The Future of the Intranet. Not what we’ve had in mind
by Shiv Singh
Tomorrow is a hectic Intranet day for me. In the morning I’m co-hosting an Intranet Live episode on the first Intranet media channel and then I’m spending the afternoon with a pharmaceutical client brainstorming the best ways to redesign an intranet to deliver meaningful value within the next seven months.
I was planning for tomorrow and it got me thinking about the future of intranets once more. And I realized that Intranets as they are in their current form really do not have and should not have a future. First developed in the late 1990s and popularized by Netscape, Intranets were never meant to evolve into the complex beast that many have become today. They were designed to fuel collaboration, knowledge sharing and group communication. They were meant to be the road that employees took to connect with each other and not deeply with content. But over the last eight to ten years, they’ve grown in size, scope and have become these ocean liner type digital products that are supposed to meet every employee’s electronic need.
It’s time for that to change once more. It’s time in my opinion for us Intranet managers, practitioners, consultants and gurus to rethink what an intranet should be. I don’t know what it will look like but I do know that it’ll become more invisible and more accessible through any other enterprise application. It will privilege connecting people to one another over connecting people to content and it’ll work on any device or platform that it may be accessed from. It won’t hoard data and it’ll reflect the pulse of an organization versus its information archives and internal politics. It will be about collaboration among and between employees, partners and customers fueling new ideas and insights all at once. That’s what it feels like to me. What do you think?
Thought...
