Follow me on Twitter
Friend me on Google+
Profile me on LinkedIn
Follow me on FriendFeed
Posts
All Comments
Why you should pay attention to intranet search logs | Tweet |
My team keeps a close eye on what people search for in our intranet.
It helps us identify patterns in staff behaviour and better support their needs.
In browsing for other online information, I came across a case study from 2006 about a government agency which provides a similar picture of the value of paying attention to intranet search logs.
Improving an intranet staff directory | Tweet |
My team has been throwing around approaches for improving our internal agency staff directory on the intranet to make it more of a knowledge resource for staff.
As this is the most used tool in our intranet (people need to contact other people), improving the service contributes measurably to our staff's capacity to collaborate and discover the information necessary in their roles.
The more we can streamline people discovery, the more time we can save staff.
Thus far discussions have focused on our own experiences across a number of online staff directories over the years.
For my contribution to the discussion, from my experience over a twenty year span, the first staff directories were based on the paper phone directories used before intranets were common - alphabetical lists of names, titles, teams and phone numbers, divided by region or area.
These lists - and intranet directories - were useful in finding a known person, were you could identify their name and area.
However they had more difficulty in locating unknown people - subject matter experts - as area and team names did not always reflect their activities and without knowing who to contact it was hard to find an appropriate name.
Also traditional staff directories are only name, number and rank - they do not provide details on skills, relationships or communities, which help link people collaborate more effectively.
Therefore I've described three cases I want our future staff directory to cover.
1) Locating details for known people
2) Locating experts
3) Engaging networks of knowledge
As part of these cases, we're considering Facebook and LinkedIn style features, such as,
Involvement in all of these areas would be optional, allowing staff to better self-manage their privacy. However, as in any situation involving information sharing, you get greater value when you share than when you silo knowledge.
Over time this approach lends itself to integration with collaboration tools, forums, wikis, groups and blogs, as well as team-based tools such as group calendars and mailing lists.
We've been looking online for reference material on the topic of staff directories, drawing on the experiences of a number of private sector organisations who have implemented similar types of directories.
A couple of the resources we've found useful include,
I'm very interested in the experiences of other government and private sector organisations in this space - so drop me a comment if you have suggestions to add.
A glimpse at the future of the semantic web | Tweet |
Fresh+New, a blog written by Seb Chan from the Powerhouse Museum, has brought to my attention Aza Raskin’s Ubiquity, a very interested look at the possible web of the future, using semantic browsers to provide a more connected experience.
More details are in Seb's post, More powerful browsers - Mozilla Labs Ubiquity, or on Aza's blog.
Below is the video introducing Ubiquity.
Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.
US Air Force planning to create its first virtual air base | Tweet |
According to the NextGov article Air Force opens bidding for virtual air base, the US Air Force is preparing to launch a virtual air base where airmen will attend courses in a 3D virtual world.
Simulators have long been used in training pilots and astronauts, due to the fatal consequences of mistakes by novices. This air base takes it a step further, with the Air Force looking to support up to 75 simultaneous users in a geospatially accurate real-time training environment.
As described in the NextGov article,The service initially hopes to create two furnished virtual classrooms that can stream audio and video, and to allow users to design their own avatars in uniform with a variety of physical attributes and appropriate rank. The synthetic base also must include buildings, vegetation, signage, roads, security, a flight line with planes and the ability to exchange documents, photographs and video. Once it buys the software and training, the Air Force expects delivery within two weeks.
The system, termed MyBase, is seen as a key component in the Air Force's future training programs. Here's a video from them explaining more...
This type of learning environment is adaptable to many different functions - including virtual seminars and roadshows, collaborative meetings, presentations, media events, group-based activities and real-time or time-delayed course training. Several universities in the US have already made courses available via 3D virtual worlds such as Second Life.
In Australia we've seen some exploration of these technologies by the Victorian state government in its Melbourne Laneways project for public consumption.
My view is that some of the more immediate benefits for the public sector are in internal use of such environments by geographically diverse agencies to create learning and collaborative environments.
In fact the ATO has demonstrated such an environment already in its ATO Showcase as one of the innovations they are exploring for future roll-out.
For public use of these environments today by government the equity issue needs to be well considered.
Personally I've always felt that gradual degradation is an appropriate approach, providing a virtual 3D environment for broadband users, degrading to voice and powerpoint for 'thin' broadband and dial-up users, down to distributed multimedia for computer users without internet connections and to hardcopy or physical meetings for those without computers.
The other consideration is the proportion of the audience falling into each of these groups, and if this has not been established I'd be very cautious about providing more advanced options.
When too much public information is public | Tweet |
Related to my previous post, AZcentral reports that, Death notices removed from county Web site.
Privacy concerns and identity-theft fears prompted Maricopa County Recorder Helen Purcell to halt public viewing of death certificates on the agency's Web site.
"There is so much personal information on them: a mother's maiden name, what they died from," Purcell said, adding that her office has been fielding complaints for years about the office's practice of posting death-certificate images. The office quietly took them down last month.
This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence.
Please attribute in the form: Sourced from eGovAU
