Future principle: it’s more than the intranet
Categorised under: Enterprise 2.0, Future intranet, Information management, Intranets
I’ve been talking about the future of how staff will work in organisations, starting with Sarah’s first day, and then exploring products and innovation.
An important question has been raised by more than a few people:
So is this still the intranet? Or should we be calling it something different?
An excellent question, and one that I’ll be exploring throughout 2010. There are some that would like to dump the “intranet” name, as it’s associated with the “old” vision of intranets as a publishing platform, a dumping group for documents, and a place for the CEO to post his thoughts.
This narrow vision of the intranet must certainly die. In the process, intranet teams need to go from being custodians of an internal website, to facilitators for business improvements. In many ways, the word “intranet” has too much baggage, and is an anchor for much-needed changes.
Jane McConnell is probably the leader of the movement for a new name, and her preferred choice is the web workplace. She’s written some excellent posts about this, and has articulated some valuable principles that have shaped my thinking. Nonetheless, I’m not convinced.
It’s hard to come up with a new name, and to get it adopted. This is fundamentally a social thing, and it smacks of marketing when driven by a few individuals (not that this is Jane’s intention!). “Web workplace” also doesn’t resonate with me, as it still traps us online, rather than moving towards ubiquitous access.
Where do I stand? I think that intranets still have a role to play in our future organisations, and this is how it could fit together:
“Intranet”
We will still need a web-based “intranet” in the future. This will play a more important role in organisations, mixing old and new thinking:
- corporate homepage and first point of entry
- findability layer, helping staff get to required information and tools
- home for corporate information (yes, we’ll still need this!)
- seamless environment for web-based systems and processes
- business tool used daily by operational staff
- web-based environment for collaboration and social interaction
- vehicle for corporate culture
This is not a million miles away from where intranets are at currently, but there are important differences:
- intranets are just one part of broader environments within organisations (see below)
- focus shifts from publishing information to delivering business value and streamlining processes
- collaboration capabilities get progressively folded in, rather than being separate
- intranets get smarter, sharper, more proactive, and more valuable
As an industry, it is our responsibility to change the perception of the word “intranet”, and to create a forward-looking and constructive vision for our intranets.
(Organisations then benefit from hiding the word intranet entirely, instead giving the intranet a name. That way staff are using “Morris”, oblivious of the debate raging in the intranet community over the appropriate nomenclature.)
“Information systems”
As the future scenarios have shown, Sarah is interacting with much more than just a web-based intranet “site”. Information is available at the point of need, and seamlessly accessible across multiple systems and platforms.
This requires us to be smarter and more coordinated in how we manage our “information systems”. I’m being deliberately generic here, to get away from being caught up in discussions about “document management” vs “enterprise content management”, “business process automation”, “web content management” etc, etc.
Instead, we can say:
“To deliver a staff directory with all the information we need, we’ll need to integrate some of our information systems.”
“Better information systems would allow us to slash the lead-time in product development by 50%”
In practice, this means working with many different tools, systems and platforms. Despite the hopes of some vendors, we’re not going to replace every legacy system with “one tool to rule them all”. Instead, we need to work with point solutions and system specialists to deliver the end-to-end processes we desire and need.
How do we focus our work on the underlying information systems? By targeting the needs and activities of staff:
“Enterprise experience”
The broader industry talks about “user experience”. How users interact with systems, systems’ ease of use (usability), the step-by-step process to complete a task. This has driven remarkable improvements in the usability of websites and intranets.
Within organisations, we should start to talk about the “enterprise experience”. What experience do we want to provide to staff in their working lives? What systems should they be using, and how? How do they interact with the information and tools they need to do their jobs?
This provides a useful focus on:
- delivering solutions that work remarkably well for staff
- creating end-to-end solutions that streamline processes, despite the profusion of behind-the-scenes technologies
- moving steadily towards a seamless environment for staff
- producing delight and joy for staff
- making a real impact on how organisations work, and delivering commensurate business benefits
In short
We’re talking about delivering intranets that bring tools, information and processes together. By steadily improving our information systems, we can provide staff with the tools they need to do their jobs, where and when they need them. The end goal is to deliver an enterprise experience that delights staff and drives business success.
