The future of intranets in Copenhagen
Categorised under: Enterprise 2.0, Future intranet, Intranets
I’ve been talking about future intranets since late last year, leading up to my keynote at the IntraTeam Event in Copenhagen.
As expected, this turned out to be a wonderful conference, with Jane McConnell’s keynote a real highlight, along with many other interesting sessions. As always, plenty of great conversations in the corridors, including with Mark Morrell from BT.
My goal of my “Intranets in 2015″ keynote was to show what the future might look like, if we move intranets beyond their current role. I used the two stories blogged earlier, and added rich visuals and examples. I’m pleased to say that the storytelling approach seemed to connect with the audience, and many insightful questions were asked.
I’ll blog more about the examples I showed shortly, but I did want to share some of the ideas contributed by audience members, going beyond the scenarios I’ve already outlined:
- Martin White suggested that there was no need to wait for Sarah’s first day to connect up with her. What about making contact before that point, and helping her to get up to speed before she even arrives?
I then had a conversation with a Danish company who is doing exactly that, with the functionality planned to go live mid-year. I look forward to seeing this in the 2011 Intranet Innovation Awards.
- Martin also highlighted the additional value of providing intranet access on mobile devices: location-aware services. The intranet should know what country someone is in automatically as well as the nearest office. Information could then be automatically tailored to match, a perfect example of acting proactively.
- It was suggested that the intranet should piggyback on public social networks. For example, If allowed by Sarah, the intranet could identify her Facebook friends who work within the same organisation, and use that to suggest connections on the enterprise social network. (Privacy would need to be carefully managed.)
This week I’ll be spending a whole day with some of the leading companies in Switzerland working through the future sceanrios, so I look forward to further insights. Please do continue to contribute to these conversations, and together we can uncover where intranets should be heading.
James Robertson is the Managing Director of 