Collaboration at Interaction 2011
Interact held ‘Interaction 2011’, their first intranet conference in London, UK, on 13 October. A great theme, set of speakers, enthusiastic audience combined to make it a day to remember by everyone involved.
Over 130 delegates arrived for a feast of intranet offerings with James Robertson starting the keynote presentations with ‘Making an intranet essential’. James covered how to transform your intranet from ‘ad-hoc’ to ‘essential’, showing examples of how their recent award winners have achieved this.
This was followed by me (James is a tough act to follow!) explaining how intranet leadership can lead to a more enthusiastic, engaged and involved workforce. Lee Bryant, Headshift, took us through the evolution of the intranet, enhancing it with social features, adoption from a social perspective, and the future of enterprise IT.
Janus Boye talked about the challenges surrounding Intranets including lack of management support, usability, collaboration and governance. The morning was completed by Paula Martin, G4S, taking us on a journey towards a new intranet, overcoming the challenges faced implementing a new way to operations in more than 500 business units across 125 countries.
The noise from the conversations during lunch and other breaks in sessions showed how much people were engaged with the themes while discussing these with other intranet practitioners. This was also matched by the tweets under the #iconf tag on Twitter. Several were read out as questions to the speakers to reply to.
Two streams gave delegates the opportunity to choose which speakers and subject they wanted to hear from. It was a difficult choice to make with so many great speakers and subjects like Sam Marshall who covered ’10 worst practices for intranets’ – very thought provoking!
The finale was a panel that included Janus, James, Sam and yours truly to answer some of the key points raised during the day.
Interestingly there was no mobile signal in the venue, only wifi access. It worked very well because many people tweeted using the #iconf tag on Twitter but no one was interrupted or distracted by mobiles going off for calls or texts.
So, a big ‘thank you’ to Nigel Danson for collaborating with IBF. Apart from promoting IBF Live and membership benefits at the end of my presentation, every delegate went away with an IBF brochure. Result!
Any DWG member who wants to see the slides used should go to Interact Intranet or follow Twitter for the discussions between physical and
virtual delegates. Conferences don’t end when the last speaker has finished, they continue online…….
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