What makes an intranet ‘social’, and what are the differences between ‘social intranets’ and ‘traditional intranets’?

A philosophy and way of working

Social intranets are not a technology, or a specific set of features or functionality. Instead, they represent an emerging view of how organisations should work, and how staff can interact.

The underlying philosophy of social intranets includes:

• recognising that organisations are made up of people, with interests, activities and interactions
• delivering human-friendly solutions that match how people work in real life
• supporting two-way dialogue and interaction between staff
• facilitating cross-organisational communication and collaboration
• enabling staff to be active participants and owners on intranets, and not just passive consumers
• drawing on network effects within organisations, recognising that groups can do more than individuals
• enriching traditional business and internet activities with a social layer

[October article by James Robertson, read the full article]

Alongside brand-new “social intranets” are traditional intranets still focusing on the fundamentals.
What we’re seeing is a landscape of two-speed intranets. While there is plenty of overlap between the go-fast and go-slow intranets, there are also many differences. If we’re to close the gaps, we need to recognize that there is no one-size- fits-all approach.

Stealing approaches from the public web, the enterprise space is becoming much richer and more vibrant. Collaboration tools of all kinds are being tried and adopted, introducing new ways of connecting staff members. In some cases, organizations are ditching old intranets and replacing them with social intranets that democratize participation.

Beyond the purely social and collaborative space, modern approaches dramatically simplify developing enterprise applications. This has enabled innovative teams to deliver business solutions targeting key needs in months rather than years. This has transformed go-fast intranets into powerful business tools.

While these intranets are the ones that you hear about at conferences, the reality is that they’re still very much in the minority. In these early stages, the right conditions need to be in place to enable this type of innovation. The challenge for these new intranets is to avoid throwing the baby out with the bathwater. In some cases, the lessons hard learned over the past decade have been forgotten, on the idealistic assumption that new technologies trump old problems.

[Editorial in Intranets magazine, read the full post]

Deploying microblogging involves more than understanding the technology, because it is really about providing opportunities for conversations between staff. The content of microblogging messages can vary widely, from accounts of what staff are working on, and questions for other staff, to updates about products, projects or situations.

The growth in microblogging is a relatively recent phenomenon and its success within organisations varies greatly. Where it has been successful, microblogging has been able to better connect staff, break down hierarchical structures and improve the sense of belonging felt by staff.

As with many of the social media tools, there is an impact on the intranet, particularly on communication channels and siloing of information. This article outlines:

• strategic considerations
• practicalities on how to set up microblogging
• how to drive adoption

Microblogging is a quick informal channel people can subscribe to with a low time commitment. It goes beyond Twitter-style 140-character comments but it is less structured and time-consuming than blogging. Ease of use and high levels of engagement make this a powerful tool to complement any intranet.

(July article by Catherine Grenfell, read the full article)

Yesterday in Stockholm, I gave a presentation at a local IntraTeam community group meeting. A friendly bunch of people, with lots of good conversations (and great lunch!). These were the key points of my presentation:

• The unmanaged spread of collaboration tools is anti knowledge sharing.
• Intranets and collaboration tools can’t afford to compete: both lose.
• Instead, collaboration tools and intranets must be brought together.
• Start by clarifying the role of the intranet and collaboration tools (including using the shop window metaphor).
• Establish good governance for collaboration tools
• Explore the many ways that the two sides can be seamlessly integrated, including simple ways of providing access to collaboration tools.

For all this, these are deeply unfamiliar tools for most “normal” staff (ie not us). They are not drop-in replacements for our old ways of working, and require different behaviours and ways of thinking.

It is therefore strange to see so many organisations rolling out these tools with little or no training or support. In many cases, there isn’t even an announcement heralding the release of these new tools, with adoption left to organic growth through word-of-mouth.

Is it any surprise, therefore, to see staff replicate their old behaviours in the new tools?

Rich team spaces become online copies of the file shares they were meant to replace, with the same problems. Social tools are used as replacements for all-staff emails, increasing noise rather than reducing it. Collaboration spaces are created as experiments, and then quickly abandoned.

If these tools are meant to transform our organisations, why are we not making the change management effort required to achieve this outcome?

Communication and support

When collaboration and social tools are deployed, they shouldn’t be rolled out quietly. An overall communications strategy is needed to:

• inform staff about the new tools
• educate them on how to use them
• sell them on the benefits
• encourage them to change their working practices
• answer their questions
• help them to be effective

For example, we’ve seen some great videos produced within organisations to promote the adoption of collaboration tools (including in this year’s soon-to-be-announced Intranet Innovation Awards). The Transfield case study also shows what should be done to support and educate staff.

Adoption strategies

Michael Sampson’s book User Adoption Strategies is also a must-read. In it, he compellingly outlines the need behavioural change if collaboration tools are going to succeed within organisations, and provides a simple four-stage model for planning this transformation.

Most importantly, he outlines 20 (!) different change strategies that can be applied to gain adoption of collaboration tools. These range from quick-and-easy activities to major enterprise initiatives; all are worth considering.

This is a masterwork, and it highlights what organisations must do make collaboration tools work. As Michael reminds us, “hope is not a strategy”.

