What’s that coming over the hill??
What's that coming over the hill?
Good Afternoon!
As most of you regulars will gather, this is my first post for the Claromentis Blog so please go easy on the comments!
Having worked closely with Claromentis for a little over a year now, and after many discussions with Nigel and Team regarding “What’s coming in Claromentis 6.0“, it seems to me that a growing number of companies are introducing “Social and Business” sharing across corporate intranet sites. On recent occasions I find myself sifting through reams of RSS feeds in my inbox and thinking “The team would be interested in that – I’ll send it on”. With this in mind, it is with great anticipation I acknowledge the introduction of the Claromentis “Innovate” application coming in the not so distant future, which only enforces this need for sharing information with colleagues.
Having seen a preview of the new “Innovate” application only yesterday, one question burns in the back of my mind – How will this work for intranets with many users? To give this more meaning, we currently support a mere 2000 users on our main Intranet including Staff, Contractors, and Clients, located from the highlands of Scotland to the very lowlands of Cornwall. Our users operate across a quite complex layer of permissions on content, roles and groups that I will only imagine a roll-out of this type of application can lead to a multitude of challenges. Will there be a need for an engineer on one of our operations sites to share in my “Idea’s Space”? Unlikely, but just maybe… At the moment, I believe that the best way of understanding how this will “slot into” our Intranet model will be down to an in depth understanding both our business model, and the full extent of the “Innovate” applications capabilities, as well as its boundaries.
When brainstorming our ideas for Visual Interface updates a few months ago, we looked widely at the cyber world for ideas of how large companies had used their websites to display meaningful content, with the ambition of enriching and shaping our users web experience of the Intranet. Feedback we received previously hinted that maybe our users experience was mainly “One Way”. In our early mock-ups, we included the “What Am I Working On” box – A user’s ability to share what they are currently working on with all other users of the intranet – and found that our senior user’s reaction to the “Social Networking” approach left them with a heavy mindset of “Facebook” type applications taking over the intranet. I think that “Innovate” will largely encompass all of the best parts of a more collaborative approach to sharing information while maintaining the integrity of a corporate image. Only time will tell…
The only piece of advice I can throw into the pot while starting promotion of an application of this nature is to be mindful of existing user’s thoughts of “Innovate” replacing key applications such as “News”. I know that the user’s of our intranet rely on our “News” system to deliver key information across our business and a phased replacement (If there is to be one) of these key applications is a must.
I think that in conclusion to the above, the “Innovate” application will introduce a whole new level of collaborative working for our colleagues to better share information across our Intranet, all-be-it with its difficulties and significant cultural changes on implementation, with the idea of sharing ideas live online being quite scary to some.
All comments welcome.
Craig