Does this work for you? Or should we using something different?
Tags: enterprise experience, future, Information management, information systems, Intranets, strategy
James Robertson is the Managing Director of 
23 Comments:
Changing the name “intranet” to something vaguely euphemistic such as “web workplace” strikes me as silly. If the intranet has a bad rep, let’s change the rep, not the name. Honestly, what would you tell someone looking for today’s lunch menu? “Just check the web workplace”? Hardly. And you certainly wouldn’t say “The report is now available on our enterprise experience.”
Personally, I like both “intranet” and “extranet” as terms, but we do need clearer, updated definitions of these as concepts. Today, “intranets” actually serve far flung organizations, not just one physical site.
An “enterprise experience” covers both the intranet, extranet, and internet aspects of the browser-based world. And I do like the term, but used as a general descriptor for a combination of elements, not a hard-core noun for a single aspect.
Here’s how I arrange these things in my own mind:
Internet – public-facing online information, typically a website.
Intranet – a password protected zone reserved for people who work for the same organization and probably share the same e-mail suffix, e.g. john.doe@xyz.com where “xyz.com” is the common denominator.
Extranet – a password protected zone for partners, distributors, key accounts, etc. These folks may or may not have access to parts of the intranet.
So let’s get our definitions straightened out and leave the names alone. After all, we still speak of “dial tones” on telephones although most of us haven’t actually “dialed” a phone in years.
I’m absolutely conscious of not getting caught up in “defining the damn thing” Eric! I’ve seen way too much of that in KM, IM, IA, UX, etc, etc.
Like you, I’m comfortable with the word “intranet”, but we need to reshape it into something more successful than our current generation of sites.
But it’s also not just about a single website, which is where the “enterprise experience” comes in. Definitely not as a proper noun, but as a way of thinking about how to deliver joined-up, seamless, useful and productive solutions for staff. Which is surely more important that just focusing on how to keep intranet pages up to date…
I’m wondering what it would take to update the definition of the word ‘intranet’?
So far, it seems vendors have been leading the pack when it comes to giving words new meaning and coming up with new ones (e.g. enterprise portals).
Is there any alternative than to hope vendors will save us? Note that most of the big vendors (e.g. IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP) seems genuinely uninterested in intranets.
Janus
Since I started this discussion last year (on April 1st actually:), let me share how my thoughts have evolved.
I am using the term “workplace web” rather than “web workplace”, which, like James, did not resonate well with me in the long run.
I see the “workplace web” as the ensemble of digital “things” linked together or not that people use or are exposed to in their work. I sub-titled the Global Intranet Trends for 2010 report “Towards the Workplace web” (http://www.netjmc.net/globally_local/2009/11/highlights-from-the-global-intranet-trends-for-2010.html) and identified 5 future trends of which the intranet as the front door into the workplace web was one.
I wrote about the intranet as the front door here: http://www.netjmc.net/globally_local/2010/01/workplace-web-3-models.html and commented along with many other people on a provocative post by Alex Manchester here: http://www.alexmanchester.com/alexmanchester/2009/12/is-the-intranet-dead.html
I agree with Eric that you wouldn’t say “check the workplace web for today’s lunch menu”. The intranet can still be the place where that is posted! If the intranet is to be named, then that name has to be easy to use in natural speech.
Interestingly, a number of organizations I know rarely use the word “intranet” and when they do, it’s in more of a technical context. It has “disappeared” from everyday language, become a utility that is taken for granted. These companies are branding the services offered by the intranet, not the intranet itself. In fact, the title “intranet manager” rarely exists nowadays, based on what I saw in the email signatures of the nearly 300 participants in the survey last fall.
