About

I am an intranet strategist and knowledge management consultant.

I have worked with on-line collaboration tools since 1994, starting with native Lotus Notes groupware, before moving on to browser-based intranet applications.

In 2002 I joined a knowledge management team to help the organisation “connect, collaborate and innovate”. The focus on processes and technologies led me to suspect we were undervaluing the people dimension. This was confirmed by my first foray into professional networking at David Gurteen‘s Knowledge Cafés and I began pushing for more focus on people.

Soon after, the KM team and intranet teams merged. We began applying KM principles to intranet development and learned about user-centric design

In 2003 I discovered social networking when I joined Friendster and told my colleagues we should be concentrating our efforts here. After four years – and the advent of Facebook – I had persuaded enough people that I put together a team which transformed the internal people directory into one of the first internal social networks in a large corporate environment, built as an experiment from the bottom up.

Milestones:

• In 2004, inspired by The Guardian and the BBC, we began experimenting internally with blogging tools.
• In 2006 a major redesign helped change attitudes to on-line collaboration, which subsequently took off. We wrote a guide to community kick off events which we called CommunityBuilder.
• In 2007 I led an informal group which transformed the internal employee directory into one of the first internal social networking tools in a large corporate.
• In 2008 I became an accredited Cognitive Edge practitioner.