Intranets are not just intranets anymore

by Shiv Singh

October 21, 2008 at 9:25 am · Filed under Collaboration, Intranets

I spent the better part of yesterday locked in a brainstorming room with a client and my team as we discussed what a next generation intranet should look like. I was struck by how little some business assumptions have changed in the last few years. We forget these assumptions as we strategize, design and build next generation intranets. Here are a few of those assumptions.

1. Intranets are about Lunch Menus and People Finders. Everyday intranet managers around the world try to make a strong case for why the intranet is a strategic tool. Why its about collaboration and insights and how it can transform an organization bottom up. Unfortunately, many senior managers and employees across the board still think of it just in terms of lunch menus, people finders and human resources information.

2. Intranets are an HR & and Corporate Communications asset. Intranets are very important to HR and Corporate Communications, but its extremely important to other departments and teams as well. It can be an effective medium for employees to share information and collaborate among themselves. That doesn’t have to happen outside the intranet.

3. Intranets aren’t mission critical business applications. Here’s the biggest misnomer. Intranets can be mission critical and they can and should integrate business applications. Remember the portal craze of the late 1990s? That wasn’t a mistake, it was just ahead of its time. Employees are demanding single, consolidated, dashboard interfaces that serve as a true virtual desktop. Some intranets play that role. Others can too as well.

4. Intranets are browser based and top down in nature. Who’s to say that intranets need to be browser based. The best intranets take advantage of social technologies, desktop applications (like widgets) and mobile solutions to provide greater value to employees where and when they want it. Its not about the intranet, but about employee productivity using digital technologies.

Intranets have a long history in most organizations dating back to the mid 1990s. That’s what drives its current perception. The organizational silos within IT departments that separated intranet ownership from other business applications made sense at the time but don’t anymore. Today, employees demand more consolidated interfaces where all the information, collaboration, self service and business application access needs are met. Its probably time for the departments to reorganize to more directly align with employee expectations and less by application ownership.

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12 Comments »

Appreciated your: “The organizational silos within IT departments that separated intranet ownership from other business applications made sense at the time but don’t anymore.”

Your post reminded me of interviewing Serena Software’s Kyle Arteaga for an “Inside Knowledge Magazine” piece on implications of Facebook for enterprise social networking. You may recall about a year ago Serena Software made headlines by announcing they were adopting a Facebook Group to enhance internal collaboration in lieu of their intranet.

“The future of intranets is increasingly distributed, sitting outside everybody’s firewall. You need a presence on whatever platforms your employees and the people with whom they do business connect.”

If you are interested in the context the article is here:
http://snurl.com/4lhh2 [c21org_typepad_com]

Jenny, thank you for your note. I was on a panel with an executive from Serena Software last fall and know them reasonably well. I’d say that the future of the intranet is integrating the broader web into daily workplace experiences. It isn’t just about sitting outside the firewall. Mission critical applications and security concerns will always limit what is done outside the firewall. Its not a zero sum game in my opinion. Both will be part of the picture. Interestingly, a lot of financial services companies still limit broader internet access from office desks.

Great article. In our 100 person organization, our intranet is a very important part of our processes, rather than just being about the lunch menu and corporate communications (tho there is that aspect too). we use a web based intranet solution called HyperOffice , which has many integrated tools which we find useful to our day to day working. it is the sole repository of documents, where every department has its own “workspace” has its own document library. all management personnel are encouraged to manage tasks and activities using the integrated “task management” tool, which is of a great help because our teams are scattered across locations. we also manage our schedules and mail through the intranet.

Thanks, Pankaj for the feedback. That’s good to hear. In my own organization the intranet is structured primarily as a wiki (using media wiki software). It looks, feels and functions like Wikipedia. It includes document repositories but not to the extent that yours probably does.

Hey Shiv, nice article, really like the bit: “Who’s to say intranets need to be browser based” - not so long ago I had a long conversation with someone about what you might basically call an ‘Outlook’ based intranet, some serious brainstorming was done around Outlook 2007’s ability to act as email client, RSS reader, Documentum client and Sharepoint client. It never happened, but just shows that its worth ‘thinking outside the box’ !

That’s an interesting idea. It reminds me of Xobni which starts to tie Outlook with one’s social network and creates a different kind of address book on the fly. The fact of the matter is that no application can compete with Outlook so it does beg the question - can one create an intranet that’s Outlook based? Its certainly something that I need to think through.

However it does indeed raise the question of Outlook’s dominance in large enterprises. I think in smaller business, or new businesses, where cloud based applications or open source get a foot in the door earlier (e.g. Gmail, or Thunderbird & Lightning, etc) its actually easier to think of ‘old’ browser based intranet. It will be interesting to see if Microsoft do a much better job of integrating the next version of Sharepoint with the Exchange / Outlook platform.

SharePoint and InfoPath are the tools we use to ensure “Intranets are not just intranets anymore”. We have made excellent progress in redefining the intranet in multiple organization doing exactly what you suggest : Extending the intranet as a suite of critical web based business applications that drives employee productivity and collaboration.

How true and how sad these assumptions are. Add in the recent post from James Robertson on 25 incorrect assumptions about intranets acting as a productivity tool and you could feel quite depressed. The fundamental problem has nothing to do with intranets and a huge amount to do with information management. Far too many organisations have no concept about the importance of information to their operations. Information management is seen as a synonym for information systems, and it is something very different and much more potent.

Much of my work is now in helping organisations develop intranet strategies, and from that encourage their organisation to fit the intranet strategy into a wider information strategy. Intranets have to be decision support platforms and all the content should be aligned along making effective decisions. Even news has a role as it should help the employee to make the decision to stay! Start linking decisions into risk amelioration and you will find the risk/compliance manager camping out in your office. Businesses are going to be so risk averse that an intranet that can play a significant role in reducing risk will have a very significant impact..

An intranet is not a technology, it is a structured collection of the very best quality information that the organisation has developed or purchased. That of course rasies the issue of what the quality standards for information are in an organisation. I bet they exist for health and safety but not for information.

Far too much is being made of the next generation intranets being collaboration platforms. For me the next-generation intranets will be work-flow based. Click on the link to the stage in the workflow you have reached (preparing a tender, filing an appeal, doing a lessons-learned review) and just the information you need at that stage of the process will appear, complemented by enbedded search that presents highly effective pre-planned search strategies delivered though a click on a link and not through having to enter keywords. Part of that process will be collaboration, but just turning an intranet into a forum of some form is not going to be of any lasting value.

Not sure that these comments are quite aligned with your original post but hopefully they may spark some more intelligent contributions.

Martin, thank you for your provocative thoughts. I agree that intranets are about more than collaboration however, I’m not sure if they’re going to be directly work-flow driven only either. Its a matter of the specific business scenarios. Information management is critical in any organization but how much of it can and should be managed through an intranet is still a question. I’ve seen many companies have separate Records Management departments where they use specific tools to manage all the structured data in the organization. These tools are kept separate from the intranet. In other cases, its tied in along with some of the softer intranet components. I tend to feel that an intranet needs to account for structured and unstructured information and all the collaboration pieces that come along with that.

Hi Shiv, There actually is a big retail company over here in Switzerland that uses outlook as their intranet client. I once did a case study on them in regard to their intranet governance modell and it was quite interesting to see how they provide “all the information” employees need in outlook (including sharepoint workspaces etc.)

[…] точно сформулировал Shiv Singh (компания Avenue A Razorfish - “Intranets are not just intranets anymore”), признанный эксперт в международном […]

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