While talking to people after presenting ‘Adding value to your intranet – Intranet governance at BT‘ at Intranätdagarna 2009 in Stockholm last week it made me realise some simple steps could help an intranet blog or wiki be successful or not.
So, using BT’s experience, here goes:
Your sponsor
You need someone in an influential position in your organisation who will champion this. You need to be clear what their expectation is. Is it the same or similar to your own? You need to be clear what a wiki or blog will achieve…… and the timescales for achieving it too!
Your culture
If your organisation isn’t very trusting of communications; it doesn’t share information; unwilling to respond to any feedback that is critical but constructive then you will find it very difficult to introduce wikis or blogs. You need an organisation willing to collaborate; responds to ideas and feedback from anyone; encourages honest communications to have a successful launch.
Your technology
You need to agree with your IT partners on the technology to use. It should be free or very cheap. Open source applications are ideal. Without IT accepting and even better, agreeing, with what you plan to do it will be very difficult, if not impossible, to do. If you haven’t got a good working relationship already with IT, now is the time to start!
Your plan
Start small with your wiki or blog. Just have one template for users to contribute. Invite people who you know have a need or interest from different parts of your organisation to test it out. See what the feedback is for the future direction you need to take. Don’t spend lots of time, effort and MONEY testing. If you are it isn’t going right! There’s more on beta testing in another of my posts.
Next
If the beta testing is successful and the objectives are being met you then have the justification to develop it further for wider use. If you need to apply for funding you have evidence to support from request. Again, keep the next stage small to start with, publicise with users who will benefit or be interested and WILL contribute. Sit back and watch it grow but……….make sure you respond to any feedback from users so that continues.
I’ll blog soon about more advanced steps BT needed to take to continue the success!
Mark Morrell Intranet Pioneer 
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