denotes premium content | Sep 9 2010 
Enterprise Information archive
Volume 1 Issue 7
Editor's letter
The
But the Act is not without its critics. A hard-hitting report published in 2004 by Bob Phillis, chief executive of the Guardian Media Group, states that the FOIA is woefully inadequate for a modern democracy and that ministers should not exercise the right of veto that the Act gives them.
This view is echoed by Maurice Frankel, director of the Campaign for Freedom of Information: “So long as this corrosive veto exists, ministers won’t take the Act seriously – they know they can overrule the information commissioner and cling to their secrets.”
Let’s also remember that the
Few will argue that the FOIA represents a phenomenal opportunity for
I hope you enjoy this month’s issue. As always, if you have any comments, questions or suggestions, please do not hesitate to contact me at jschofield@ark-group.com.
Editor
Features
Evolving your intranet into a corporate portal
Making the move from intranet to corporate portal is in many ways a natural evolution, but seldom straightforward.
In the post-dotcom age, the corporate portal has enjoyed a meteoric rise in popularity. A well designed portal integrates internet and intranet content, corporate databases, e-mail systems and enterprise applications (eg, Oracle, PeopleSoft, SAP), empowering employees to increase business efficiency, improve the quality of corporate relationships and maximise value throughout the entire enterprise. However, while the move from intranet to corporate portal is in many ways a natural evolution, it is seldom straightforward. With this in mind, I will outline Aegis Group’s approach to portal development and discuss some of the issues organisations need to think about as they decide whether to evolve their own intranet into a portal.
Employee self-service: information on demand
Meeting the demands and needs of employees through the development of an employee self-service intranet.
Day one. I’m here. My first day. I wonder how things are organised around here? What’s the environment really like to work in? How will I find out what to do? Where is the canteen? Why is that person at the desk over there staring at me? Questions, questions, questions, something we all have when we start a new job.
“Knowledge is power” as Francis Bacon said in 1597. No, this is not an article of historical philosophy, but the quotation is relevant to the question in hand. I only have to think back a few years to remember people who believed that one way of making themselves irreplaceable in an organisation was to be a font of knowledge. To accomplish this they had to ensure that the process of finding the ‘font’ was equal to that of the quest for the Holy Grail. Having invested so much into your quest for information you were only too willing to infer on the provider the status of ‘information guru’. You were now in an inner circle of people who knew where to find the information. You, too, were ‘in power’.
Mid-market ECM
When deploying an enterprise-content-management system, mid-size companies would do well to avoid ‘vendor envy’. By Jessica Twentyman.
When it comes to choosing an enterprise-content-management (ECM) system, Meta Group analyst Andrew Warzecha has a simple piece of advice for mid-size companies: Bigger is not necessarily better.
Too often, he says, these kinds of organisations – which he defines as those with between 500 and 5,000 employees – suffer from a condition he calls ‘vendor envy’; that is to say, they long to deploy the kind of end-to-end, enterprise-class ECM packages from companies such as Documentum, FileNet, Interwoven and Vignette that are typically implemented by far larger organisations.
The portal promise
The benefits of enterprise portals have been well publicised. But looking beyond the market hype, what does the future hold for a technology that often flatters to deceive? By Martin Fustes.
Imagine you run a small high-street retail business. The shop has a large stock. Some time ago that level of stock became too great to keep entirely on the premises so a storage facility was rented a mile or so away in which to store the bulk of it.
Regulars
It’s a question of usability
There was a bizarre sense of deja vu surrounding the start of 2005 on more than one front. The much-hyped 1000th UK Number 1 single turned out to be the ancient (and fairly cheesy) Elvis Presley ballad, ‘One Night’. This annoying landmark (if it had to be a song by Elvis, then why not more substantive fare such as ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ or even ‘Suspicious Minds’?) coincided with the publication of a Jakob Nielsen ‘Alertbox’ for mid-January that echoed a similar theme. In this, his regular bi-monthly commentary on usability issues, the web’s best-known guru on such matters produced evidence to support the argument that almost 90 per cent of usability guidelines from 1986 are still valid.
Recommended steps when outlining a CMS strategy
Selecting a content-management system will impact a wide range of business processes and information systems. For this reason, the procurement of a CMS has to take place within a strategic context, and based on as rigorous a business case as possible.
After the content audit is over…
Welcome to part two of this two-part article on content auditing. Previously, I covered why you should think about conducting an audit and some tips on getting started. In this second part, I will provide some pointers for once the audit is underway and, most importantly, some tips on how to make sure you don’t end up in same position a year from now. I will then look at some of the benefits you can gain from a content audit to help justify those all important business cases and funding requests. By Lynda Rathbone.
The last word: Opening up IT to disabled people
Most of us don’t give it a second thought as we punch the buttons on our telephone handset, but for Jamie Branford, who works at an Inland Revenue call centre in the UK, dialling someone on a conventional phone is virtually impossible – because he can’t see well enough.
For years he was confined to mundane administrative tasks until last year his employer adapted its systems to cater for Jamie’s poor eyesight. By displaying a keyboard on screen and providing a magnification program, the Inland Revenue enabled Jamie to dial calls and read scripts.
Jamie is not alone – there are some seven million disabled people of working age in Britain, many of whom cannot use a computer without assistance. And as the population ages, more and more of us are going to need help using the tools that are an essential part of most white-collar work.
