After a summer break it’s time to get back to the blogging. I thought I’d start by looking ahead to some of the conferences and other meetings that I’ll be participating in over the next few months.
First up is the inaugural meeting of the JBoye Intranet Expert Group in London on 19 September. The idea behind the Group is to provide a forum where intranet practitioners, analysts, thinkers, experts and vendors can meet, set the agenda for future industry developments, give each other feedback and share thoughts and ideas in an inspiring setting. I’m not quite sure that the Plaza Hotel Westminster Bridge qualifies as an inspired setting. There is much talk about managing shareholder expectations in intranet governance and I’m looking forward to sharing my ideas on a stakeholder management methodology with practioners from a wide variety of backgrounds. There is nothing better than peer review to move an idea from the drawing board to being an effective component of an intranet manager’s toolkit.
A week later I have been invited to participate in an EU Think Tank and Workshop in Brussels on various aspects of search technology development and application. I will be presenting my thoughts on the development of enterprise search in the EU. Last year I undertook a project for the EU Institute for Prospective Technological Studies on the EU search market and my paper at the Workshop will update this project. Back from Brussels I will head off to the Open University to take part in the fourth m-Libraries conference, giving a paper that will seek to summarise the impact of all the current deluge of announcements from the major players in the mobile business.
Back to intranets in October with the Interaction 2012 event organised by Interact Intranet. Nigel Danson and his colleagues have come up with a superb range of speakers which includes James Robertson and Andrew Wright from Australia and Janus Boye from Denmark, and Sam Marshall, Johnathan Philips, Dana Leeson, Luke Mepham, Sharon O’Dea, Helen Day, Tim Walters and many more. For once I am not talking about intranets or search but about managing virtual teams.
I’ll be meeting up with James again the following week at the Hartman Event in Utrecht. This is held in possibly the most comfortable conference room in Europe! The subject of my presentation is the re-invention of enterprise search. Among the other speakers are Bob Boiko, Theresa Regli and David Hobbs. Then it’s home to pack for a week at KMWorld 2012 and the co-located Enterprise Search Summit Fall in Washington D.C. I’ll be giving a workshop on virtual teams and presentations on intranet and enterprise search topics. I’ve been doing quite a lot of work on virtual team management success factors and will be giving two further workshops in London, one as part of Internet Librarian International and a public workshop on 7 November organised by the UK Electronic Information Group.
In between these events I’m working on two quite different enterprise search projects, supporting an organisation in specifying and selecting a new intranet platform and continuing to develop an information management strategy for a global manufacturing company. My Research Notes series will start up again later this month. The topics for the rest of 2012 will include risk management and some suggestions on how to assess the success of an intranet. Planning is also beginning for Enterprise Search Europe 2013 which will take place in London on 15-16 May, with workshops on 14 May.
Martin White