The story so far

I had been in the intranet driving seat for two years. It was summer 2006. I had become aware of two things: the intranet was languishing a bit and all sorts of cool things were appearing on the consumer web.

Surely there must be a way to bring some of these things from the web to reinvigorate the intranet? I felt that the ease of use of tools such as Flickr, de.lios.us and Protopage were the key. If I could make the intranet publishing process as easy (and fun!)to use I would be on to a winner. But this would not deal with the other problem. I had heard comments from some rather senior people that they “could not find things” on the intranet and I suspected that, although we had a fair amount of content being posted each week, few people were reading it.

To address this, I was attempting to update the intranet’s taxonomy. I planned to use a card sort exercise to arrive at a new one. I anticipated that it would be a daunting task. I was also investigating enterprise search tools (but I got shocked by the sticker prices! – would find it hard to find the funding for that kind of money)

Then I started hearing stories of some enterprises using wikis to replace large parts of their intranets……. More in part 2 soon.