KonzeptioNerd

Intranet 2.0

Yet another article I’ve been working on earlier this year (together with BlueMars’s Tobias Kirchhofer) has made it between cardboard covers at last:

“BlueMars Intranet-Relaunch nutzt Web-2.0-Techniken” in: Frank Martin Hein, Elektronische Unternehmenskommunikation, Deutscher Fachverlag 2007.

We’re in good company with contributors from businesses such as Microsoft, Bertelsmann AG, Allianz SE, Meta Design, Kaufhof, Philips, SAP or Sony Europe. The book covers the full spectrum from cultural and communication theory via current trends in electronic media, planning and managing projects with digital media to hands-on reports.

Buy the book from Amazon: Elektronische Unternehmenskommunikation (Edition Horizont) (609 pages, all in perfect German, with a supporting CD, ISBN-10: 3866410786, ISBN-13: 978-3866410787).

When I wrote this article, we’d just rolled out our brand-new enirely Wiki based Intranet and had made some decisions that’d set it apart from our old, rarely used system: low entrance barrier (wikitext as well as rich text, collaborative development to take final cut responsibility from colleagues less used to express themselves in writing), low structural hierarchy, self-organisation, emphasis on commenting, inbound syndication (to prevent frequent bloggers from having to write the same things in two locations).

Today we find that many of the cues we planted have really been taken up and developed into an active knowledge management that far exceeds everything we’ve had before. People actually post from short link dumps that get commented on by the group to full-fledged project documentations that enormously facilitate cooperation within distributed teams.

What we have not seen so far is an extensive syndicating of colleague-blogs into the intranet or frequent intranet contributers turning into bloggers. I think we could find ways to encourage and incentivise those text-based forms of knowledge-creation, -preservation and -sharing. But the development of the BlueMars intranet goes to show that benefitting from digital media in your business communication is as much as matter of setting a corporate culture as of an onging commitment to educating people in your company about the potential of digital media.

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