Tuesday, September 26, 2006

Settling in

It's been a while :o) 4 months, or thereabouts since the last update.

It's been a period of developing and publishing content, finishing the '"Company Handbook" style' sections off, helping people to produce content, trying to decide the best way to deal with incoming requests to publish things, keeping up with the editorial process.

We've also been adding to the list of things we'd like to do and looking at the next things to come... one of which will be using the Intranet to process 'live' operational data such as online project time recording (which will actually be done by the new finance system which is being implemented, it has a web interface which we have minimal control over).

We've also been checking the search logs to see what people can't find, updating the appearance of old systems which are still in use and available only via the Intranet.

It's a good time to take stock of things now and see how the thing is holding up and it's not doing too badly, however we are finding that people aren't getting the most out of it.

Currently we have all of the 'administrative' style information (such as booking annual leave) categorised and published. The names of items are still not entirely comfortable (but since we've not reached a conclusion on those in over a year they'll have to stay as they are for the moment :( ).

Things are structured and there is a clear logic to the structure, which has held up through all of the publishing we've done, but it's not 'in your face' enough for staff who only ever look at it for a few minutes at a time.

So it's time for a slight adjustment and as we're also approaching the time to design the 'operational' section it's a good time to review the overall structure and see if we can make it easier to see the logic in a shorter period of time.

Now the Intranet exists and people are talking about it and getting used to it and we are getting quite a lot requests to publish information, most of which will go into the 'operational' section which feels quite neat in the timing.

It will be interesting (and might be a bit time consuming) as it involves collaboration across the company and finding the time to get the necessary people together is going to be a challenge.

We're starting off with a plan...