Intranets have been with us for many years now. Stephen Lawton was the first to coin the term in an article he wrote for Digital News & Review in April 24 1995. Essentially, he observed that people were creating small websites inside their organisations to share knowledge and communicate information. Nearly 15 years later, many of us continue to use intranets in this way and have not yet moved beyond the publishing of static information because we assume that this provides sufficient value to the modern knowledge worker.

I think this mentality was born out of a whole generation of workers who have effectively grown up in their professional lives with Microsoft Office styled products — the idea that, much like print publishing, documents are worked on by individuals and then released to others once it is finished and officially approved. KM guru David Gurteen suggests that this “create and publish” behaviour is also likely to be the result of early knowledge management efforts to bring structure to information in the organisation and make it searchable and easily accessible to employees. Unfortunately, as Gurteen highlights, too often employees didn’t see any value in this for themselves and, as a result, such systems failed [1].

The essence of this failure of early intranets to bring true communication value into an organisation and to its employees is perhaps bound with the lack of recognition and understanding of how knowledge is created and information is shared by people. It’s also the factor that underpins Web 2.0’s success where traditional intranets have tended to fail. That is, that information is shared through social networks, from person to person, and that there are a number of roles in that social exchange.

With Web 2.0 tools being assessed for their worth to enhance intranets Forrester’s Social Technographics is a timely reminder of the social exchange — people’s behavioural requirements for sharing information — needed for a successful intranet, and further, a modern digital workplace. Microsoft’s newest offering, SharePoint 2010, which is about to released soon, reflects this trend. We first saw blogs and wikis integrated into this offering a few years ago, helping to meet what Forrester terms “Creator” and “Critic” rolls. While the upcoming version will debut free online versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote for the production of all types of content by Creators  [2], making a step closer to a truly online, digital workplace, out-of-the-box it is still unlikely to meet the needs of “Joiners” or “Collectors”. [3]

Joiners need to feel they belong, what Maslow would call Social and Esteem needs. As such, Joiners need to be able to maintain their personal profile as it fits with the behavioural and cultural norms displayed by the group. Collectors’ need RSS feeds, to vote for content they feel adds value to the group, and to add to the way in which information is typically classified (by adding tags to a folksonomy) by the group so that its members can more easily find it.

In embracing the move beyond the standard intranet to an enterprise 2.0 world, the world of the digital workplace, more needs to be done to understand the real human reasons why we’ve failed in the past to deliver technology to support people at work. In reality, this requires organisations to come to terms with the ways in which people create knowledge through the social exchange of information. It means embedding the understanding that a one-size-fits-all approach is unlikely to work into the organisation’s IT strategic plan. It demands acknowledgment that embracing technology variety  will enable people to be naturally drawn to those tools that best suit their personal communication and interaction needs, based on their Maslow-described motivations, their group’s communication and behavioural norms, and their individual role preferences for creation, joining, critiquing, collecting or just spectating.

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1. Gurteen, D. 2008. KM (2.0) goes social. The Gurteen Perspective, Inside Knowledge. 29 Feb, 11, 6. Online at:

http://www.ikmagazine.com/display.asp?articleid=A42004B0-DBB1-43F5-80FA-5B2B146FB714

2. Marks, O. 2009. Anticipating Sharepoint 2010: Making Enterprise Foundations More Flexible? 13 Aug. Online at: http://blogs.zdnet.com/collaboration/?p=816

3. Not to mention that the user experience inherent in opening up a Word document means that the most logical place for a Critic to read and rate the content is inside the document, but the most useful place for someone else to see that rating is before the document is open