Is It Time For Your Intranets Annual Performance Review?

8th July, 2010 - Posted By Sean R. Nicholson - 7 Comments

It never ceases to amaze me how few people trust their organizational intranets. A tool that was designed specifically for the purpose of helping employees do their job better and faster is often the joke of the water cooler. Yet organizations knowingly ignore the fact that employees don’t use or trust the information stored on their intranet.

Periodically, I have the great opportunity to sit in front of a group of employees and ask them about their intranet experiences. Often, it’s in anticipation of an intranet revamp, so the need for a “do-over” or an evolution has already been defined at some level. While the individual users and comments might be different, they usually go start with something like this:

Recent Volcanic Eruption Can Help Stress The Importance Of Your Intranet Apps

24th April, 2010 - Posted By Sean R. Nicholson - 2 Comments

Sometimes opportunities knock quietly….and sometimes they hit us with explosive force. The trouble is, we often miss them even though they are staring us right in the face. As an example, take a look at the recent volcanic explosion in Iceland. This natural disaster has demonstrated the need for business travelers to have access to their corporate information, regardless of where they are located.

Turn Your Intranet Into A Clown College

26th January, 2010 - Posted By Sean R. Nicholson - No Comments

As Intranet Professionals, think about whether your Intranet is being used to encourage new ideas. Do you have a campaign asking employees to behave like clowns? Do you have an idea center where employees can submit their ideas and vote on those that they feel would be valuable? Are your executives open to new ideas and are they actively encouraging innovation?

Out With The Old…Rethinking Outdated Intranet Portal Models Part II – Next Generation Portal Platforms

13th December, 2009 - Posted By Sean R. Nicholson - 1 Comment

The recent explosion of social media platforms coupled with the financial meltdown driving a need for operational improvement has left purchasers exploring low-cost open source options, which is driving commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) vendors to rethink their licensing models. In addition, purchasers of Intranet software have started to expect expanded social media functionality and expanded options for licensing/hosting as Software as a Service (SaaS) becomes more popular. In this piece, we’ll focus on the new platforms available for Intranets and some of the options available to organizations to reduce internal costs and maintain system stability while ensuring that their users have access to a wide variety of features.

Out With The Old…Rethinking Outdated Intranet Portal Models Part I – Introduction

3rd November, 2009 - Posted By Sean R. Nicholson - 9 Comments

Over the last few years, the social media boom has forced Intranet portal vendors to rethink some of their licensing models and expand their feature functionality. “Traditional” intranet portals that are simply presentations layers with a back-end content management system just don’t cut it anymore. Instead, organizations want their employees to generate peer-to-peer content using 2.0 functionality like blogs, wikis, and tagging instead of relying on one-way messages from the top.