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Features
When developing intranets, companies often make significant investments in armies of consultants, whiz-bang technology, industrial-strength hardware, and cutting-edge visual design. Despite these efforts, a large percentage of intranet projects fail to meet expectations, or produce lackluster results. Often, these failures are due to the oversight of a fundamental premise: know your users and plan everything with them in mind. You are probably thinking, “Of course it’s about the user.” But this mantra is not always self-evident, nor is it easy to maintain. Many directives are quickly derailed by extraneous business goals, stakeholders who confuse themselves with users, inarticulate users, and personal agendas overriding best practices.
Staff directories (also known as phone directories, corporate phone books, or internal white pages) are generally the most used element of a corporate intranet. They are also one of the few tools that staff use every day, and as such, they have a considerable impact upon the efficiency of staff throughout the organization. The role of the staff directory is to provide an online source of staff contact details that is quick, easy, accurate, and complete. As the size of the organization grows, and the rate of change in the business increases, so does the importance of the staff directory. There can be no communication within an organization without the ability to first find the staff person to contact.
Columns
It seems like just a matter of time before everyone will be blogging—or at least know someone who knows somebody who is. Considering how open most of us are these days to new technologies, the likelihood seems high. Blogs are open-source publishing for all. They cover topics ranging from the mundane to the technical and inside the firewall, blogs can provide a knowledge marketplace.
Question: Our intranet has been owned by just about every department in the organization. It started in IT, who then handed it over to marketing because they managed the corporate site. It turned out that they had no interest in internal communications, so our corporate communications team took it on. Now this team is being disbanded and our intranet is about to be rudderless. Any suggestions as to who should be taking responsibility for the management of the intranet?
Read_Me_File
Reviewed this issue: Learning to Fly: Practical Knowledge Management from Leading and Learning Organizations, 2nd Edition, Contentmanager.net, and The Content Management Handbook
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