beatnic - just wondering

A year to the day since I embarked on this freelance adventure.

It’s been full of variety, full of people, full of learning, full of challenges and full of fun!

Thoughts to follow sooner or later no doubt.

I’ve got that song by Martha and the Vandellas in my head now. “Nowhere to run to baby, nowehere to hide…”

When I left the institution four months ago it was with the intention of “setting up on my own” as I put it. And thankfully things have got off to a very positive start, with some very interesting work and some great people.

As a friend recently put it, “You no longer belong to the organisation, you belong to the network!”

One of the things I’ve noticed pretty quickly is that when you work for yourself you simply cannot hide.

I’m not suggesting that I hid a lot when I was an employee, but there are ways of avoiding spending too long in the spotlight. And large organisations by their very nature allow layers of hierarchy and bureacracy to protect - and also hinder - their employees.

Out here you are your work. That’s it. What they see is what they get.

My grandmother once gave my father a plate. It was called a round tuit.

I was reminded of it today as I found myself running out of ways to procrastinate.

Using twitter to announce my predicament I quickly received what I needed from @shbib. A link to an article titled “Structured Procrastination” written and published by John Perry in 1995.

Excitedly I clicked on the link and was faced with a several hundred word article. The only thing for it was to go and make a cup of tea.

On my way back in to my home office I noticed several things I’d been meaning to do. Shelves to tidy. Things to move from my desk to a shelf. A pile of papers to straighten. Ways to organise things on shelves.

Eventually, having fired up Sigur Ros on itunes, I did read the article and I can thoroughly recommend everyone adds reading it to their to-do list. To quote:

One needs to be able to recognize and commit oneself to tasks with inflated importance and unreal deadlines, while making oneself feel that they are important and urgent. This is not a problem, because virtually all procrastinators have excellent self-deceptive skills also.

Today was my getting stuff done day. I’ve got a list. Invoices to write, research to plan, people to contact, filing, researching various financial products for the self-employed, reading the next bit of Getting Things Done. I’d set the day aside for these. The reality is most of them probably won’t take very long. But I keep putting them off.

One day I’m sure I’ll get a round tuit too.

Are you involved in intranet (in its broadest possible definition) content, design, management, publishing, thinking, consultancy, evaluation or strategy?

What’s on your reading list?

I’ll kick off with my blog subscriptions tagged “intranet” in google reader (view posts/subscribe to this list):

• Column Two - James Robertson in Australia, who is also behind the Intranet Innovation Awards.
• Currybetdotnet - Martin Belam, who I first met and worked with at the BBC when he helped us with our intranet search strategy back in 2002.
• Dilbert - keeps me sane.
• FastForward - stuff on so-called “Enterprise 2.0″.
• Globally local - locally global - Jane McConnell in France. Useful international and strategic perspectives. Annual global survey giving excellent insight and evidence if anyone needs to build a business case for an intranet.
• InfoDesign: Understanding by design - digest of design-related posts and articles (including interaction design, user experience design and information architecture) compiled by Peter J. Bogaards.
• Inside out - A relative newcomer to the intranet blogging scene and a must-read from Richard Dennison at BT.
• Intranet Blog - Toby Ward in Canada. Has worked with numerous companies and seen a lot of intranets - useful case studies and advice on avoiding common pitfalls.
• IBF Blog - Rotating bloggers on a monthly basis offering insight and analysis from research and evaluations of dozens of company intranets. [I wear an occasional Intranet Benchmarking Forum hat]
• Is this wisdom - Richard Hare on networking and sharing ideas.
• Learning Trends - Elliott Masie’s newsletter on the world of learning, work and technology.
• New Thinking by Gerry McGovern - killer content and the long neck.
• The Obvious? - Euan Semple, who started the BBC’s internal blogs, wikis, discussion forum, profile pages long before anyone was talking about Enterprise 2.0 or other such neologisms. Thought-provoking ideas and ruminations on social media, the internet, society and work.
• Signal vs. Noise - The blog from 37 signals makers of Basecamp and other useful, usable and desirable web apps.
• Webcredibles - Accessible writing on accessibility.

This gives me a manageable amount of info and insight and points to other conversations going on that are relevant too.

It’s difficult deciding what to tag “intranet” and what to tag “intranet-related” - as Richard Dennison asks what is an intranet after all?

I’ve tagged quite a lot, including the frequently updating news-based sources, as intranet-related to try to see the wood for the trees as it were.

