The power of networking: From isolation to innovation

“No man is an island”, declared the English metaphysical poet John Donne rather portentously in 1624, within his famous Meditation 17. It is perhaps just as well that there wasn’t an intranet manager on hand to persuade him otherwise. If there had been, there’s a fair chance that Mr Donne would have downed tools and the English language might have lost one of its most famous aphorisms. Although it certainly isn’t their fault, the role of the intranet manager can indeed seem like a solitary island, lost in the surrounding sea. It’s an unfair analogy, but such individuals often appear as the lighthouse keepers of the information profession, conducting their duties in splendid isolation.

After roughly a decade of developing in-house web resources, the reasons for this are sadly all too clear. Whereas an external corporate website acts as a ‘look at me’ shop front for a large company’s activities, the intranet will usually contain material specifically targeted at a company’s workforce. The resource may well contain information that is business-sensitive, and there is the added complication that the intranet manager may well be a shade sheepish about showing their empire off to outsiders. But isolated though their role may be, today there is little excuse for intranet managers to be unaware of what is happening elsewhere. Following below are a few personal tips for keeping up to speed with best (and worst) practice within the world of in-house web resources. The list is cursory and far from complete, so if I’ve missed anything obvious feel free to curl your lip in a gratifying sneer. But in the main, these resources and techniques have proven useful for me.

Of course, there’s very much an element of preaching to the converted about all of this. If you’ve got this far, and you’re a regular Enterprise Information reader, you should be well informed as to what constitutes best practice with regards to intranets and portals. Taking it a stage further, there’s plenty of information available on the web that could help you to become a better intranet manager and there are no expenses involved, other than your time. If you haven’t already bookmarked it, check out the consultancy, Step Two Design’s website at www.steptwo.com. It contains a wide variety of worthwhile and easy-to-follow papers on knowledge-management related topics, including specific papers on usability, intranet and content management. Also investigate Gerry McGovern’s free fortnightly newsletter, New Thinking at www.gerrymcgovern.com, which delivers a range of sound advice on content management from a decidedly non-technical stance. Martin White’s website, www.intranetfocus.com, is another good source of advice and also details his many publications on the subject. Finally, if you have a burning question relating to your work duties you could do a lot worse than posting it on the Freepint ‘Bar’ (www.freepint.com). You’ll be impressed at how even the most arcane enquiry will usually receive quick and useful responses from fellow information professionals.

By following the examples above, you’ll receive a decent grounding on what constitutes a good intranet and the best methods for improving the resource that you have. But it’s also vital to move away from the ‘ivory tower’ approach to find out what’s going on in the real world. You have to get out and (apologies for the word, I can’t abide it) network a bit. Even the most anti-sociable and curmudgeonly among us stand to benefit from listening to what fellow professionals have been up to. Best practice is all very well, but you’ll get the grimy truth from one-to-one conversations with contemporaries. Learning about intranet worst practice is often far more instructive than hearing yet another example of when things went well.

Probably the best mechanism to do this is to see if there is a trade grouping of fellow information professionals in the sector that you work in. Go to a meeting or two; eat the sandwiches, drink the wine (hopefully), ask a few questions and listen. No names, and no pack drill, but having been a long-time member of two work-related societies, you can make some good friends – and pick up some interesting titbits along the way. Recently at such an event, I received a blow-by-blow account of what must have been the worst roll-out of a new set of intranet publisher guidelines ever. On a scale of disasters to hit the information profession, it didn’t quite rank alongside the destruction of the Great Library of Alexandria. But it made for diverting listening nonetheless – and focused the mind on what to avoid.

If this perception sounds a shade cynical, you’ll also learn a fair deal of good practice along the way – and I’ve made a fair few intranet-related clangers in my time, believe me.

If you’re serious about combining the two approaches – gaining examples of intranet best practice as well as liaising with like-minded contemporaries – it would make good sense to attend a conference or two. You (or your employer) will probably have to pay, but the benefits will almost certainly outweigh the cost incurred. If you’re reading this in the UK, the Intranet Benchmarking Forum’s annual conference, IBF Live is on the horizon, taking place in early October (www.ibfo rum.co.uk/index. asp). Slightly further down the line, at the end of November, the annual Online Information exhibition and conference is will be held at Olympia (www.online-information.co.uk/). Billed as the “world’s number one event for information content and information-management solutions”, if you’re not going to that – well, why not?

So there you have it. It’s generally fairly painless stuff – you could well make a few friends, and you’ll almost certainly pick up a few examples of glaring intranet worst practice along the way. And, in passing, you may even have some fun as well.