I could write a book on this subject, which is just what I am doing right now. To a first approximation there are two types of intranet. The first type is so embedded in the way that people work they don’t call it anything. They just sit at their desk (and increasingly their mobile phone) and use it. This is Jane’s web workplace approach. The second type isn’t embedded but sits on the desktop looking somewhat forlorn and lonely. I’m tired of people asking “How can I get people to use our intranet?”. Clever names and a design once-over won’t work if the intranet does not support people in the tasks that they have to do every day to survive. Like finding people who know more than they do about something, and that does not necessarily mean building an expertise directory!
Increasingly I find myself developing information management strategies for organisations, not intranet strategies, because if there is no explicit, or at least implicit, IM strategy then the intranet has little chance of being regarded as a useful application. Some consulting companies (Gartner is a good example) refer to IM as information governance, and I can live with that.
With reference to the query from Janus, the vendors won’t help because there is no money for them in intranet software and services. One of my clients last year was running a very decent intranet for 56,000 employees world-wide on Plone. It was not glamorous but addressed core business requirements absolutely spot on. Intranet costs are basically staff time.
So here we are, four intranet consultants talking to each other using a blog comment box. Sad, isn’t it? I think we need to move from being intranet fixers to information evangelists. Then the ‘intranet’ problems will start to go away.
Martin
Nice post, James. The “Enterprise Experience” as you call it (meanwhile over at Headshift, we are talking about what we call Social Business Design) is heading in the right direction. I’m looking forward to seeing more “intranet fixers” picking up this new intranet meme too
Jane has a point in saying that the term ‘Intranet’ is used in a more technical context. You have an Intranet, an Extranet, and a website. Together these three deliver the ‘enterprise experience’ James mentions.
A strong intranet brand will leave the intranet definition up to the intranet management team. What is an intranet? It still depends the the needs and visions of the individual organisations. Out of these individual needs and visions we can derive a new definition.
Vendors like IBM, SAP, MS, etc. provide platforms – not definitions. If we let them make up the definitions we will just continue to let the technology determine the solutions we can provide.
Hi,
I am inclined to agree that ‘intranet’ is increasingly too narrow a term and loaded with preconceptions to describe the future of internal work environments. I think we are reaching the point where the notion of something being specifically ‘online’ or ‘digital’ is becoming obsolete in terms of administrative functions (lets not forget that a lot of work is physical and not computer based).
How about we ditch the concept all together from a user’s perspective? Let the ‘intranet’ fade off into a specialist term for infrastructure and systems developers and just talk about each thing that’s delivered through these networks int their own terms. (e.g. The phonebook, the newsfeeed, etc.)
2p.
Lou.
@Jane, we’re still coming across plenty of “intranets” in organisations, even when they have a local name. We also find a lot of intranet teams and intranet managers. There’s also plenty of intranets run by internal communications teams, knowledge management groups, information management areas; but I see this as more a reflection of the eternal question “so who should own the intranet?” rather than a disinterest in the term “intranet”.
Perhaps at the level of global companies you work with there are few “intranet managers”. Maybe these exist at the country level and below?
@Janus, it’s hard to see what substantive role vendors can play in the future direction of intranets. Considering our industry-wide experiences with vendor-driven initiatives to date, it’s even harder to imagine why we would want to give them this power!
At a basic level, the technology underpinning intranets is not very interesting, and can easily remain invisible to all but authors and content owners. It’s enough for these tools to allow simple publishing of content. The real value is delivered by great IA, interface design, content management processes.
As intranets get more advanced, there is a greater technology component, but will this really be out-of-the-box? To streamline tasks requires true integration, not the clumsy approaches by the big portal and ERM vendors.
I say: forget the vendors! Look not to them for salvation!
Things like this always feel like more of marketing exercise to me. I have heard any number of new names for the Intranet of the future (or is it present now). I think what is important is the focus, purpose, and functionality of the system changes – not the name. Intranets are maturing. This is easy to understand and doesn’t require a catchy title to communicate it to people.
James,
BT has an intranet. It’s called the BT Intranet. It’s what it does that has created the reputation it now has rather than what it is called.
It’s what an intranet does that it important – not what it is called.
I feel you should go further than you have. In BT we use internet tools as well as intranet tools including Facebook, Twitter and RSS feeds of internal and external news for business purposes http://markmorrell.wordpress.com/2009/06/30/i-now-receive-only-the-information-i-need/.
