The problem is, not only do these simplistic approaches not work, they often make the situation worse. A few examples:

1. Let’s limit email inboxes to only 20meg

The problem: staff use their email programs as long-term storage mechanisms, clogging up servers with an immense amount of old email. The simplistic solution: limit email inboxes to a small size (say 20meg), and then delete any excess on a regular basis.

We’ve seen an organisation do this. The result was that staff saved all their old messages into Outlook “saved mail” (PST) files. When an audit was done of server space, it was discovered that 12 out of 20TB was being used by these files. They can’t be indexed, searched, or virus-checked. Chances are, they will never be opened again by the staff who saved them.

So the inboxes are beautifully small, but the overall space used is larger, and information management is worse.

2. Blow up shared network folders

The problem: there are an immense number of files stored on corporate file servers, across thousands of folders in hundreds of shared drives. The files are poorly named, hard to find, and often duplicated. The simplistic solution: install SharePoint (Lotus Notes, etc), turn off network folders, and force everyone to store their files online instead.

Faced by the prospect of files shares being turned off, staff invariably copy everything they’ve got directly into SharePoint document collections (etc). Files aren’t reviewed, documents aren’t renamed, and little old content is removed. Instead, a one-to-one copy of files simply replicates the same problems in a new space.

The result? A new technology, but the same content and information management problems. And in the process, search is broken, because every search term now returns hundreds of irrelevant files and duplicates.

3. Let’s fully centralised, or fully decentralise

The problem: intranet content is very inconsistent in its quality, currency, relevance and structure. This generates a huge amount of staff (and stakeholder) dissatisfaction. The simplistic solution: fully centralise intranet publishing, so all content is created by a central team with professional skills. Alternatively: fully decentralise, so all content is owned by the business, with no involvement from the central team (if one is left).

The difficulty is this: fully centralised is always a bottleneck; fully decentralised is always anarchy. Neither extreme will deliver a successful intranet, and a mix of strategies will be required, including both centralised and decentralised where appropriate.

4. Three clicks rule

The problem: staff can’t find information on the intranet. The simplistic solution: staff “don’t like to click”, so ensure that all pages are no more than three clicks away from the homepage.

The reality is that this simply doesn’t work, not just because you can’t fit an entire intranet into a structure three levels deep. The underlying assumption is also false: staff are perfectly happy to click as long as they are confident they’re heading in the right direction.

Beware excessive simplicity

I could share a dozen other examples of simplistic approaches, and why they don’t work. The only valid simple rule is this: “The simpler the principle, the more likely it is to be wrong” (hmm, I may be breaking my own principle there).

We should always strive to elegance and simplicity where we can find it, but not to the extent that simplistic approaches actually make the problem worse. At the end of the day, it’s our job as professionals to find strategies that work in our complex organisations, and to constantly adapt these to match changing circumstances.

What are the simplistic rules you’ve seen, and what problems did they cause?

Multiple repositories can come in many different forms, be they hundreds of SharePoint sites, a handful of massive ECM systems, or a combination of shared drives and Outlook folders. But they all represent the same basic problem. “I have the information I need, it’s somewhere, but I can’t access it or find it easily, let alone leverage its full value.”

In this project, we were able to actually bring both sides around the same table (figuratively and literally), and facilitated the conversation so that each began to understand the others’ frustrations and hopes. Both sides learned a great deal, and though peace was not brought to this particularly fractious environment, they took some great steps toward avoiding all-out war.

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?

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.

The genesis of the Charter was a particularly challenging project to develop an information management strategy for a major pharmaceutical company, and then having to condense it into a single PowerPoint slide for an internal presentation. Driving home from Heathrow Airport one day I passed through the village of Runnymede, which is where the Magna Carta was signed in 1215. This set me thinking about the role of a charter as distinct from a strategy.

In my view the EIS must consider all instances of information and knowledge transfer that take place within an organisation. This does not mean that it is possible to actually manage all transactions. For instance the tacit knowledge inside people’s heads can be added to by training and can be influenced by organisational culture but the only manager of this type of knowledge is the person in whose head the knowledge resides. However it is possible, for instance, to consider the amount of tacit knowledge that people might need in order to do their jobs effectively. If it is too little then you are not allowing staff any control over their working environment and they will have little job satisfaction; if it is too much then the organisation may be badly affected as crucial knowledge will leave when the person does.

Enterprises are rich in both context and control, while new social media sites start completely flat and without either. By embracing and extending our strengths, enterprises can take a shorter journey to successful and mature social media than the consumer models that inspire us.

Like all maturity models, it is partly descriptive and partly prescriptive. You can apply the model to audit, assess, and explain your current state, as well as inform a roadmap for maturing your enterprise capabilities.

This is great stuff, and I’m very pleased to see this produced by a number of our very close colleagues overseas. Definitely worth downloading, and with its creative commons licence, there are sure to many uses!

Effective user adoption is the absolute best predictor of enterprise software success. That was one of the key takeaways for me from the OpenAir User Conference this week.

According to a study done by the Sand Hill Group and Neochange, the most critical factor (70% listed it as number 1) for software success and return-on-investment is effective user adoption.

(Focusing on adoption is on of the 10 principles of effective information management we published a while back.)

This diagram captures some of my evolving thinking on intranets, information management and enterprise 2.0. It outlines three scenarios:

Scenario A

This is the “now” scenario, typical of most intranets and information management strategies.

Information is mostly published at the corporate level, delivered to “all staff”. The closer you get to any one staff member, the less the information is targeted to their their needs. All staff are basically considered the same, and there is no personalisation or tailoring.

Scenario B

This is the “ideal” state, as outlined in the web 2.0 and enterprise 2.0 world view.

The individual is at the centre of all things, and information is specifically delivered to meet their specific needs. This may be via customisation, tailoring, or self-driven social networks. This recognises that organisations are made of up individuals, who need to be effective and engaged.

There is, however, a huge change from scenario A to scenario B. While portals and other technologies have offered personalisation functionality, this has often failed to be used. “My page” and other personal homepages are commonly left empty. Adoption of “enterprise 2.0″ and “social” tools is still in its early stages.

Scenario C

Perhaps this is the middle ground we can work towards in the short term.

While information is still published at the corporate level, there is tailoring of information at business unit level. Call centre staff have relevant information delivered to them, distinct from that delivered to sales staff, engineers, or admin staff.

This is relatively easy for intranet and information management teams to handle. There may be anything from a few to many dozen business groups to target, but this is much easier than trying to address the needs of thousands of individual staff.

Putting it all together

This is just some early thinking, but what I’m looking for is a way of bridging the gap between the corporate on one side, and the individual on the other. This is the middle ground that we need to play in for the immediate future.

So, does it make sense? Do the diagrams help?

(Don’t forget that there is now commenting on this blog!)