Web Workplace – a new word for intranet?
Categorised under: Intranets
Jane McConnell suggests that Web Workplace could be a new word for intranets. To quote:
We need to find a new word for “intranet”.
Why? Because we need to wake people up, lose the “dead wieght” we have with the word “intranet”, help people – especially top management – focus on why intranets are business critical.
I know where Jane is coming from on this one. I confess mixed feelings about the word “intranet”. It comes with a lot of baggage, and it often associated with just the “boring” stuff of content and communication, and is not seen as a business tool. So that argues for a fresh start, and a new name.
That being said, everyone has an “intranet” and the word is widely recognised. It’s also extremely hard to gain adoption for new terminology, and new terms often cause more confusion than clarity. New terms can also fail to resonate with people (look at the term “intranet 2.0″ for an example).
So I’m going to keep writing about intranets for the moment, and will continue to work on changing perceptions relating to this term. But I’m prepared to jump ship if it makes sense: after all, I don’t care what it’s called, but what it does!
What do you think?
Tags: Intranets
James Robertson is the Managing Director of 
10 Comments:
Hi James, I agree – “Workplace” definitely seems to describe a more “holistic” view of what is traditionally described as the Intranet. Workplace was a term IBM adopted several years back to describe a new organization formed when the Corporate Intranet team moved out of Communications and under the CIO. The mission of the “Total Workplace Experience” group extended to everything “on the glass” – which I think was (and still is) the right way to think about things: An integrated approach to maintaining the overall quality, experience and identity (or brand) of what employees do through the desktop – whether it be via a Web browser, through a desktop client, or any other interface (“glass” was understood to include mobile devices). I think Web could be left to one side. “Digital” could be prepended to the term, but I think that, increasingly, the Workplace is only what you experience through the lid of your laptop. For many, including myself, the entire workaday experience of a company happens solely through the narrow rectangle of my ThinkPad lid. Sort of a strange thought. To my mind it just underscores the importance of user experience and digital brand when it comes to strategic intranet (workplace) management.
I don’t understand why we should consider moving away from using Intranet as a term? Why change something that, intrinsically isn’t broken? There’s a difference between having an intranet that doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do and the name by which it’s called.
In the BBC we have a brand name for the Intranet; “Gateway”. It’s a common term that is bandied around to describe everything and anything within the on-line workspace.
Simply changing the terminology used to describe something that most people know and already understand won’t fix the ill’s of a company’s intranet. It’ll merely confuse people. And the effort it will take to get any new terminology into common parlance far outweighs any short term benefits it purports to deliver.
Any brand name change should be a considered part of and parcel of a longer term plan that changes the way people work. Not tinkering around with name changes.
Would we consider changed the phrase “internet”? Probably not. So I don’t see why we should approach our intranet in a different way.
Some examples of where this hasn’t worked;
1. Personnel -> HR -> BBC people. Still known amongst our staff members as “personnel”. The people within the personnel world still do primarily the same thing but have different job titles. Where’s the benefit to people who work for the BBC?
2. “Marathon” chocolate bar now known as “Snickers”. Still referred to a “Marathon” by the majority of the UK populace.
3. “Jif” is now “Cif”. Maybe in the Unilever’s marketing teams minds it is. But the reality is different.
I could go on. But I won’t.
In these resource strained times, we need to concentrate our dwindling resources in improving the effectiveness of our intranets, not thinking about embarking on something that will make little or no difference to the most important people affected by all of this. The user.
The idea of changing “intranet” never occurred to me. And while I see both sides of the issue as presented by Abigail and Phil, I have to admit that I’m intrigued by the idea of “Web Workplace.”
We, too, have an intranet that’s branded. So, I’m less concerned about the impact on our employees. Where I see the advantage to changing to web workplace is with our senior leaders. They seem to constantly struggle with the difference between the internet and the intranet. Even trying to say the two can make an experienced person fumble.
To me, telling someone that I manage strategic direction and content management for Nationwide’s web workplace for associates provides a much clearer understanding of my role than referring to the intranet.
All good points! I confess a certain skepticism too about the rebranding of items. To often, like IBM’s efforts, it feels like a “land grab”, and the market reacts accordingly. Other times, new names simply cause confusion.
I’m certainly not going to stop talking about intranets
Thanks for picking up on my post. And thank you to the others who reacted here. There are still more comments on my original post (see link above) which you might like to look at.
I believe we need a break from the past even if “web workplace” is not the right term. One of my readers suggested turning the terms around and calling it “workplace web”. An intranet manager had also suggested that among the original suggestions, so the idea has come around twice now.
What do you all think about “workplace web”?
I’d like to re-post here a response to Phil (BBC)that I have already posted inside the NetJMC & Co Linked in group so that others can see it:
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Phil: I’d like to clarify that I’m not talking about changing a brand name, but rather a concept. I’m looking for a generic word. Each organization will have its own brand name or not.
I’m happy for the BBC that the word intranet is clearly understood. In my experience that is very rare. Maybe you don’t feel a problem because you have already created a strong concept with “Gateway”. You say it is “a common term that is bandied around to describe everything and anything within the on-line workspace”. Sounds to me like the word “intranet” itself is not used by BBC people and that the Gateway concept is very strong. Congratulations! That’s the big step forward.
When you refer to “on-line workspace” it is clear that the BBC has gone beyond the misconceptions about intranets that many people have and that create confusion and weak positioning of intranets for a lot of enterprises I know.
I’ve reposted this from NetJMC & Co Linked in group.
“Intra-net” is clearly a mirror concept to that of the “inter-net”. I see no problem with having an alternate phrase that also mirrors, for the enterprise, the phrase “world-wide web”. I would simply note that many enterprises are made up of multiple workplaces. So a more accurate mirroring phrase would be something like “enterprise-wide web”. It doesn’t exactly trip off the tongue lightly, I’ll grant you.
I think it is also useful to consider that, in the internet, there were many “portals” plus other information sources. Just as within most enterprises (at least large, complex ones) there are many information sources with the “portal” trying to be the main starting point within the intranet.
Hi James (and Jane),
You said at the end of your post “I don’t care what it’s called, but what it does!” and that is the main point to me.
It is what we use the intranet/web workplace/thingy for that is what users will remember it best for.
In BT we refer to Directory, BT Today (our internal news site) and Room bookings as business as usual activities we need to use to do our work.
What underpins them and enables them to function is the intranet but that’s not important or what they refer to.
Mark
I think the long term objective is incredibly easy to state:
“We want to provide staff with a seamless environment to get the tools and information they need to do their job.”
Very easy to state. Incredibly hard to do, and made harder as each legacy tool becomes web-enabled.
Now I’m not suggesting some rapid rush to put everything on the web, eliminating Outlook, Word and the entire desktop environment.
But the goal must clearly be to provide staff (users) with less tools, and to have those tools better coordinated. Whether the resultant thing is called the “intranet” is then perhaps irrelevant.
Your thoughts?
James, I really do not think the term is irrelevant. That’s easy to say when you are in intranet-land – “friendly territory”.
Imagine you need to stand up in front of the top management board of your company, you have 10 minutes on their agenda, you need a budget for X number of $.
What do you call the “thing” your are talking about? The intranet? The “web workplace”? Something else?
Words make a difference. They trigger reactions. They represent values. They are what make up the “elevator pitch”.
The words we use impact how others perceive us.
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