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Intranet 2.0: Ten Not-So-Easy Steps
Thousands of corporate intranets are seldom-used, impossibly complex beasts. In contrast, next-generation intranets are simple, social platforms that can change the way people work (for the better!). But getting to intranet 2.0 isn’t so easy. Here are my ten steps to getting there.
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Step 1: Blow up the old intranet.
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Step 2: Turn users into authors.
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Step 3: Expose the social context of all content.
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Step 4: Make things findable.
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Step 5: Send signals when content changes.
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Step 6: Provide scaffolding: a framework to support new content.
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Step 7: Hold a barn raising to populate initial content.
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Step 8: Make them use it. Once.
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Step 9: Lead by example.
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Step 10: Get the intranet ‘in-the-flow’.
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What’s So New About the Outsourcing of Innovation? – Managing Technology – Dennis McDonald’s Blog
Being the diplomat that I am, I agree with both Holcombe and Cooke. Reading all the above referenced items I summarize my own views as follows:
* Don’t outsource your strategic planning responsibilities.
* Don’t outsource what you can’t manage.
* Don’t outsource to people who can’t do the job. -
Innovate on Purpose: You should outsource innovation if…
Too many firms have the right people, good ideas and senior management commitment, but simply cannot find the time to innovate. Obviously this suggests a misalignment of the focus and engagement of the teams and the goals of management, but there it is. I’ve worked in several firms where there is clear commitment from the top – demonstrated in people resources and in dollar resources – but innovation gets shoved aside because people can’t be pulled away from their day to day tasks.
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“Because That’s the Way We’ve Always Done It†Is Bunk
Our job in HR isn’t to defend the way things always were. Our job is to question why things are the way they are, then keep what works and dump what doesn’
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Managing Corporate Social Networks (in Harvard Business Review) Business Innovation
Big companies are good at innovating within silos, but woefully bad at combining creative energies across divisions to build new businesses. As the Merrill Lynch analyst Jessica Cohen once asked, How is it possible that Time Warner owned both Warner Music and AOL and didn’t create something like iTunes? The problem, according to Adam M. Kleinbaum and Michael L. Tushman, is structural: Business-unit boundaries exist precisely because they create efficient structures for executing strategy. But silo focus and ruthless efficiency come at the cost of cross-divisional collaboration, so some innovation opportunities are either poorly executed or not seen at all
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But after surveying 30 years’ worth of organizational network literature and conducting extensive research at a large IT services firm on how networks influence innovation, Adam M. Kleinbaum and Michael L. Tushman concluded that when left unmanaged, informal networks tend to inhibit innovation more often than they enable it.
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The research by Adam M. Kleinbaum and Michael L. Tushman suggests that ideas for productive collaboration will most likely come from “idea brokers.†These people maintain broad networks throughout the organization and are thus uniquely able to draw connections between — and recognize collaborative opportunities for — technologies, markets, or people that might otherwise never come into contact.
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First, invest in both idea brokers and strong cross-divisional ties. Y
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Second, become adept at deploying and overseeing informal networks
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