Doug Cornelius .com

James Robertson, the managing director of Step Two Designs, developed a”6×2″ approach for intranet development.

He proposes that you work in 6 month chunks, planning on what you can deliver in the next six months. Any ideas that cannot be met in the six month time-frame are pegged into the following six month period.

I also really like his idea of designating versions of your intranet. (I think we are currently planning for version 5.0).

Read more in his August KM Column: 6×2: a new approach to planning or his book 6×2 methodology for intranets.

We are in the process of redesigning out intranet and keep running into navigational issues. We want to keep things user and tasked based. But we also want to represent the structure of the firm.

I found this post by Bob Mixon with his take on navigation for an intranet: Topical Versus Organizational.

Milissa Tarquini posted a story on web design: Blasting the Myth of the Fold.

We are currently re-designing out intranet and are wrestling with the issue of screen space. Everyone wants a link to their site or information on the home page and in a top-most location on the home page.

Milissa points out that it is hard to find out where the fold is located. The combination of users settings of different screen sizes, text sizes and resolution ends up putting the fold in a different places for different people.

Her point is to use visual clues like cut-off images and to provide compelling content. People will scroll if they think there is something to find.

After my earlier post on using YouTube as KM platform to supplement an intranet, I saw this story on the Intranet Journal by Troy Dreier: Will Video Kill the Intranet Star?

The Nielsen Norman Group pointed out American Electric Power as a company that makes extensive use of videos on its intranet. I was nearly knocked over by their investment in infrastructure: a $300,000 studio with four broadcast-quality cameras, four teleprompters, a full lighting grid, a green-screen stage, and four editing suites. Plus, a staff of five people for video production and two IT members to handle streaming events.

That is a serious investment in making videos available on their intranet.

E-mail comes and goes. We need a place to collect and build communication.

Email has become the principal means of business communication. My theory for its widespread adoption is that is just like typing a letter or making a phone call. Therefore, it was relatively easy for users to translate their existing communication processes to email. Although email has become widespread, it took years for it to get to that place.

Blogs and wikis are still in their infancy for business communication, but we should look ahead with their potential.

I find the key to enabling them as a communication tool is to tie them to the enterprise with an enterprise RSS feed aggregator. I recently looked at the Attensa product and tied it into the next generation of our intranet using Sharepoint 2007 .

The proverbial light went on over my head. I now see the intranet as a communication tool instead of a mere content repository.

The blog becomes the way to collect communication and distribute it. But the communication is no longer a disruptive email. It moves communication that is not actionable out of the email inbox. People do not need to save the email to later recall the message. The intranet search can easily retrieve the blog posting.

The wiki combines a document with the communication of changes to the document. Instead of drafting a substantive memo and circulating the memo by email, the user creates a wiki page. Those interested in/ subscribed to the wiki topic get a notice of the new wiki page. But the notice comes through the RSS aggregator instead of email. And the reader does not need to save the email and memo to retrieve the memo. The wiki moves an email and a bulky attachment out of the email traffic flow. The intranet search can easily retrieve the wiki page.

As we have been hit with the flurry of Web 2.0 tools, is Knowledge Management evolving to KM 2.0.?

As Matt points out in KM 2.0, KM has never been about the technology. The technology is just one tool to help unite people with processes to share knowledge.

The big reason Web 2.0 will not mean KM 2.0 is the percentage of participation. If you look at some of the participation percentages for the big Web 2.0 sites, only a very small percentage of user contribute content. [Creators, Synthesizers, and Consumers]

If 1% is the right amount of contributors to Web 2.0 platforms, apply that to the number of workers (or even worse, knowledge workers) in your enterprise. In my case that means for the 750 lawyers in my firm, 8 (I rounded) will contribute to a Web 2.0 like system.

Web 2.0 cannot equate to KM 2.0 because first Web 2.0 needs to be converted to Enterprise 2.0. The massive scale of the internet for producing content fails when it is translated to an enterprise level.

As James Dellow pointed out last month, Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0 merely provides some new tools for knowledge management.

I am excited to deploy blogs, wikis and RSS in our enterprise. But I do not expect they will operate on our intranet with the same process they do on the internet. In fact, I have been hesitant to even use the terms “blog” or “wiki” in the discussion of the new features coming in the next version of our intranet.

Ron Friedmann has reported [Strategic Legal Technology :: Demise of Document Management?] that the UK firm Lewis Silkin is replacing their Hummingbird document management system with Sharepoint.

As I pointed out in my posts last week on the four types of document searches, they lose the critical fetch and recall searches to get a more effective research search. The traditional DM is great system for managing documents; it is not a great system for knowledge management.

I prefer the approach that Tom Baldwin at Sheppard Mullin has taken with layering the Sharepoint search engine on top of the DM system. This gives you the best of both worlds with the great management of the DM and the superior search of Sharepoint.

CIO.com has a detailed article on search engine marketing. Although it goes into detail about the use of a search engine marketing specialist, there is enough background information on how to enhance the relevancy of your website in search results.

The same techniques carry over to intranet searching as well, since most intranet search engines operate in a similar way. The need text in the html of the page.

The ABCs of Search Engine Marketing – ABCs

Law.com published a review on LawPort:
Legal Technology – ‘By Law Firms for Law Firms,’ Does LawPort Deliver on Information Management?

Top 10 Tips for Improving Your Intranet
Tom Dunlap of the Intranet Journal provides his tips.

His number 1 item is keep it fresh (i.e. content is king).