Giraffe Forum

There is a wonderful future ahead for internal communicators who focus on content as a productive asset.
Giving control of an intranet to a traditional communicator is a bit like giving a pub to an alcoholic. It’s happy days. There’s so much to publish. All the stuff they never read offline can go on the intranet. […]

Traditional managers often lack the skills required to understand if an intranet is successful or not.
I was once talking to a manager about how the intranet could save staff time and make things easier, when he shook his head dismissively. “It’s not the job of management to make life easier for staff,” he told […]

Low-value content is destroying the usefulness of intranets and public websites. It needs to be stored separately.
Andrew Leung is a computer science researcher at the University of California. His team analyzed a large data/content environment over a three month period. Their findings included the following:

More than 90 percent of the files were never accessed.
Of those […]

Intranet search is appalling because people don’t want their content to get found, and the organization does not value the importance of finding.
Why do so many of the best organizations in the world have ass-and-cart search engines? The quality of search is astonishingly bad within most organizations. And what’s even more astonishing, nobody’s in charge […]

The first step in creating a genuinely useful intranet is to ban the intranet team from using the word “information”.
“‘Distribute information’ is by far the primary perceived role of the intranet, increasing by 7 points from 2006 up to nearly 60 percent saying “absolutely” in 2007. However, “facilitate collaboration” stagnated at 20 percent and “facilitate […]

Installing Google for your public website or intranet does not replace the need for professional management.
The cult of technology can be disturbing. For years, a scruffy bunch of people within organizations went around muttering: “A Portal. A Portal. What we need is a Portal.”
Some of these people became seriously disturbed and could be […]

The Web is supposed to replace manual service with self-service, but sometimes our number one task on a website is to find someone to talk to.
Over the years, I have noticed that a key task, particularly on intranets, is to find people. This is somewhat ironic when you consider that the business case of a […]

Organizations have an overwhelming desire to own and control. Even within organizations, each unit/department is constantly trying to prove that it is important.
The intranet emerged as a classic organization chart structure. Each unit wanted its own website and everyone wanted a link on the homepage. Each unit was not so much concerned with helping […]

The theory of intranet personalization is wonderful. The practice is generally woeful: hugely expensive implementations that totally fail; massive maintenance overheads and very little employee uptake.
According to the Jakob Nielsen report, Intranet Design Annual 2007: The Year’s 10 Best Intranets, “Many entries and almost all of the winning intranets offer extensive personalization features.” This is […]

In the historical context of the organization, the intranet is definitely the new kid on the block. Properly managed, the future for intranets is very bright indeed.
I meet a lot of intranet managers who are frustrated with their jobs. It’s easy to understand why. But we need to be clever here. We need to get […]