However, before a social intranet can be successful, work must be done to enrich and develop a much more fundamental aspect of the intranet — the staff directory. This article explores the potential of the staff directory, the impact social networks on the Web are having on intranet design, the rise of ‘social search’, and examples of these concepts in play in businesses already.

The killer app

Typically, the staff (or corporate) directory is already one of the most vital and well-used utilities on an intranet. Finding out who to contact and how to contact them supersedes nearly every other intranet-based process or task that employees conduct on a day-to-day basis.

Typically, the staff directory is a highly popular intranet tool

With the increasingly powerful capabilities of modern intranet platforms, the staff directory is rapidly becoming not only the most-used utility on an intranet, but actually the very heart of the system. It’s the database and tool that all other features and functions are being tied to. Whether it’s core functionality such as business intelligence, data reporting and record keeping, or more social features such as collaborative project areas, blogging and more, the person or people using these systems, spaces and tools is becoming the focus.

The Tube

No example illustrates this better than IDEO’s much-publicised and stunning entry in the 2009 Intranet Innovation Awards.

[August KM Column by Alex Manchester, read the full article]

Intranet is basically a practical tool that creates a unified workplace for an organization supplying a number of benefits. In my opinion, the list of must-have features include collaboration, communications and knowledge base.

I agree with Denis on this one. Staff don’t need yet another tool for collaboration or enterprise 2.0. Instead, we should be bringing things together into a increasingly powerful intranet, combining information, communication, collaboration and tools.

[Thanks to Intranet Loungue]

When I work with global organizations to help them define the business objectives of the intranet, we do it from these 3 angles. The problem is when we push each dimension to its logical conclusion, we end up with a technology dilemma.

From a purely practical standpoint, various activity streams, and social software in general, are extra tools layered on top of the current systems a worker has in place.
This is inherently true because we’re not replacing systems of record; social software should be designed to complement them and make them more useful.

[Thanks to Intranet Lounge.]

Prince was wrong – it’s not the internet that’s dead, it’s the intranet. When I talk to clients about intranets as a collaboration hub they cock an eyebrow as if I’m speaking 2003 speak rather than 2010 speak. Some of it may be terminology tedium, but the sentiment is born out of a sense that the intranets of old no longer offer a compelling enough business proposition.

[Thanks to Intranet Lounge.]

Whether their organisation is in a position to make use of these solutions or not, the intranet team needs to stay informed. Personal likes and dislikes should be set aside to keep an open mind on investigating tools to support the business.

To be effective, the team should be able to understand and articulate the functionality, benefits and risks of potential solutions. Often other staff in the organisation are already investigating and proposing new solutions.

It doesn’t matter if team members love or hate Twitter, or if they spend their evenings knitting rather than Facebooking or using the latest mobile applications. Intranet professionals need to be able to explore and evaluate new solutions in a range of ways:

• Practicality — how does this new element work?
• Usefulness — what could it add to an intranet?
• Execution — what is the end result?
• Emotion — how does it make users feel?

[CM Briefing 2010-11 by Catherine Grenfell, read the full article]

1. It is believed that it is the Millennials (those recently out of university and roughly 22 to 27 years old) that are expecting or demanding these social tools.
2. Often people make the link from Web 2.0 to Enterprise 2.0 stating we must follow this path which is successful.
3. Often you hear no training is needed because the tools are so easy, or its related mantra “if you build it they will come”.
4. Many people believe that one percent create content, nine percent modify and interact with that content, and 90 percent just consume that information and are passive.
5. People are moving to being more openly social as years go by. This is also tied to the youth myth (this combination myth really doesn’t hold up at all either).

I believe these kinds of pilots are unintentionally set up to fail, or at least underwhelm. This is essentially because they contain too few people, most of whom know each other too well.

While I agree with Andrew that pilots are often run with the wrong people (preaching to the converted), the “throw everything out into the organisation and hope for the best” alternative is far from satisfying.

We would always argue that projects should focus on solving a specific and concrete business problem with new tools. This delivers clear benefits, and gives useful momentum for further initatives. There are many examples that we’ve seen, including: Scottrade and British Airways.

Twitter has popularised the use of #hashtags as a way to aggregate relevant tweets together. #hashtag is a special kind of tag because people learn about them before using them. For example, if I want to apply a hashtag for information architecture, I will lookup the hastags.org directory to see if I should be using “information_architecture”, “information-architecture”, “#ia” or some other hashtags, based on the original intention of the hashtag, the popularity of the hashtag, the quality of information represented by the hashtag and the type of people I want to reach. This is unlike tags, which is a typical summary of content using keywords that mean something to the originator. #hastags have this powerful self-organising ability. It is this inherent ability of #hashtags that allows us to build communities organically. This is nothing new, it was the intention of #hashtags in Twitter.

In my last blog post I covered open vs. managed community creation inside the enterprise. The next logical question I am asked is “If we do go the managed creation route, what types of questions should we ask the requestors?”. I hear this question often and so decided to share what I share with my customers and ask you to chime in with what else you might have to add. (Keeping in mind we are talking about internal communities within the enterprise.)