Congratulations to Neil Morgan, global intranet and web manager, from the WWF for being voted Thursday’s best speaker at the recent J. Boye Aarhus 2009 conference.
Neil’s presentation discussed how the WWF are using Google Apps for collaboration. Collaborating using Google Apps has pretty much become fundamental in the organisation. Everyone just “get it”.
The success the intranet team has had of supporting online collaboration at the WWF is a direct result of the approach taken before launching any new tool, as Neil explains:
The best advice I can give about online collaboration, is that you cannot start to collaborate online if you do not know the people you are collaborating with. Therefore what must precede the launch of any tool is to actually bring the group together for a conference call, video conference or face-to-face meeting to figure out the best way of working together. This is important in establishing the trust need to collaborate effectively, regardless the solution.
This is a universal point we tend to forget when we get excited about new so called “social” technologies. Sometimes in fact, collaboration can be bad for an organisation. As always with technology it pays to focus on business needs first.
How do you involve your users before launching a new internal tool?
