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Two-speed intranets

Written by , published September 7th, 2011

Categorised under: Collaboration, Enterprise 2.0, Intranets

You’d think from the buzz about social media and collaboration tools that the world is changing rapidly. And you’d be right. These tools are transforming the typical corporate intranet. The intranet doesn’t need to be a one-way communications channel and home for policies. With the availability of new tools-and new mindsets-intranets can foster discussion, break silos, and transform how work is done. Yet for all the enthusiasm, the true picture is more complex. As William Gibson said, “The future is already here-it’s just unevenly distributed.”

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]

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4 Comments:

  1. EphraimJF commented on September 8th, 2011

    The points you make here, James, get to the heart of why I like ThoughtFarmer software so much (http://thoughtfarmer.com):

    - Allows for top-level global navigation
    - Includes left-hand navigation on most pages
    - Allows building navigations through card sorting, task testing, etc.
    - Is also social down to its core DNA

    A lot of social or collaborative tools focus on groups, wherein a lot of content can be stored in large buckets (“documents,” “pages,” and “discussions”). But they don’t allow for strong global navigations in the same space that allow for building topical, task-based information architectures.

    I see a lot of companies that see “the intranet” and “collaboration” as totally separate, which creates a poor user experience for employees.

    Great post, as always!

  2. James Robertson commented on September 8th, 2011

    Agree completely Ephraim!
    I’m always confused why the arguments keep coming back to intranets vs social. This is not an either-or. Instead, we need intranets *and* social.
    As you say, collaborative tools are great at discussions, but can be poor at structure … and there still needs to be a home for the leave form and policy.
    Conversely, intranets in their old-fashioned, static form will struggle to survive into the modern age.
    Let’s hope there are even more tools soon that elegantly combine content and collaboration.

  3. PatrickC. Walsh commented on September 29th, 2011

    James,
    Good , thoughtful article as always.
    When I was doing research many years ago around ERP adoption and why organizations were spending silly money on bigger and bigger systems that inevitably crashed (literally as well as metaphorically) I came across a great quote. This academic had spent years looking at the problem and said that the knee jerk reaction when companies had problems with complex IT systems was not to sit back and analyse why the problem happened but to spend even more money on newer technologies that inevitably failed also. He called it ‘fleeing into the future’.
    IMHO going for ‘social’intranets without understanding the problems that may have limited the success of any previous form of intranet is doing exactly that.

    Patrick

  4. James Robertson commented on October 18th, 2011

    “Fleeing into the future”, I like it! :-)

    Agree completely that the new intranet ideas are great, but only if they also make the most of the great old ideas too.