Pat’s Point of View

Anyone of my generation or older will likely be amazed by the rapid (and continued) growth of personal computer technology. In particular the rise in hard disk capacities. And it’s all good; today’s personal computing requires massive amounts of storage space. No longer do we store the odd document, spreadsheet or work assignments. Nowadays we’re talking audio, video, photos…hundreds or thousands of megabytes. On sale for a mere few hundred dollars.

Bringing this situation into sharp focus for me, was the situation on our little home network. We’ve got two Macs, three iPods, the occasional PC and a printer. For various reasons, my little family has been purely digital for almost 8 years now, so that’s a lot of data. Rarely do we listen to CDs anymore, anything we want to listen to is MP3 o AAC. Similarly, our photos are all digital, usually enjoyed on-screen and only sometimes printed. As are home videos, which do get burnt to disc when I have time (I think I’m backlogged to somewhere in 2004). There are exceptions, but commercial video is mostly DVD. We haven’t yet taken the step to having an online movie library (when the wife’s not looking an Apple TV and gigabit router might suddenly appear and change this).

Isn’t it all wonderful? Isn’t it great that you can fit some much stuff?! Right up until a hard disk barfs it and you lose everything. Whilst this hasn’t happened to me in many years, I am acutely aware it could happen at any time. It could have happened just then. Or then. (I won’t push my luck)

For years I’ve been backing up my data onto DVD, at first 4.7GB at a time, and then with dual layer, about 9GB at a time. But this is a pain when you’re talking about hundreds of gigabytes of data. And the various drives in our collection were running out of space. I had to start using the spare space on my video iPod to store stuff that wouldn’t fit anywhere else. It was clear something better was needed.

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As a member of the judging panel, I’m pleased to announce that the winners of the inaugural Intranet Innovation Awards were announced on Friday.

The team at Step Two have worked hard to make this happen, so it’s great to finally announce the winners. I can take only a small part of the credit, but it was good to be involved.

As was the aim of the awards, each category was won by a specific piece of an intranet, not the whole intranet. This has highlighted some really good ideas that are being implemented to meet specific business needs. I’m quite looking forward to next year!

After an embarrassingly long time, I have finally finished a case study of an intranet redesign project I did for Canon more than a year ago.

This project highlighted that intranets do not need to be structured in the ‘traditional’ way (ie like public websites).

Instead of a single home page and a rigid view of the site, a fresh approach was taken, and the information architecture for [this intranet] makes use of personalisation to efficiently meet the needs of Canon staff.

Lastly, it is worth noting that the information architecture techniques devised for websites apply equally to intranets, sometimes more so. This is a key lesson for experienced information architecture practitioners.

Continuing my ‘exclusive tips’ for those who read my blog, what you won’t read much about in the article is the intranet alignment workshop we ran.

In any organisation, there are many stakeholders who are involved in the design or management of the intranet. The first challenge confronting many intranet projects therefore becomes to create a common vision for the intranet, to align the many stakeholders, and to define the role that each stakeholder will play.

Ask anyone who has worked in a large organisation on a website or intranet project, and they will tell you that getting management buy-in can be very difficult. Political battles over ownership of the site, and thus over its redesign, are commonplace. And without some early alignment and consensus, trying to get approval for design ideas later on can be heartbreaking.

Just a half-day workshop, held after some initial needs analysis has been performed, can work wonders. Key stakeholders get their chance to give their input, they can see progress is being made, and as a group can discuss those things that are often assumed (like what is the intranet for?).