Intranets can be an important business ‘glue’ for both private and public organisations. They enable geographically diverse individuals to share knowledge and productively collaborate, areas within the organisation to disseminate information, help senior leadership reinforce corporate values, strengthen internal communication and help align management and staff with corporate goals. Not surprisingly many of the challenges…
My agency has historically provided documents within our website and intranet in three formats, HTML (web pages), RTF (Rich Text Format) and PDF. The rationale behind this has been to give customers choice. It has also allowed us to look at relative usage over time to see which formats are most preferred by our customers…
Donna Spencer has written a very thoughtful piece on how many items were ‘too many’ to have in a navigation bar on a website. Entitled, How many items in a navigation bar it’s well worth a read. She argues that the 7+/- ‘rule’ is more of a myth and offers some suggestions on how to…
A dilemma we’re dealing with in my agency is that many projects have placed their documentation within the intranet and, over time, this has become the authoritative source of the most current copy of some documents. This means that the owners of the content are very sensitive towards any changes to the intranet’s structure which…
My team, in association with our web of content editors, recently completed a major review of the content within our intranet. This has dramatically improved the currency of information throughout the site, with over 90% of the content having been reviewed and updated within the last year, up from slightly over 60% before I took…
Every time I have redesigned a website or intranet over the last 12 years I have asked the question of what is the minimum monitor resolution we need to support for customers. I was very glad when we could stop catering for 640×480 resolution and make the new minimum 800×600. Since then each time I…
When I joined the public service a few years back I was very pleased to discover that my agency was very proactive about engaging stakeholders when creating products and services for our customers. The agency was still using 20th century methods to achieve these outcomes and was making no use of online collaborative groups or…
eMetrics is a personal interest of mine. Being able to measure what actions people take and what information they use is, in my opinion, one of the key differentiators between the online channel and other communications mediums. I find that the insights into customer and staff behaviour gained through eMetrics provides a solid basis for…
Here are some great ideas from Step Two Designs in a presentation resulting from their Innovative Intranets Awards this year. It includes a voiceover from James Robertson What do innovative intranets look like?
My Agency has just finished a nine-month long independent expert usability review of all of our online properties – website, intranet and secure online transaction service. Needless to say most of the results matched what we already knew our website needs more of a customer-focus and is due for a facelift, our intranet needs reorganisation…
This archive mirrors the original eGov AU blog — Craig’s professional commentary on AI, digital government and technology in public life, running since 2006.
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