Our unwavering efforts over the last 7+ years have been focused on helping teams deliver better intranets. This has all been about “today”, and what we can do to make intranets work better. This has involved uncovering successes (and failures) from across the globe, and distilling these into best practices and practical suggestions. There is still much work to be done on this.

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.