I’m going to start talking about the future, and I need your help
Categorised under: Enterprise 2.0, Intranets
Our unwavering efforts over the last 7+ years have been focused on helping teams deliver better intranets. This has all been about “today”, and what we can do to make intranets work better. This has involved uncovering successes (and failures) from across the globe, and distilling these into best practices and practical suggestions. There is still much work to be done on this.
What has been missing in the intranet space are grounded and practical discussions about “tomorrow”. What will the intranet of the future look like? What should we be aiming for? What are the potential benefits?
From this point on, I’m going to be doing a lot of talking about the future, in addition to our normal discussions. The culmination will be a keynote presentation in Denmark at the IntraTeam conference, March 2-4.
I’ve learned that creating new ideas and methodologies is not a purely intellectual activity, it’s a conversation. It’s more about finding ways of communicating ideas, than the insights themselves. So I need your help.
I’m going to be sharing my ideas, and I need your input to tune and refine the language and approaches, so that we can jointly create something that will help to take intranets forward the next step.
I think the future of intranets is important to talk about for a number of reasons:
- Knowing where to head. Without a direction, it’s no wonder that many intranet teams have become stuck just maintaining the current site.
- Excitement and enthusiasm. We need to inject a sense of enthusiasm into an often all-too-quiet enterprise space. Not hype, but genuine and authentic passion.
- Joining the dots. There is a lot of good work and thinking going on, but no clear vision of how the pieces all fit together.
- Building support. To connect with senior management, to build a compelling business case, we need a vision that truly speaks to business needs.
- Generating momentum. Intranets need to move, evolve and innovate. We can’t foster this if all we talk about is the problems of yesterday and today.
This will be a two-pronged approach. I’ll use narrative to explore a “day in the life” of staff within the future organisation. We’ll use these stories to uncover some fundamental principles that can guide future activities.
Watch this space, and don’t be afraid to get involved.
Tags: Enterprise 2.0, future, Information management, Intranets
James Robertson is the Managing Director of 
5 Comments:
James,
I want my intranet to be a personal intelligence/communications tool. I want to access my companies VOIP service from it so conversations can be recorded and archived against projects. I could also make cheap phone calls from my home computer without the need to bring my laptop or cell phone with me. I want my intranet to give me location /individual stasus of co-workers much like MSN and Sharepoint. So, if a person is on the phone, MSN and Sharepoint status change. I want easy integration of my Outlook and Intranet so email file storage is easy. I want my Intranet, Outlook task, and Project Server to all talk to each other. So my boss can’t assign me work when I am on vacation or can more easily resource level me. I want one place I can go to to find all my tasks, past, present and futre without needed to go to many sites. Same for alerts for document changes. You can probably tell I am a fan of SharePoint, since some of these features are found there but it is not easy to get them all working together.
I want my facebook, twitter, Linked in, Blog Phone, MSN, Yahoo etc to be one integrated platform so I don’t have to have 10 applications running. IGoogle comes close but it usually requires relogging into each service after each start up. I want…. the world?
Near future (5 years):
1. Good design: Thoughtful IA better focused on task completion & social software design.
2. Near seamless integration of i) information finding, ii) communication, iii) collaboration and iv) activity completion tools. Think integration of Skype with wikis & blogs with MS Outlook with performance management software with policy libraries with Yammer.
3. Find and connect with the right colleague really fast: Mix of social software design, strong personal profile & expertise info, task-based approach and integration of comms tools.
4. Complete mobile access: From your (really) smart phone you can i) find any needed piece of information through enterprise search; ii) find and email, IM, text, call, video chat with any colleague; 3) edit wiki pages and post news stories; 4) complete activities, such as travel advance requests.
5. Integrated and sortable team and roll-based activity update streams: Think blog RSS plus Yammer streams from your teams/projects/topics plus wiki edit alerts.
To sum up: Intranet as an ecosytem rather than a tool; communication as a scalable activity rather than a set of individual tools; content as a collaborative process rather than a product.
I think the Workplace Web is the way of the future.
A place where knowledge workers have everything they need to do their job through the web – independently of time, location and hardware.
Data, documents, applications, personal contacts, web sites, processes, web based forms, latest news updates – all will be delivered within a relevant context from the Workplace Web.
We’ll see virtual teams and organisations operating globally, in different time zones, on different hardware platforms, with different cultures but driven by common business goals.
It’s already happening with the outsourcing of call centre operations and the trend towards cloud computing.
PS
I noticed lots of RTs on Twitter about this topic… but where are the comments?
Some good comments so far. For me there are (at least) several questions the intranet of the future need to address:
1) How will technology develop – look at the impact the mobile devices have had on working.
2) How will our working lives change? More and more flexibility is taking place and the lines between work and life are already changing towards a whole life approach. It will be interesting to see if the boundaries between home and work disappear, with total integration of systems. Perhaps the iphone/blackberry generation will be working in micro, tweet sized short bursts of activity taking place small via custom apps.
3) What are the big business drivers going forward. Information management and storage is going to be huge. The shift towards globalisation makes demands on the language used on intranets.
4) Who leads the debate – IT vendors, users, the business or intranet managers? As you say it has to be a conversation.
So, where are the futurists out there who are already mapping the future where we all live on Mars….?
James,
I’ll be happy to join the conversation when I’m back from holiday. I’ll be at IntraTeam conference to hear the culmination too.
Mark