Spent most of the morning in a session looking at a CMS for recruitment which is being deployed on our website and intranet site this quarter. Couple of points for me. One – hadn’t realised how excited I am about CMS. Sad I know but never met a CMS that I didn’t want to interrogate with questions on keywords, search, T7Cs etc. Secondly, it pained me that we spend so much time on tweaking systems with workflows that may happen once in a million occurrences. I suppose its good that we attempt to cater for the quirks of users/publishers, but these ‘refinements’ make it so much harder to deploy as a simple, efficient system.

Is it just me or is the reputation of search on public search engines now getting the same reputation as internal applications? Saw an item on the BBC site on Friday. Searched for it last night and it doesn’t appear anywhere. Also found the search on Youtube and Google is letting me down more and more. I know it’s out there but just can’t find it.

Maybe part of the problem is I’m far more aware of what content exists externally and far more demanding of the search engine to present it to me. The same issue as internal search applications I suspect.

Maybe the answer is the same. Content will be found if it wants to be found – i.e. there is some monetary value to the publisher that this is found and resource/budget is invested accordingly. Any of the collaboration or networking sites just have to accept the same fate as many intranet sites that have little or no resource for search.

Nearly the end of the working year so doing some musing over the last decade in the world of knowledge and intranets. We’ve seen:

• the rise of crowd power – crowdsourcing
• people’s ability to use online for their own ends
• the growth of Google
• broadband
• explosion of content generation
• social networks
• anytime, anywhere intranets
• rss feeds
• blogs – then bite-sized remarks through Twitter
• cloud computing 

What will be the trends for the next decade? For me its lies somewhere around mobile and location-based services. Local may regain its popularity, rather than global (I think we already start to see this in terms of knowledge); intranets will become the workplace of tomorrow – energy efficient practices will keep more people away from the physical workplace; we will also see the demise of traditional websites and intranets as content looks for channels and audience rather than defined databases.

The two trends for me will be governance and community.

Governance – how well do we want the space governed – in terms of trust, authentication and validation?

Community – we must excel in finding, developing and enhancing communities and learn how to gain mutual value from them. This will focus more around people than technology. We should see the digital channels as not another way to distribute content. Our online experiences should revolve around building community and collaboration, rather than the production and consumption of content. 

One of our departments, with deep pockets so it would appear, has just produced a slick, flash (in terms of look and technology) Contact Card ??? enabling internet users to see ???who does what??? in that department. Announced with great fanfare it looks neat, does its job and ticks a box ??? but it leaves me uneasy. It has no integration with the employee directory (where their listings still appear with old photos ??? rather than the high resolution in the Contact Card). Its sits on a server that is not picked up by our search and it doesn???t talk to our ???peoplesoft??? systems. Other departments are now asking for something similar but it???s unsustainable, in terms of budget and production.

I fear one of the effects of the recession has been the growing divide of a two tier knowledge offering. Those departments with budget produce something pretty, but it has little impact on the overall development of a knowledge sharing platform. The divide between a national health care system and private system springs to mind. Although we should applaud the innovation, or spending budget on it, it can???t be scaled to include whole organisation without a great demand for budget and resource. Would a better approach have been to collectively look at how we can improve the contact systems throughout the organisation? There would have been little fanfare for this but the greater good would be achieved. However, would such a project ever have got off the ground? In these economically uncertain times there are great opportunities to showcase something new (as there is very little competition) but whether it has any lasting value is another matter.

One of the popular features we added to our new intranet template is the ability to create a ‘friendly’ URL to a content page (I’ve also seen this described as a ‘direct URL’; ‘vanity URL’; ‘short name URL’ etc). It allows the content publisher to set-up a URL which makes sense to the user, rather than be left to the complexities of the technology infrastructure to create the URL. 

One of the results this function is the increasing ‘seeding’ of these URLs in other channels other than the intranet. Email is a prime example. Word documents, powerpoints, Excel etc all now have friendly URLs appearing in there – allowing intranet content to migrate seamlessly across our applications. Looking at the latest metrics nearly 1500 pages were used as entry point to intranet content. I blogged previously of the decreasing value of the homepage. We can see intranet behaviour now mirroring the external world where seeding of content is now far more important than trying to attract traffic to a corporate website. Publishing on the intranet is not enough. Its how and where you seed it that counts.

• Two important currencies of the web – trust and attention
• Social media tools areeasier to activate than adopt
• Integrate social media with what the organisation is doing on a day-to-day basis.
• What is the value and benefit of these tools? People with little interest in IT begin to engage
• What are the security issues around this? Data protection, search, data loss, threat of reputation
• Every organisation needs a social media participation policy
• Are we creating a technology democracy – freedom of speech inside the workplace? Or is this just a myth. Things that matter, employee rights etc are rarley on the agenda for social media.
• Is there greater engagement in organisation that already have employee forums within their structure (trade unions, employee councils etc)?