thinkIntranet Strategic Intranet Management

Melcrum’s latest version of their “Transforming Your Intranet” report includes a contribution from me on recession-proofing your Intranet. So far I’ve just glanced through the free extract, but it looks like a valuable report for any organization considering a more strategic and successful Intranet Management program. The report came out last November (hmm.. I guess I should Google myself more often).

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.

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.

The work with the Global Procurement Intranet at J&J has really picked up speed - after four months now at J&J I feel that I’m finally starting to build a more comprehensive picture of the organization I’m in, as well as the benefits and limitations of the SharePoint platform.