Orchestrating the Intranet for Knowledge Management

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Patrick’s taxonomy development infographic has sparked off a little friendly competition in the office. The infographic you see above is my attempt at explaining the different pieces of an intranet puzzle that KM practitioners may have to deal with, and how they all fit together.

This is the link to the pdf version – Intranet_Poster.pdf. Note that it is formatted for A2 size and you will need to set your printer to print within paper size for smaller sizes.

I would like to commend Patrick for his sportsmanship, for even though my poster is evidently better than his, it did not hold him back from providing some of the explanations that you see on the poster.

5 Comments so far

michelle lambert

Another great piece of work from Straights Knowledge. Well done guys, We recently had a session here in Melbourne around this type of challenge and the folks here will be very impressed to see all the work you have done joining the dots with this infographic.

keep up the good work

Posted on May 15, 2012 at 01:06 PM | Comment permalink

Tim

Hi Edgar

Impressive chart; and yes, I can confirm all these aspects while running a global document sharing platform. For example, it’s amazing how important file naming is and I am still surprised how difficult it is to convince people to make self-explaining titles. And Governance, this is to ensure that employees understand what is it for and when to use the intranet. We are putting a lot of focus on this.

At the same time, I am missing something on your chart, which I would consider one of the most important things in an intranet and for knowledge sharing; some people might argue it’s not really the scope of an intranet… Using a buzz word, I would call it Social Collaboration. Bringing teams and communities together on a central platform to share, discuss, work together, etc. This is where a lot of the companies’ knowledge is created and shared - in our daily work life.

For me it is important that social collaboration is happening on the intranet; it should be integrated with the central knowledge repository, webbed together. In recent workshops at our company with many business stakeholders we agreed that ‘One Platform’ is one of the guiding principles for a new collaboration and communication platform: all the elements of e-mail, calendar, tasks, communities, file collaboration, knowledge repository, etc. should be available in one place to ensure usage and global connections.

All the elements you have on your chart are supporting the social collaboration; and for example ensure that information and knowledge created in one team can easily be spread and discovered by others within and outside the organisation.

How do you see that in your projects?

Posted on May 15, 2012 at 02:36 PM | Comment permalink

Michael Sutton

In Patrick’s chart, I was very encouraged to see the use of the WARRANT. To me, this is an integral element that invigorates buy-in from the stakeholders. In my recent foundational MBA knowledge management class at Westminster College, I took two weeks of a 7-week course to DRAFT and FINALIZE the wiki charter for our Atlassian Confluence KM-Wiki Project. All the learners where amazed at their reflection upon recent corporate wiki initiatives in their own organizations, where the projects died and withered for lack of a charter/warrant and the ensuing collaborative stage of hammering our the details of the warrant.

Patrick’s charts also have that ‘Dan Roam flavour’ about them, (“The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures,” and Unfolding the Napkin”). I really appreciate this informal style of picture making and knowledge mapping.

Edgar, the elements of your infographic I found very useful was the highly structured, top-down, definitional approach to what I often refer to with my learners as “functional disambiguation.” (OK, sometimes I slip into academic speak, even though I consider myself a scholarly practitioner.) I am reminded by your chart of many of the classical AIIM.org posters down about a decade ago to help illustrate ECM.

Thanks for sharing these artifacts. They will help me jumpstart many of the learners in this Summer semester’s foundational knowledge mobilization course.

Posted on May 15, 2012 at 07:25 PM | Comment permalink

Edgar

Michelle, Michael, thank you for your comments.

Tim, I had subsumed social collaboration under Web2.0, but you are right that a large amount of content is created in team sites or collaboration spaces and it needs to be managed for search and retrieval enterprise wide. Something for the next version.

Posted on May 16, 2012 at 06:25 PM | Comment permalink

Annette Hexelschneider

What an overview. Thank you.

May humble suggestions are:

I think it could perhaps be visually structured with a set of colours. Not too many just a synchronized set.

Looking forward to more km infographic contests wink

Posted on May 28, 2012 at 03:00 AM | Comment permalink

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