Giraffe Forum

Managers need to focus on making things easy to do. If it’s not easy, it often doesn’t get done.
A couple of years ago I met a manager who had been specifically appointed by the CEO to improve employee morale. I gave him data that showed that his intranet had the lowest employee satisfaction ratings we […]

Most organizations are only operating at 60 percent efficiency even though they may have the most cutting edge information technology available.
I was at a conference recently where a speaker asked an audience of some 600 intranet professionals to raise their hands if their organizations used SAP. About 60 percent of the audience put their hands […]

Focus on saving time for your employees if you want to create an intranet that delivers true value to your organization.
“The source of material civilization is developed power,” Henry Ford wrote in 1926. “If one has this developed power at hand then a use for it will easily be found … The way to liberty, […]

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 […]