OU Intranet Redesign
The latest OU internal communications brief announces that OU Intranet is up for a redesign apparently, and of course, of course, user opinions will be solicited...
INTRANET REDEVELOPMENT
The redevelopment of the University's Intranet is now well under way. Its purpose is to create a new working environment for all staff that makes access to information and the completion of daily tasks simpler. An Intranet audit of over 200 Intranet sites to determine their purpose, software used and plans for redevelopment is under way. An Interim Search Improvement Project is currently identifying search difficulties to determine how to improve results. The project is reviewing the most used search terms to see how successfully appropriate information was found and where necessary making them more accessible via Intranet navigation. Staff across the University will be interviewed in order to capture user requirements for future development. The volume of Intranet site traffic is being investigated to determine the most popular sites so that Information Architecture / navigation can be optimised. An 'Interim publishing strategy' recommends the tools to support any internal web site redevelopment/creation ahead of the full findings of the project.
So after a period of
no thought whatsoever, here are a few of my own random thoughts, off the top of my head, in stream of consciousness style, scribbled down on the boat home (across the Solent), of some of the things I'd like to see...
- an infrastructure that accommodates publishing via RSS, (which of course we ignore at our peril;-) To look at it now, the OU intranet home page could almost be completely replaced by a startpage/webtop powered by internal web feeds (a bit like the OUseful dashboard);
- a search engine that works, usably; for the sake of a few of thousand quid, it'd be worth giving a Google appliance free reign to index the intranet for a week or two of side by side user trials with the current search engine; even if the Google box does a miserable job, observing the differences in both user experience and the quality of search results will provide an interesting lesson for anyone interested in how search works and is used in the OU; ways of exploiting intranet browsing history search (and potentially desktop and email search, too) with intranet search might also be amusing... People search also needs addressing (and it's not just me who thinks that...) - Expert Search generalised (to leverage all the other sorts of knowledge that's bottled up and siloed away) would be worth a small investment from any large institution...
- visualisations of....everything :-) I keep managing to stumble across hierarchical, organisational charts (which I keep thinking could maybe provide a visual navigation tool - like the wikimindmap - to committee documents and minutes?) but it strikes me that committees are not really how the organisation is structured. What might a visualisation of the OU reveal if rendered as a "London Tube map": a) in which stations (nodes) were committees and lines (edges) were people who sit on those committees (either as individuals or as ex officio posts (the "ex officio, committee tube map!));or b) in which nodes were people (either named individuals or roles for an ex officio map view) and edges were committees/teams they are on. (There are loads of opportunities for visualising public OU web stats, OU course populations/student flow through courses, retention maps, course content browsing, etc etc, but neither of those are intranet related, really...)
Posted by ajh59 at July 5, 2007 12:19 AM