it comes to information management or content management strategies, particularly at the enterprise level, there is a strong tendency (and desire) to create long-term plans. These plans may outline activities more than of 18 or 24 months in advance, starting with the deployment of base infrastructure, through to the final delivery of strong business functionality. These plans mostly fail, and few ever end up delivering the hoped-for benefits. While this is not an argument for abandoning strategic planning entirely, it raises a question whether long-term plans are the most sensible approach. This briefing will explore some of the issues

Getting participants for website research can be difficult, but a few simple steps can help make the process go much more smoothly. This article outlines steps modelled on the approach taken to recruiting users for a recent website redevelopment project for a tertiary education institution. The research activities included interviews, focus groups and usability testing. Gather available information As outlined in the previous article Start user research by talking with staff, an ideal place to start is with a series of staff interviews. These can provide an excellent initial picture of website users and some of the relevant issues. Staff