I also feel work and personal lives are blurring in being separate distinctive things we do and we are doing more of these using intranet/internet tools.
As this evolves intranets could well become a redundant term and something far more embracing takes hold.
This will because of what people are doing rather than calling an intranet by another name.
Popular diction and nomenclature rule the day; what is most popular will succeed, whether its the most appropriate or not.
Frankly, the term ‘intranet’ as applied to the internal, employee website, is a misnomer and technically incorrect. The intranet is in fact the whole network, and it includes email, all internal websites, LANs, WANs, etc. However, the internal, employee website has become to be known as the “intranet” and that’s a fact. There actually is no changing that unless a popular movement to supplant it arises (which is highly, highly unlikely).
There’s a lot of terms I don’t like — especially 2.0; there’s so much wrong with this label… where to begin… However, 2.0 is a popular term, and therefore it should be used, because its common nomenclature that everyone understands; this is the point. Its correct to call the internal employee website the “intranet” because common nomenclature supports this understanding.
@James Intranet managers practically never exist at the local/country level. The people who “run” the intranets do so many other things too. Nobody full time!
@ Louise – My point exactly when you say “I am inclined to agree that ‘intranet’ is increasingly too narrow a term and loaded with preconceptions to describe the future of internal work environments.”
@ Mark – Again, this is exactly my point: “As this evolves intranets could well become a redundant term and something far more embracing takes hold.”
Yey for “beyond the intranet” !!
What I see in daily practice is that people are not so sure anymore whether they are just seeing a web site, a piece of software, or a widget/gadget/whatever. They are also not sure where in this space such a thing resides, and – most importantly – how it will behave when they use it. Established UI paradigms don’t work anymore when you take some functionality and content and make it available on a dozen platforms and devices.
All those artifial terms like Web, Desktop, Application, Site, Intra/Extranet – they are loosing their meaning and purpose. It’s up to consolidating channels/portals/experiences to bring those pieces back together in a meaningful way. I don’t know how they are going to be called, but Intranet is already out the moment external users are working with it (extended enterprise bla bla
.
Great article!
Milan
I like the pragmatic approach @Toby! Staff definitely do call this “thing” the “intranet”, at least in our experience. I’m not so sure on the “2.0″ label, however. My sense is that the time has passed for this, and that it’s had all the impact it’s going to have. (We therefore avoid the term “intranet 2.0″ for that reason.)
@Jane, that’s extremely interesting! Perhaps we’re seeing a difference between between super-large/global companies (your space), and merely large/national organisations (where we do a lot of work). It may also be a regional thing, as it seems that there are fewer dedicated intranet resources in some locations (USA?) than in other regions (notably Australia).
Let’s keep working on expanding your survey, and hopefully we’ll finally have a clear picture of the intranet landscape!
Wow, all the big shots are involved in this conversation – lovely to see.
James when you ask “should we be using something different” – is that the ‘royal’ we ? The industry, the consultants, or the Corporate Comms ‘foot soldiers’ on the front lines ?
I am a geek as you well know, therefore to me it is simple, an intranet is an “internal” network using internet protocols – http/https, etc. As such I would debate Toby’s point about including the LAN (file shares ?) in fact in my current organization there is a big difference in use of language here – something is either “on the LAN” or “on the intranet”.
However I agree that the “intranet” is in reality an ecosystem that encompasses many facets, from web publishing, to collaborative workspaces to instant messaging, and might be seen to include tools as old as email and as new a microblogging. So…..
@Martin – I agree an intranet is just part of an enterprise information management ecosystem, or system or systems, thus it should be about info mngt strategy
@Mark – absolutely agree that the shift brought about by broad adoption of social ‘consumer’ IT, like your Facebook example, causes more definition issues – is FB part of the intranet, well no because its external and belongs to someone else, and at the same time yes because its our collaborative social networking platform…….
@Jane – the workplace web sums it up well, but to me the workplace web is a sub-system of the broader intranet.
