Size Matters. Matt Mower asks good questions on why company size should matter in intranet development, but I believe there are several other factors to consider. [b.cognosco]

Okay Terry raises some good points.  Lets take 'em one-by-one.

Many small companies don't provide their workers with computers, so intranet access is moot.

Agreed.  Although I would want to be certain that the reason for not providing computers was legit.  Example:  Is there a need, but no expertise?  This isn't an argument not to have some kind of intranet.

Intranets are designed to supplement human communication and learning, not replace it. If everyone is sitting within talking distance it makes little sense to put another layer of machines between them.

Well now I don't think that's always true, even in the situation of 5 guys in an office (and I'll let you assume that they are always all there, 5 days a week.  weekends?)  So:

• Terry what did we do on the firefly account last august? (Hope you've got a good memory).
• How many support calls did we get last week?  What was the hottest issue? (Want a debate?  Or do we have that data?)
• We need to order & configure a new server same as the last one.  What do we do?

Now I grant you that you don't need an intranet for any of this stuff.  I just think you are more effective if have one.  And what if things aren't so simple?  What happens when times aren't so good and you have to let Larry & Curly go.  Oops, all the knowledge about the Firefly account and how to build your servers just walked out the door.  Or when Moe's brother joins the 'ol firm.  How does he figure out how things happen around here?  Sure, he can hang around and watch you guys but why not let him see it.

Peter Drucker says "all work is knowledge work," but if workers aren't already spending the majority of their work day in front of a computer (the case in many small service companies) intranets make little sense.

I'm with Peter on this one.  Give 'em hand-held's, give 'em tablets, give 'em something.  And for service folks that goes double.  For small companies life is often about quality of service.  Serve the customer better than the big NoNameCo and you stay in business (and the old guy whose been at this 40 years... he should be writing lots of content - he won't be around forever).

I guess for me the central point is "what is the intranet for?"

If it's part of the solution then why wouldn't you want your people to have it?

Reduce Project Variability...Start Listening. I've been teaching listening from the time I started teaching project management. Invariably, a large percentage (often a great majority) of the sources of mis-coordination on projects is the result of project participants not listening. Mis-listening just adds to the variability and uncertainty on our projects. [Reforming Project Management]

With thanks to Phil for rsstroducing me to Hal's blog and to a great post.  It's also a great advert for k-logs since reading k-logs is all about listening.

Was it Phil who, a little while ago, advised the idea of using k-logs to let projects fail fast.  Reading the k-logs of the people on the team (or perhaps a consolidated feed built from & filtered out of their individual feeds) is a key aspect of how you understand what is happening on the project, how you can tell if it is failling and understand the issues.

I've pondered risk management in projects before.  No project worth doing comes without risks and the challenge is often to understand what the real risks are and to spot them in time to do something about them.  Again, this is listening.  How can you sense when a risk is rearing it's head for real?  How can you tell when a new issue is emerging that should make it onto your list?

If listening is the stethoscope then k-logs are the heartbeat (...too much? :-) )

I've been going on about filtering RSS feeds with topics and apart from the Paolo and Mikel I've had little in the way of feedback.  Have I been preaching to the converted?  Or do people not see value in this idea?

I have become quite religious about adding topics like "humour", "politics" and "culture" to posts that I consider off-topic for my k-log.  If my views on these things aren't your cup of tea I want you to be able to say:

Matt's feed - { "humour", "politics", "culture" }

to just knock all that clutter straight out of the feed.

Alternatively you may find that there are one or two interesting posts in a number of different feeds that share a common theme.  I want to enable an aggregator to make a consolidated feed out of those.  java.blogs is a great example of where this kind of thing is going.  However in order to be useful to a wider community I think the tools have to come to the users, like RssDistiller

So who is working on the smart aggregators?  Who is interested?

Caption competition. Lady Thatcher was in Washington this week to receive an award. Enter our caption competition by deciding what's being said in this picture. [BBC News | UK | UK Edition]

Fantastic :)

Who Needs an Intranet?. Martin White has an interesting answer for managers of small companies wondering about intranets -- you probably don't need one! I concur, companies under about 50 employees, with everyone located in the same facility, can likely forego the expense and ha [b.cognosco]

I think this is where I begin to diverge from mainstream thinking on Intranets.  My thinking here is along the same lines as my previous post on whether an Intranet is a factory or a gallery.  I agree with Martin that a 50-man organisation doesn't need a gallery intranet to reflect upon work done or to showcase the HR policy set.  But who does?  More often than not I think these sites are built with an eye on senior management approval.  Hence: glossy, bright colours, simple headlines and little substance.

However if an intranet is living work, an embodyment of the spinning flywheels and turning cogs of the organisation, then why is it any less relevant to a 50-man, or even 5-man organisation?  To me it's just as relevant.  In a small organsiation there are less people doing the work, everyone needs to be that bit more focused on it (don't I know it!)  In a large organisation there are more cracks for things to fall through, but the idea is the same.

An intranet should help to collect things together and provide a locus for action.  The intranet should be part of the process, embedded in the work not separate to it.  As Terry says in response to the gallery post:

In "The 21st-Century Intranet" Jennifer Gonzalez describes four types of intranets ranging from the asynchronous broadcast model to the symmetrical interactive model. Almost none of the later exist and I belive it is becasue of the point you make -- there is almost no room for people. Even the idea of adding people to the intranet draws gap-mouthed stares from executives in many companies.

I don't think a change in workflow alone will do it. As numerous k-log threads have discussed, the cultural and personal barriers are greater than a simple change in workflow can address. But a comprehensive approach, will solid management support, could drastically change the nature of intra-company communication.

The basic point is this: If the Intranet is about the people, and their work, then why does the number of people matter?

KM as Both Practice and Theory. Ton Zijlstra uses his weblog to share self-directed learning experiences and think out loud about how to address issues in his company. [b.cognosco]

Terry points to a good article about the perils of being a thinker and also the problems of getting your message across.  This:

This prospect viewed us a software company as the only product information he saw from us was one having to do with some software we happen to sell as a tool. This tool is part of a larger product that is in the area of consulting. So I talked with this prospect about what it is we actually do. Now how is it that this prospect got the wrong impression? Is our productinformation not clear enough? These are the sort of things my colleague and I want to talk about when meeting the other accountmanageing researchers.

struck a chord with me.