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the good life in a digital age

what to do next

My first six months at the RNIB are up. I’ve spent them mostly playing catch-up and firefighting on the intranet project. Now it is time to actually do some planning.

My department’s focus is mostly internal, I’m a bit of anomaly with my work on the website.

Some constraints to bear in mind:

  • I’m the only IA
  • Must be extremely responsible with the charity’s money
  • Small organisation, doing many things, so staff are time-poor
  • Software development is not what the organisation specialises in

At the moment I’m thinking we could get alot of value of focusing quite heavily on search. I’ll have to do that anyway for the website relaunch but there are big gains to be had from getting the intranet search working well and then exploring enterprise search.

I’m also interested in what we could do with automating related links. Never quite got there at the BBC but there’s an even stronger case here. Authors have very little time to create rich related links and the tendancy is to only promote content produced by their own teams, as ever.

Some simple reference data management might also be needed, possibly to support the enterprise search and automated links plan but also to improve interoperability of all sorts of systems.

Just first thoughts…

Written by Karen

March 17th, 2009 at 6:25 pm

Posted in navigation,rnib,search