I just wanted to say a few words about the intranet at my workplace. How people share information/knowledge inside a company is an interest of mine so I was curious about what I would find at Laws R Us.
A little background. I learned the web as, along with a few coworkers, we built the local intranet at Not Big Blue. There were no rules to follow so we created a bunch of stuff--mostly ugly pages with piles of links to things that usually loaded when you clicked on the link. Most of it was built according to the whims of the managers who used our services, particularly the "vanity" pages with the manager's picture and some words of corporate wisdom or a mission statement. That intranet was well used but it was nearly impossible to find specific information since there wasn't an intranet search available.
At Whatever You Want Widgets there wasn't much time to write things down so only the very dedicated people did it. After years of information frustration, however, we did get a movement going to use a wiki (look it up at wikipedia.org) to collect information that everyone needed but no one knew how to find. Some people entered information consistently but most didn't and I don't think many people looked for information there since they didn't expect the information to be written down. I hope it's working better now but people there are even busier than when I left so they have even less time to document their work.
At Laws R Us someone has implemented a fancy templated solution. Home pages are for "communities" which could be a company organization, an interest group, or any group that needs the same information (e.g., new employees). Projects have mini-repositories that allow you to easily find, upload, and download documents, even letting you do searches inside individual projects. Every project in my part of the company has a repository and I can view information in all of them. The problem with the intranet is that's slow and I often have trouble downloading documents. Some days it drags so much that after I click on a document link I flip to another task instead of waiting. I love the potential benefits but it's irritating.
Some people work outside the system. My organization has a minimal templated home page but also has a great, old-school, ugly web page with lots of very useful links that I use every day. It loads fast, everything works correctly, it required no software to create, and it can be updated quickly (but only by the owner).
So which is better? Well, what is technology for? Answer the second question and then you'll have your answer to the first.
A little background. I learned the web as, along with a few coworkers, we built the local intranet at Not Big Blue. There were no rules to follow so we created a bunch of stuff--mostly ugly pages with piles of links to things that usually loaded when you clicked on the link. Most of it was built according to the whims of the managers who used our services, particularly the "vanity" pages with the manager's picture and some words of corporate wisdom or a mission statement. That intranet was well used but it was nearly impossible to find specific information since there wasn't an intranet search available.
At Whatever You Want Widgets there wasn't much time to write things down so only the very dedicated people did it. After years of information frustration, however, we did get a movement going to use a wiki (look it up at wikipedia.org) to collect information that everyone needed but no one knew how to find. Some people entered information consistently but most didn't and I don't think many people looked for information there since they didn't expect the information to be written down. I hope it's working better now but people there are even busier than when I left so they have even less time to document their work.
At Laws R Us someone has implemented a fancy templated solution. Home pages are for "communities" which could be a company organization, an interest group, or any group that needs the same information (e.g., new employees). Projects have mini-repositories that allow you to easily find, upload, and download documents, even letting you do searches inside individual projects. Every project in my part of the company has a repository and I can view information in all of them. The problem with the intranet is that's slow and I often have trouble downloading documents. Some days it drags so much that after I click on a document link I flip to another task instead of waiting. I love the potential benefits but it's irritating.
Some people work outside the system. My organization has a minimal templated home page but also has a great, old-school, ugly web page with lots of very useful links that I use every day. It loads fast, everything works correctly, it required no software to create, and it can be updated quickly (but only by the owner).
So which is better? Well, what is technology for? Answer the second question and then you'll have your answer to the first.
posted by changingagain at 8:45 PM
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