Intranets and ideal worlds
I was asked the question today - in an ideal world, what would you put on an intranet. So I sat down and had a brainstorming session.
Straight off the top of my head the first things that came to mind were blogs. They're quick and easy to use, and are the perfect tool for getting updates out quickly. Plus you then have an archive of the updates. Currently, if you miss an update in the 'What's New' section, that's it, you can't see it again.
Other things were things were no brainers like having a separate page for individual practice areas or departments, and topic pages that bring together a wide variety of material on a single topic.
Something I'd really like to implement is the use of wikis. Initially, this would be a trainee specific one. It would be nice if trainees could contribute to a wiki on their current seat as a way of creating a knowledge repository that can then be used by the next trainee in the seat.
And in my idea world, the intranet would function a bit like a portal and a bit like Pageflakes. I don't actually use pageflakes currently but I do like the concept and see how you could transfer the concept to a firms intranet. Being able to specify what you want to see when you open the intranet ensures that you're getting the most relevant information straight away and I think that could really appeal to lawyers.
There are so many other things I thought of, just sitting thinking for 10 minutes. And they're all technologically possible, the problem is getting the ideas to become reality. But in my ideal world, all these things would be standard.
In an ideal world, what would YOU put on your intranet?
1 comment:
I love the concept of trainees doing a wiki, but I know that the reality would probably end up with them saying "but it's not my job"! Or pretending to do it, but getting me to do the research and accidentally forgetting to credit me... And they're so possessive of 'their' work that to lose part of their ownership within a wiki might be hard to persuade them into.
Our in-house intranet is already pretty good for what we want, acting as a portal for most data, archiving and making searchable our current awareness and internal info. Although a customisable opening page might well appeal to some staff...hhmmmmm...
The only thing stopping us from doing some things is the traditional library-must-play-second-to-IT / they don't know about technology mindset. And the resistance of fee earning staff to anything that takes more than 7 seconds to learn about!!
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