I made a presentation recently in Sydney to local government on intranets and how I think they’re dead.

Around 10 years ago, we held great hopes for our intranets. For our investment [1] we expected the technology would deliver cost savings, working efficiencies, collaboration and best-practice knowledge management. By 1998, we’d spent about $10.9 billion USD [2] on corporate intranets, yet our ideals about collaboration remained relatively unrealised with COIs ignoring the strategic value and assuming that an intranet’s only purpose was to serve as an information repository. After spending billions of dollars we’d received little more than an electronic filing cabinet.

Part of the failure to realise the value of intranets was our misplaced trust that the newly emerging web technology would somehow deliver something that is essentially a people process, because collaboration and knowledge management is about people, not technology. The other failure is in our management practices and a missunderstanding about how people work — that information is somehow a product, a Word document for example, that, like an engine in a car factory, is produced by the end of a hard days work.

There’s no return on investment to be had in this paradigm. As my AppGap colleague Jon Husband writes in his article The Design of Knowledge Work, it reflects a very Tayloristic view of the world, where efficiency is to be had by motivating workers to behave in more efficient ways, rather than to think smarter. Certainly, you can offer better tools like large intranet repositories with a wealth of information inside, but the synthesis of information into knowledge is a difficult task when the person who created a piece of information, or a similarly empowered individual, is not there to help you know where to look, understand what you find, and then assimilate it.

The truth of most modern work is that we analyse data and information and reach out to our networks in order to gain access to knowledge. We collaborate on ideas and then have a burst of work that reflects the sharing of ideas. And, of course, once we have produced something, we then tend to socialise it again within our networks in order to refine the ideas we’ve produced. This is knowledge work in action and people are at the centre of it.

Of course, when I say collaborate I mean individuals engage in a range of activities, from using the telephone or meeting face-to-face, to using Twitter or engaging others through blogs, in order to reach out to people (not technology like traditional intranets), in order to socialise ideas, create new thinking, help refine old ideas and make them better.

This is where modern organisations find their investment in social computing tools is paying off. Tools, like Twitter, give employees instant access to their trusted network of colleagues, friends and experts. Blogs allow people to have access to other people’s thoughts in a storytelling style that communicates in a much more personal and effective way than a clinical report ever can. And then, of course, individuals can comment and ask the author a direct question and have a discussion that leads into the use of other social computing tools.

Its this access to people that the investment in social computing tools brings. When considering closing down the walls to applications like Facebook or Twitter, consider the impact on workers inability to access the experts in their professional networks. When considering bringing social computing tools into the organisation look at how they will support and strengthen communication within your internal communities of practice. This is the ROI for social computing and when used as part of an array of tools that help connect people, facilitate communication and collaboration, then it can rejuvenate your intranet and make it live!

M

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1. Melcrum Internet Survey (2001)

2. Computerworld (1999) $10.9 billion spent on intranets. International Data Corp Briefs, 42, 26 July.