A short post really, but it had occurred to me that one of the biggest opportunities for cost savings within organisations is the intranet.
However in the local government world – perhaps even the wider public sector, i would guess that nearly all of them lack any real interaction, functionality, transaction etc. Compared to the level of external benchmarking and rating that our public sites go through it is no wonder that intranets are probably still in 1996.
Maybe what we need is and i’m not sure how we would facilitate this at the moment but if we could at least be subjected to a similar style benchmarking exercise to Better Connected (Socitm). If this could happen then i believe that councils might be more inclined to drive forward the intranet to offer the kind of business value it promises.
I will post again in the new year as i think we also need to understand what we all mean by Intranet. In my experience the Intranet can be anything from just an internal website with information to pretty much the whole of the desktop aswell.
To me the intranet is now just part of what many people are referring to as Enterprise 2.0 – however i think this needs some explanation as well.
In the meantime, If you know of any really dynamic intranet sites in the public sector i’d be keen to hear the story.
A journey through life - Carl's Notepad 
I can probably help with this…..drop me a line and maybe we can address your specific issues.
I suspect it is the case that local authorities websites are just lacking, full stop. Benchmarking would help though.
A major theme for me in 2010 is going to be that the interesting bit around social media is the cultural by product of it – openness, collaboration, transparency, co-creation.
Enterprise 2.0 is going to be an important part of that. A lot of the focus on social software has been on external engagement up to now, but the internal side of things is potentially more significant. I’m doing a load of reading about this, and will be doing plenty of blogging about how this can be applied to local gov. Happy to share and collaborate, as always!
Here’s some info regarding the Semantic web/global database
W3C Query language http://bit.ly/1bX7Nv
The Web’s next act: A worldwide database
http://gcn.com/articles/2009/11/09/linked-government-data-feature.aspx
The world government global database – Semantic web.
http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_5363.shtml
Also see: http://bit.ly/4JUj3y
All the latest discussions and information Gov 2.0 and Open Government worldwide http://bit.ly/6tq3q1
Semantic web/global database – RDF Automation Ushering in Semantic Web http://bit.ly/6fKSjY .
#Semantic web
http://twitter.com/search?q=%23semantic#search?q=%23semantic
The Worldwide Intranet Challenge (WIC) gives organisations the opportunity to benchmark their intranets against other organisations. Essentially it is a web based survey that asks intranet end users generic questions about their intranet. This is a service that has been going since April this year. Over 10,000 intranet users from 30 organisations have participated in the WIC since then.
The WIC measures things like interactivity of your intranet, effectiveness in completing work tasks, look & feel, findability (is that a word?) of information, and performance.
You can find our more about it on the following websites:
http://www.cibasolutions.com.au/
http://cibasolutions.typepad.com/wic/
regards
Hi Carl
I posted something similar on the CoP site a few months ago stating that Socitm should be looking at launching a better connected service for LA Intranets. However it might be an idea to set up something ourselves?
In many organisations resources are concentrated on the corporate website and external customers, however I believe that an organisations Intranet is just as important if not more important.
If created correctly an Intranet allows our internal customers (staff) the ability to better serve our external customers by providing more efficient streamlined services and help staff share and collaborate with each other. It is this knowledge sharing and enabling enterprise search that will help make organisations more efficient and helping provide a better service to its customers both internal and external.
I wrote a report last year on the current state of Enterprise 2.0 within UK local government, if you are interested I can send you over a copy?
Thanks Ian, I’d really like to see your report my email is carl dot haggerty @ devon dot gov dot uk.
When you say “set up oursleves” who are you referring to?