Right, wrong, good, bad? Too introspective? What’s missing? What do you recommend?

It’s time to drag the intranet in to the twenty-first century. We need to think of the intranet as the digital workspace, or “my web at work.” As a worker I need access to all the tools and information I need to do my job. It’s becoming increasingly likely that not all of that lives inside the company firewall. And I won’t always be at my desk.

Gone are the days of the intranet being a single destination, a “website”, an online publishing - or rather broadcasting - medium for the internal communication function. Sure, there’s a place for internal comms on an intranet, just as there’s a place for payroll giving, blogs and project support tools, but it’s much more. It’s my web at work.

This new definition helps to clarify the role of the central intranet team in any organisation however large or small.

As Matt Jones once put it when discussing bbc.co.uk, “We’re not building a website, we’re building part of the web” - or words to that effect.

The role is not to lock down but to open up. To make the digital workspace as navigable as possible, and to make everything within it as findable and usable as possible.

Ever since I saw them and started using them I could see that if we had Delicious, Technorati and Bloglines on our intranet it would change the way we work and our perception of what an intranet is.

It’s something I’ve been presenting on at events recently to fellow intranet professionals.

There are so many reasons why this is important and exciting. Here are three:

• it takes the intranet to the next level and beyond the “firewall” - covering the web, the stuff you can see through your browser (whether it’s hosted internally or externally)
• teams, projects, communities of interest, communities of practice have new ways to share information, including bookmarks
• potentially fascinating (and useful) insight available from the tag-clouds that start to appear, an organic topology of interests and a real-time overview of what an organisation is thinking and maybe even which way it’s going

Thanks to Chris Tubb for sending me a link to this article by David Millen, Jonathan Feinberg, and Bernard Kerr of IBM about the excellent sounding stuff they’ve been up to in this field.

It never really existed anyway.

It’s no longer useful to call it the intranet. It’s just a concept. Everyone has a different idea of what the word means. That adds complexity. That means risk.

As an idea, a construct, it’s been useful, but moving forward it’s more of a hindrance. Who does it serve to call it the “intranet”?

The three ages of the intranet:

1. Attic geeks and vanity publishers
2. Structure and order, command and control
3. The death of the intranet

1. Attic geeks and vanity publishers

No law and order

Unmanaged content, unmanaged contributors

Poor/no navigation, poor/no search

Anarchy and chaos, and some quite good stuff

And why not? Now that the internet is here, everyone’s a web designer (right?), everyone’s a publisher – why shouldn’t that be true of intranets?

2. Structure and order, command and control

Control centre, rules, policy

Consistency, branding, homogeneity

Standards (W3C, design, editorial, accessibility…)

Search, Navigation

Framework, Structure

CMS, workflow, version control, templates

Governance

3. The death of the intranet

Intranet merges with desktop to become “screen-based working environment”

Oh and it’s still a portal if you want it to be but that’s always just confused things

Helps people do their job, perform tasks

Understands context

Attempting to control everything has stifled creativity and innovation and the willingness to share information and ideas with colleagues

But some of the online applications are starting to pay dividends, provide ROI. Particularly those which conducted user research as part of the design process and didn’t simply expose the inner “buiness-system” workings leaving people flummoxed and exasperated!

CMS has worked for some people and some content, but is not the panacea

One size doesn’t fit all

New stuff is cropping up all over the place – but it’s not all inside the organisation

Social bookmarking, folksonomies, blogs, wikis, RSS feeds, conversations on discussion forums

How do we keep track of it all?

How do we keep control?

Do we want to? Do we need to?

Contextualise content. If content is king, context is god.

Make it relevant.

Combine taxonomies (local top-down to the systems they describe, controlled classification system) and folksonomies (bottom up, how people out there have described the stuff)

Stuff out there is as relevant and useful as stuff in here

The firewall is a hindrance

It’s not the intranet anymore, it’s a (mainly) screen-based extension of what I do (when I’m working, maybe)

But I still need a way in.

Well, not just one way in…

Now… what should we call these ways in?

Blogger beware!

Job seekers who are also bloggers may have a tough road ahead, if our committee’s experience is any indication.

You may think your blog is a harmless outlet. You may use the faulty logic of the blogger, “Oh, no one will see it anyway.” Don’t count on it. Even if you take your blog offline while job applications are active, Google and other search engines store cached data of their prior contents. So that cranky rant might still turn up.

From Chronicle Careers via plasticbag.org.