thinkIntranet Strategic Intranet Management

Just read James Robertson’s Post “Web Workplace: A new word for Intranet”.

I agree that Workplace describes a more holistic view of for what typically fulls under the “Intranet” umbrella. A few years ago now, IBM adopted the term to describe a new organization formed when the Corporate Intranet team moved out of Communications and under the CIO. The mission of the “Total Workplace Experience” group extended to everything “on the glass” - which I think was (and still is) the right way to think about things.

green [green] –adjective
1. Not fully developed or perfected in growth or condition.

I’ve been waiting for a while now to invite the J&J Global Procurement community members to check out the new MySite capabilities and features. MySite – a personalized employee information page, offers J&J employees a place to identify skills, responsibilities, colleagues, documents and more in one personalized view. It also attempts to aggregate activity across the SharePoitn platform - surfacing sites and documents that you’ve got in other SharePoint sites.

I really enjoyed this post by Mike Gotta about whether SharPoint is “e2.0” or not - or whether it is even relevant to ask the question. This post is a great synopsis of the issues around enterprise collaboration and 2.0 adoption. Mike is clearly channeling many lives right now, including mine! http://mikeg.typepad.com/perceptions/2009/03/circling-around-to-enterpri…

Mike makes the point that e2.0 is not about the platform, or the technology, but about the conceptual framework for work that any organization is bound by. SharePoint for any organization is only as successful as as an e20 solution if it is implemented in the context of the organization’s culture and climate. And, as Mike says, a little customization doesn’t hurt (okay, maybe a ton of customization).

A strange thing happened to me a few months ago at J&J: The manager who had hired me into J&J left the company, and I was moved to a temporary manager in the same team while new reporting lines were sorted out. Around the same time, I had been starting to look at my new MySite page - just released in a sort of “beta” for J&J employees. One day, I noticed that my management line had changed again - instead of my temporary holding manager, me and a line of other Procurement folks now reported into a whole new group.

Huh! I thought - odd that nobody let me know ahead of time - but maybe they meant to, or HR jumped the gun on the change.. who knows.

I’ve been having more and more conversations with folks around J&J who are interested in Intranet Management for the company as a whole. I recently attended a meeting of communications professionals where two J&J senior executives had a very engaging discussion about how J&J is a company of opposing forces: A Family of Companies looking to converge, standardize and connect across the collective, and a decentralized stable of individual brand and company identities, retaining the agility and speed characteristic of small companies. It is these opposing forces, they suggested, that keep the company in motion, but which at the same time present an ongoing challenge when considering employee engagement, process standardization, corporate identity, and culture.