by Shiv Singh
November 4, 2008 at 10:56 pm
· Filed under Reviews
Earlier today I was a special guest on the very first Intranet Live show hosted by the Intranet Benchmarking Forum. I shared details of the Razorfish wiki and discussed how in a downturn companies spend more on improving productivity as they need to depend on fewer employees to do more.
As I reflected on the conversation a little later in the day, I realized that not enough has changed in the intranet world over the last few years. When I compare Intranets today to those that were designed and launched in early 2000, they don’t look that different. People Finders, HR information, corporate news and organizational charts still reign supreme. Yes, social media has had an influence and we are collaborating in new ways but the changes don’t appear that transformative. In fact, social media has often meant that employees now have less time for the intranet.
Am I missing something? Are we as intranet designers, managers and thought leaders not doing our job properly? I don’t know. But what I do believe is that we’re maybe too focused on a traditional definition of the intranet. And that’s something we need to move beyond.
I’m waiting for the case study where a whole intranet is reduced to an iPhone or a Blackberry application, to a time when Microsoft Office blurs the lines between the desktop and the intranet, and to the scenario where an Intranet truly integrates with a LinkedIn and leverages peer influence dynamically. We’re not there yet. But hopefully we will be soon.
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I agree, as you say, that we’re maybe too focused on a traditional definition of the intranet. But the issue of stagnating intranets isn’t new. Some organisations have simply been progressing faster than others over the last 10 to 15 years or so, and I’m sure this will continue to be the case. Blogs, wikis, and other social media tools will only be transformative if they are used in a transformative way. The chances are that in a few years time I’m sure well see books, conferences, training course and consultants all offering ways to “refresh your wiki”.
Shiv, one area where I think intranets have been stagnating for sure, is Intranets designed specifically for small businesses. About 6 months ago I started looking around for SaaS Intranets and just got frustrated. many are scaled too big or too complex for a small organization of a couple people. What I ended up doing was cobbling together something from Start page applications.
Perhaps you can do an article some day reviewing a few scaled-down Intranet applications specifically for organizations with under 10 employees.
Intranets, yes. But then they always have after the fashion of all things designed from the top-down. But our jungle of an organizational wiki is thriving, thank you very much!
CIOs no longer see the intranet as a strategic resource, but little more than an electronic filing cabinet. As a result, we see little investment in them these days. If they are to truly serve as information and knowledge centres (as is often the intention) then they need to be better linked to people and knowledge strategies.
M
I sat in on this event and had the same takeaway - lots of nice stuff but really just the same stuff as before with a few more bells and whistles - and that’s not to put down the immense work that’s gone into the development. The two things I’m left pondering are whether it’s time to develop a new term - just say intranet and you’re back in the nineties when we wanted to show the difference between the external company web site and the employee info only area; and secondly whether the crux of it is that the intranet is still a destination to visit - it’s not the real workspace for employees. I think wikis are popular because you ‘live in them’ more; if we could bring this feel to all the functions we need for collaboration (from accessing the ‘old’ static information that still has some value to the newer interactive tools of the web 2.0 world) then the newwordforintranet will move to the next step.
Thank you for the thoughts. There are certainly some issues with the term intranet but its still the one that’s most commonly used in organizations. I don’t know the small business intranet space as well as I know the big corporation intranets. I’d have thought that we’d see more innovation there leveraging software as a service solutions but maybe not.
I agree the intranet isn’t really the workspace anymore and that’s one of its problems. I think another factor is where the intranet team sits in an organization. Its usually in the IT departments who focus heavily on the technology or the platform specifically. Wiki driven intranets and those with desktop gadget elements are starting to change things.
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