For all those that comment that the “intranet is what the intranet does”, true, but Toby is right about how use of language becomes ingrained. Thus finally in response to James, we stick with intranet but do a better job of explaining what it means ! (???)
@Jed, if you read the wikipedia definition of “intranet” then it agrees with you and talks about internal networks, TCP, HTTP, etc.
The one thing I *am* sure of is that this definition is dead. It’s not how end-users think, and it isn’t meaningful from a technical perspective either (people don’t call their Oracle DB the intranet, nor their file shares).
I do like your “ecosystem” approach, and I’ve heard quite a few users say that the intranet is “the thing you access via the blue e [the IE desktop icon]“. That would suggest that they recognise it as a web site, plus associated functionality.
Perhaps Eric and Mark hit the nail when they note that the terms are unimportant – let people call it what they call it – the reputation of the thing will grow to create the notion of what it does.
I think we are having this discussion because we (as practitioners) care about that the name infers, and that it infers something that accurately defines what we are providing. Do users have the same concern? no.
I’ve been looking at the future of intranets in some detail for an forthcoming research report, and it looks to me as if, yes Jane, the intranet is becoming the online workplace and, yes Mark and others, it will incorporate a wide range of tools, systems and even external ‘web’ resources.
But does that mean we should change the name? Not if the current moniker works for users as a term to indicate “work stuff you can do through an web browser or other online tool”. Does ‘The Tube’ accurately describe the London Underground Railway? No, but we all have an appropriate mental model.
The important thing is not to change users expectations through altering the name of the beast, but to understand what users expect an intranet to be and do and to meet that expecations. What is the user’s mental model of the intranet? How can we make sure our service is oriented toward that mental model and therefore provide a satisfactory experience.
Does it really matter what it is called?
@James “The one thing I *am* sure of is that this definition is dead. It’s not how end-users think, and it isn’t meaningful from a technical perspective either”
Well that is one of the things I asked, who is the target audience ? If its end users then I still think we need to reinforce a modern definition of the same word – intranet.
By the way, having been to read it, I dont think the Wikipedia definition is dead from a technical perspective, I think it provides useful underpinnings for the technology centric (as opposed to user centric) view
@James: thank you for an excellent keynote at Intrateam Event. You asked me where I think the future of intranets and intranet managers lie (and Martin underligned the depressing fact that there is no obvious career path for an intranet manager). I think you are absolutely right that the future is an enterprise experience with end-to-end solutions where all tools and systems are available in a web browser build into business processes and not seen as stand alone applications (in smart companies, that is. In the majority of companies the anarchy of applications will still be king). This is of course already happening as you showed. And Martin is absolutely right, in many companies it happens as part of an Information strategy, or as Jane says as part of a wider Business strategy. I think the turning point of the status and role of the intranet is when the business process owners become key stakeholders. Especially when the intranet truly integrates the number one information system in every company – the financial system. Because that will make the intranet the workplace web, business solution (or whatever we call it) of the managers in the company and it will make the Finance department a key stakeholder. Cross-organisational ownership will be the only logical answer to this evolution, and it will require “intranet managers” who:
1. are professional project managers
2. can analyse business processes
3. understand how financial information fits into business processes and how managers need this information in a user friendly way. Here by the way is a huge potential. Most web-based interfaces to financial systems still require a degree in finance to fully understand them, and most managers do not have this. So here is a huge potential to improve performance management in most companies.
We have talked about how to make HR understand the full potential of the intranet for years. Now we must turn to the Finance department and start digging for all their gold!
Nina Sonne Nikolaisen
Knowledge Management consultant
COWI A/S
Great conversation and something we’re struggling with as well. Our intranet is referred to simply the ‘intranet’ by our employees. There was a point when I thought it would make sense to ‘name’ it as employees started referring to it as the ‘portal’ but this only caused confusion as there were a number of portal initiatives underway. So the intranet is pretty much it’s name.
I think the point everyone here is making is that the intranet is so different from what it started that it feels like we should be calling it something else. A rose by any other name…
-Candace