Today I could listen to another four presentations.
In the morning, the topic was communication controlling: How do you know that your communication activities really achieve their goals, that you reach your audience – and how can you transform that into ideas for and ROI argumentation? (more…)
Categories: applied collaboration · content management · intranet
Tagged: controlling, ecmsummit
There are several reasons why some contents can not be translated:
Hierarchical terms that denominate positions that do not exist in other countries, popular terms that are hard to understand for non native speakers and even harder to translate – both are great in creating identity, they are entertaining and they are good means of communication.
But they are also tools to exclude others: That’s our thing, we say that, you don’t have to bother. You can no and should not get rid of this on a local level, but you can not use it if acting internationally; you have to neutralize yourself (one common way: just talk broken english – as I am doing it here – nothing will be perfect;; everybody will understand… )
Sometimes, it’s not the language, but the attitude that can’t be translated.
The further east I go the more I am impressed by how important birthdays and namedays are in many cee-cultures. – That must be highly fertile area for any social media services, but it’s very hard to integrate warmest wishes into business-style intranets as we know them. As prime content on the portal homepage, notabene.
A third quite special case are pictures, video- and audiofiles. Metadata can either be translated or use common language so that it’s easier to argue about, captions and other supporting texts are also easy to translate.
Pictures should be general, but actually they are not. Pictures tell a lot about tradition, power and personal views, and that is closely related to local views and traditions. A western CEO may want to visualize cooperation, openness and friendliness, an eastern CEO may rather want to represent strength, wealth and power. Western users will understand the strength-image as something oldfashioned, maybe even threatening. Eastern users may interpret open friendliness as weakness.
A universal picture language will end up being just boring. So this has to be handled somewhere else, it’s a mainly cultural and political matter where official media can only support.
Videos strongly transport values and identity. Use them only, if your plan is really clear – or if your actors are great. Information-driven videos that contain a lot of explanations can synchronised; vox pops or interviews should never be completely synchronised. That will just destroy their actual value.
To summarize: I feel more and more that multilingual sites are not a matter of translation, workflows, contentmanagement or menus, but they interfere a lot with cultural and political values in the enterprise, they have a high impact on information architecture – and they are one of the big cost drivers for portals.
Categories: content management · design · management · multilingual
Developing internal media for the banking industry is no fun at the moment, not at all. Medium term investements, even if their benefits are obvious, are cancelled if there is no plainly positive business case for the first year.
That’s a common problem for now; so should we get used to it or should we try to wait for better times? One big problem, I guess, is that most of us did probably already wait for a few months or even a year: things have been slowing down before, thorough planning and 100% budget compliant planning were some of the biggest slowdown factors up to now.
So now I’m about to plan a redesign of a ten year old intranet that should not produce any costs, should not require too many emergency workarounds, should be manageable for average-skilled editors and should attempt to satisfy those need, that we identified as the drivers for a 1 Mio € project.
Sounded disgusting in the beginning. Now I think it sounds interesting. There is no other choice anyway.
Categories: communication · content management · intranet · management
What are the most important topics in an intranet architecture, what are the most important features for Content Managementsystems to be used in an Intranet?
I just sent out a Request for Proposal to a longlist of vendors and I am now about to prioritize all the defined requirements. What I came up with as a proposal for further discussion is
It may be a little strange that the commercial criteria are so low in the ranking. In my opinion, the licensing costs really hardly matter. Vendors will offer you discounts that they almost pay you for buying their system, they will always be cheaper than their competitor. Id they are not and there is really a difference – then you should be alarmed.
The real costs will come up with additional tools and integration efforts – thats why integration features are my number 2, and support is # 3. Support and the personal relationship determin, how fast your developers will work – this will depend on how good documentation and support are, but also on how much they like the system and its consultants.
Business requirements and workflows are # 4 and 5 because they are important, but you can still fix things that are not ok – as long as # 2 and 3 are granted.
The roadmap is nice to know – you should make sure that you and your partner are going in the same direction.
You will have to pay for it, yes. But once youve paid, its over. Thats whz licensing costs are only # 6. And if # 3, 4, 5 and 6 are ok, you will be happy to pay.
So dont worry too much about prices, dont look at the big players only, listen to your developers and do care about personal relationships on all levels. If you get along with developers, project managers and CEOs, the project will be smooth and great.
Categories: content management · evaluation · intranet · project management
