thinkIntranet Strategic Intranet Management

I’m stymied. I went shopping the other day at J. Crew in advance of our vacation. The nice and very helpful sales associate there persuaded me to give over my email address for potential personal shopping services (I know - silly, really). A few hours later I’m just about ready to close the lid when all of a sudden I see this fellow has friended me on Facebook. Yikes. This presents an entirely new situation for me. The people who connect to me on Facebook and who I don’t know well are usually work-related acquaintances, and I refer them over to my Linked In profile with hardly a thought. But what about this nice young man??

In an increasingly virtual working world, Intranets must be a powerful and valuable expression of the organization’s brand and culture. Any company concerned about growth, retention and business process efficiencies will need a coherent and executable Intranet strategy to succeed.

I’m excited by Intranet management because it represents an intersection of great new technologies such as blogs, wikis and social tagging, with traditional Information Management concepts such as taxonomies, metadata, content authoring and editorial workflows.

In addition, any Intranet strategy inevitably struggles to find the right balance of power and process between the communicators and the technologists as well as the employer and the employee.