What's the answer? Seems we have a bit of debate going on regarding the best place to post content for employee engagement of the North Star elements. I suggest we use the Wiki as much as we can. We can always link in and out of the intranet if we use the Wiki as our home base, but we can't easily connect with employees if we use the intranet. This team is all about connecting with employees and making them part of the process. Does this mean allowing them to change a document like the Action Plan on KM and CT? No. Does it mean directing them to content that hasn't gone through rigorous approvals before being posted? Possibly. Is that a problem? I don't think so, but I am also a big believer in using the Wiki as a key meeting place to bring people together with a common interest but varying opinions. Yes, the Wiki can be messy and tough to navigate at times but everything is there and on it, even though I might not contribute a single thought, I feel empowered to contribute - I feel like I could be a part of anything. I don't have that connection on the intranet.
An additional concern I have is the anonymity that seems to be a given with anything intranet. On the Wiki I can be identified. As a result, I act responsibly. I share opinions and expertise where it makes sense for me to do so, I take delight in correcting grammar and typos and I am a passive reader everywhere else. But I have the choice.
How do others feel?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
6 comments:
I think that in terms of communicating on a large scale, with many people, all with different comfort levels, it is important to provide options. I think there is value to provide information in a number of different fora. The information might vary slightly in style or format, but the important content will be there. I think we shouldn't debate too much about what information goes where. We just need to get the information out. So let's start with the fastest and easiest ways to do that - the wiki, the blog, and face to face conversations.The other methods - like the intranet - will follow. Those are my thoughts on the matter.
Personally, I use the N* intranet page as a place for me to get a holistic perspective on "the past" - how North Star started, what emerged from the first ITG group, what the 1st engagement process was like, what feedback they received (did you know they posted all the feedback they received from the internet?) and what product they produced, and so forth.
It's the "static" section of the N* process, and I prefer to view that on the intranet because it's provided in a pretty, colourful, easy to use, familiar format that is logical, and doesn't require me to go through dozens of wiki pages that might not even be linked together. The wiki can be confusing if you're trying to read every page that is connected to one topic in any kind of logical order.
Where I use the wiki, however, is when I want to engage on things that are "alive" - things that I can influence and shape. If I have things I want to say about the Old North Star process, I wouldn't put those comments up on the discussion portion of an old north star page, because no one is going to look at them. Instead, I'd put it up on a live n* dialogue team page.
The intranet is a great place to put static knowledge, not because of concerns about approval etc. but because it's actually just more user friendly!
I think Patrycja nailed it! Let's just get the content out there and work with what we have.
Nadim, I do want to address your points about "presentation" and "user friendliness" of the intranet and these points are well taken. As our community of wiki users grows and wiki use in the department becomes more mainstream, my hope is that the web designers among us will begin to "pretty up" wiki pages as a matter of course. Or, perhaps by that time we will have become accustomed to more immediate collaborative content creation and the layout just won't be as important.
The culture will change...it's just a matter of time.
Why is intranet OR Wiki the question? why isn't it Intranet AND Wiki? I see these two tools as complimentary rather than mutually exclusive. They each have different functionality to offer. For example, I find that loading documents on the Wiki is cumbersome and overloads the page. I prefer to have a resident space ont he Intranet and link back to it as reference when developing a Wiki page. Also, the Wiki isn't that great when you need to develop a very interactive site such as our MMS Weekly newsletter. We developed a "sandbox" but found that coding the newsletter was far more work than using the intranet. So we will continue to use the intranet and link to the newsletters and use the Wiki page for discussions only. I also think the Wiki needs work on the privacy issue and on official languages. There is no security so folks would be hesitant to load sensitive documents but even so, no one is "watching" or monitoring. Anyone (who has an NRCan e-mail) can go to the wiki and then send any of the documents to anyone including e-mails and names and briefing notes in progress. The language thing is also a problem because a good portion of our population (i.e. french) doesnt have the same information or access. So why don't we change the question.......
Great Points patrycja, Anna. Here's my approach to any type of tool, whether it's social or technical: FORM should follow FUNCTION. TOOL should follow PURPOSE.
We may need to step back for a second and ask ourselves, as a group, what are the key TASKS that we need to perform, what are the key FUNCTIONS we need to play.
THEN, after identifying those, we can assess the merits of using tool A or tool B.
Pat's posts have started to identify some tasks:
1. communicating, on a large scale, with many people.
2. make them [employees] part of the process
3. creating a meeting place for people with a common interest but diverse opinions (that's a great line)
Once we start to make an inventory of these tasks, we can ascertain which tools are the best.
For example, the intranet can perform function 1, but not function 2 or 3.
Looks like katherine and I responded simultaneously, with similar ideas! Hello Kindred Katherine... ;)
Post a Comment