There is certainly a lot of information being published on intranets. There are excellent reports from Jane McConnell, James Robertson, Toby Ward and the Nielsen Norman Group, as well as the range of books and reports from the team at Step Two Designs. There are many very good intranet blogs , an increasing number of intranet-related conferences and the technology evaluation reports from the Real Story Group. Each year brings new intranet developments, often led by technology. Social intranets and mobile access are just two examples. Keeping track of these developments and trying to assess their implications is quite a challenge. The Intranet Benchmarking Forum do undertake research projects, but many of the reseach reports are of course for IBF members only. Others can be bought from the IBF Shop.
Over the last few years Intranet Focus Ltd has built up a substantial research collection of around 1000 reports and papers on all aspects of intranet management and information management, and over 100 books. We also have access to the Digital Library of the Association for Computing Machinery, a repository of over 1 million research papers, reports and conference proceedings. Most important of all we have the knowledge we have gained through the consulting projects that we undertake each year.
So this month we are launching a series of Research Notes. These will be published monthly, other than in July and August and will be written in a style that we hope intranet managers will find useful in discussions with other business managers about enhancing the scope and value of an intranet. The topics will be based on the requirements we see emerging from our consulting work. Each of the Research Notes will be 10-15 pages long and will be published towards the end of the month. We are not going to publish a schedule of titles for the year as we want to reflect on what is important at the time we start to prepare the next Research Note. The first one to be published is on enterprise search team management. You will see from the drop-down navigation bar for Resources there is now a section called Research Notes, and all the research can be downloaded as pdf files. If you would like to have any of the Research Notes as a Word file that you can use for internal purposes please contact us, but normally this format would only be available to our clients.
We can also prepare custom reports, either a tailored version of one of the Research Notes or specifically written for your organisation. We would be pleased to give you a quotation for the work.
We would welcome feedback on the titles we publish, and it is highly likely that in the course of the year the format and approach of the Research Notes will evolve as we respond to your comments and suggestions.
Martin White