Power-up those intranets (part deux)
Intranets can and must be truly powered by its users, for its growth, its sustainability and improvement as a primary knowledge management system. But, as I mentioned in one of my earlier posts, this is possible only when users are allowed and encouraged to participate.
Often, I see there’s no control sharing for pushing the content, a typical BOFH sys-admin mentality. When people become aware of permissions required, formalities, they just give-up:
I don’t need this. I want to contribute, but it’s not easy enough. I have to sign forms, get an approval and then add content, which is further screened by some other staff or admin. Yeah right. I’m better off doing my routine job. I don’t need the extra work just for the heck of it.
You see where I’m getting at?
If you don’t encourage your staff, people who work for you, then very soon all their enthusiasm will go out the window. Nothing gained. If that’s how you want it to be, then you might as well skip the rest of it. But if you care, and realize that your true investment is the knowledge that your staff will put together towards increased efficiency, reduced manhours and more profits, then I urge you to read-on.
The tech part: Power people with simple tools. A blog software and or a wiki depending upon the nature of information aggregation. For the totally uninitiated, and if you ever have to train anyone to do this, it wouldn’t take more than half an hour and it’s a lot easier than using Microsoft Word.
Adding and editing content: Rather than asking the sys-admins to do the job for you, you get your staff to do it. For one, they understand the info better than sys-admins and two, you have the control on content, its categorization, and index so that people can find it and benefit from it quickly and easily.
De-centralize: Different departments keep their publishings separate. I’m beginning to think that the conventional CMS is a bad idea in achieving this. You might ask then:
How are we to show them up on our intranet front page if they don’t belong together and kept separate?
I’ll come to that in the next section. But important thing is that by keeping a decentralized system help keep the system lean, very subject or discipline specific. It would also help maintenance to a certain extent (although in some cases may increase the work). Decentralized system reduces data crash, should it occur. You’d rather have one portion of your intranet go down than all of it.
Aggregation: Now that you have so many decentralized systems, how are you going to aggregate them together to form your daily news for the rest of your company? Simple. By using flexible feed aggregators like Planet or FeedWordPress. A flexible feed aggregator downloads news feeds published by web sites (de-centralized department intranet sites, in your case) and aggregates their content together into a single combined feed, latest news first. So, you have virtually any number of decentralized systems serving content maintaining their own identity in appearence and presentation and yet form a single and essential part of your main page without ever deploying a centralized CMS.
You could have separate blogs running exclusive commentary about say prices of raw material, industry related news, department-wise project progress, recreational news, logistics and anything that your company would benefit from.
How’s that for knowledge management?
Update [8th July]: There’s a nice post by Richard Macmanus On Bots and Content Creation / Aggregation that highlight some similar tools discussed above.
I guess this is a huge simplication of how content appears on Intranet.
The point you mentioned about permissions and what not is there for a reason. Corporations don’t want people to just start publishing. They do want to control of what gets published and who publishes. Let’s say that Director of HR comes to office in bad mood (after having fight with wife) and posts some stupid comment on Intranet or discloses a corporate secret. No corporation is going to take that risk and believe me people do make mistakes. (How many times have you hit ‘Reply All’ when you only wanted to Reply to original sender) And to prevent that mistakes from getting larger, a simple, push button publishing tool aint’g going to cut it in corporate intranet. Not in Fortune 500 company at least.
[Btw, I am not in favor of these approval process and all corporate juggling but I can appreciate why it's there.]
JD
Jul 5, 05 at 14:11No it’s not. If you let your IT department take care of the initial setup, it’s as good as ready to go. As a non-geek, I could implement this (including the setup, I might add), then techies could easly rip this apart to further enhance the system.
I agree to a certain extent. This is an internal matter. There are bound to be hiccups and typos and mistakes, but, there’s no gain if there’s no effort, not to mention that we’re talking about the intranet here, not the public site of the company.
There are ways of guiding people to stick to the rules of engagement and the company can deal with non-casual mistakes in the way they may please (take the offending content down; limit or revoke publishing rights, etc). But, that should not become a hindrance for people that have knowledge to contribute, those who are experts in certain things to share their ideas openly for the good of the company.
Jul 5, 05 at 14:45