Tuesday 4 November 2008

LtF Chapter 10 - Finding the right people


A chapter describing the benefits of having a corporate yellow pages. There is some sound advice about how to encourage participation (include the personal, build organically through champions etc) and some nice examples of how these have been used.

I find it hard to get excited about this. I think this is in great part due to seeing the technical issues that would be involved and the degree of challenge of getting people on board. I would want something that built onto a system that had to exist anyway - the email directory for example.

I think for a lot of areas the people they really need to know are their direct teams and they will know them through constant contact. I am not sure that within the organisation there is the degree of changing project work where people would not know each other. This would obviously be different for specific parts of the NHS.

The NHS Health Informatics Espace might support some of this functionality for health informatics staff but it feels clunky. You can search peoples profiles but have to click into each one to see any detail for example. Equally there are barriers to participation - despite being registered I cannot access one of the areas listed in the top navigation of the site (Sharing Experiences) - not very conducive to sharing!

Quote for the day (found through unrelated reading) "Try again. Fail again. Fail better." Samuel Beckett.

2 comments:

c.e.nhs said...

I'm interested in your comments about eSpace, as i'm the technical lead for the project.

I recognise some of the issues you've raised. The Member Directory (people search) functions definately needs improvement, and i'm working on the spec for some enhancements as we speak.

I don' undestand why you should have a problem with the Sharing Experiences area though. If you log a request via the contact us link on eSpace we'll look into it and make sure you have access.

Anonymous said...

Hi Colin,

Cheers for your comments.

The problem with "Sharing experiences" is that I have to sign up for this area separately from my general sign up. Once logged in I would expect that all the top level navigation options would be open to me without further registration. I can understand why some groups need to be closed but "Sharing Experiences" seems to me the wrong one to be closed in this way.