Jed Cawthorne News & Articles

As the cutting edge of Employee Experience Management sees leading organizations move from good old Intranets into the Digital Workplace, what will be next for the enterprise portal?

There's been a lot of talk about Gamification lately, and while I'm no expert, I'd like to take some time to explain why I just don't get it, why I don't think I ever will, and why I think the current treatment of the subject is overblown and heading into "trendy fad" territory.

As intranets grow in complexity, the importance and challenges of setting up an intranet governance structure grows in line -- but the benefits will be seen in the long run.

There's a lot of discussion about creating great customer experiences, but it's time we take some of the ideas and methodologies learned in that realm and apply them to creating a great employee experience, specifically, to the intranet. 

When not trading barbs in Canadian and British slang on Twitter, Jed Cawthorne is busy evangelizing the truth about information management, enterprise content management and intranets to unbelievers. It's time you got to know Jed a little bit better, don't you think?

I am really not big on speculative, future prediction posts. There are too many factors in our highly complex world that can derail even the most well researched and thought out theories for how our industry could develop, so I am going to shy away from predictions per se. Instead, I'll consider some general directions, and why other people's predictions make me laugh and make me feel like a Knowledge Management / Enterprise Content Management Grinch! Prepare for a visit from the Ghost of Christmas Past ...

Yes, Virginia, there is life beyond SharePoint.

There have been some great articles this month on CMSWire on the future direction for intranets, and how your organization might want to "re-think" or re-imagine its intranet. Subjects such as Information Architecture, the changing nature of work, and developing employee trust in your digital workplace have been covered. I would like to follow up with a few paragraphs on how search and your search strategy fit into your views of an ever evolving intranet. So, how is search evolving on your intranet? Are you equipped from a strategy and personnel point of view, or have you been fooled into concentrating purely on the technology?

In last month's column I took a generic look at whether an organization could move its intranet to the cloud, lock stock and barrel. As ever, my conclusion was "maybe" as it very much depends on your organization and what exactly you want to do. While at Dreamforce, I had the opportunity to return to this question.

A recent set of experiences at work has led me to ponder the question: can you move your intranet to the cloud?

The answer it would appear is that often given by consultants: "yes, but it depends!"  

The CMSWire theme for June is "What's working in social business in 2012?"  I don't have enough knowledge to make any sweeping statements about what is or is not working, but I can deploy the standard consultants response: "it depends!"

Do you have a company issued Blackberry? Perhaps your iPhone or Android device is connected to work systems via a “Bring Your Own Device” (BYOD) program? Maybe you’re a real road warrior with a ruggedized laptop or a corridor warrior with an iPad, but the big question is -- why?

Digital Asset Management is a specialist sub-set of Content Management, one which has developed along it's own evolutionary past. It has grown out of the needs of the traditional publishing industry to manage photographic images for print publications, and developed into an adjunct of web content management to manage still images, video and audio files as "rich media" content for web sites and other media.

This month's theme for CMSWire is about taking the focus of Customer Experience Management (CXM) and applying it internally to the enterprise, particularly to Enterprise Information Management (EIM) environments.

Initially that gave me pause for thought, because although I work for a large organization where the focus is very firmly on the customer first, and everything I do, even in an internal role, has to be linked to a positive impact on the customer, I am certainly no expert in CXM. So, while I think I understand the overall focus of CXM, my first step was Wikipedia to check on the definition of the term!

Have I mentioned recently how much I truly hate the term "social business"?

Maybe hate is a bit strong, and it's really not the term, but the way it is used. However, as I was struggling to finalize my contribution to this month's Social Business theme, I was saved by a fellow author's article: Knowledge Management in 2012: Probably Dead by Roan Young (@roanyoung).