Intranets first emerged as recognition that because the web was a great way to communicate with an external audience it must also be just as equally effective at communicating with internal staff and stakeholders [1].

And as the internet boomed, we saw many other opportunities to capitalise on. Not only did we expect that intranets should be the main vehicle for internal communication, but we also began to expect them to help us share knowledge and collaborate on ideas [2]. Unfortunately, studies suggest that we have failed to capitalise on these opportunities. [3]

What has resulted from our investment in our intranets has been little more than the paper equivalent of a filing cabinet. Business divisions publish information on themselves with very little care for their audience, in both communication of information and the services they provide in a way that has meaning to their internal audience and in categorising it so that others are able to easily find it later. Some analysts suggest that the reason intranets have failed to meet our expectations is because information is never well structured and they just are so hard to use. As a consultant and an Information Architect working in Australia, this is what I see all the time – websites that reflect those who publish information and structured in a way that reflects their internal processes, functions and organisational structure, rather than the needs of the target audience. While I try to advise that in the creation of websites that the owners and authors consider a user-centred design approach, it often fails to achieve real traction when intranets are concerned.

What ever the reason why intranets fail, CEOs now consider intranets little more than an information tool [4] – about storing and retrieving information. With the excitement of wikis and blogs in the corporate space, people like Charlene from Forrester are advising executives to ” throw out your Intranet and replace it with a wiki” [5]. And it’s a message that is being listened to because:

“Regardless of the type of innovation undertaken, over 75 percent of CEOs indicated that collaboration is very important to innovation. One CEO described its importance on a scale of one to five as “enormous. I’d give this a six if I could.” [6]

Unfortunately, the road to knowledge management hasn’t been a smooth one. Many vendors in the 90s touted their products as providing ‘knowledge management’ without regard to the true and underlying issues for effective knowledge management – that sharing knowledge is a social activity, not a technology-based one. When we have news to tell friends and colleagues we usually meet them for coffee or pick up the telephone and have a conversation. When we need to share ideas about how to make a process work more effectively we meet in a little room for a little while and brainstorm ideas. When a project finishes we often have ‘lessons learned’ in a hope to tell others about the successes and failures in order to learn from them. Enabling these activities to occur easily and encouraging them is real knowledge management in practice. The only problem is that the people you want aren’t always around and we’re not good at recording the truth and meaning behind these activities adequately because processes the processes for recording what we have in our heads is typically just too slow. When publishing information and sharing knowledge through our intranets we usually have policies that mean content requires approval, editorial attention, and so on. The same goes for records management processes. You need to title the file in a special way, with special metadata that only trained records managers know about, before you can store your information away for posterity. While these policies and procedures are to ensure that official corporate information is the ’source of truth’ handling it in the same way as we communicate information through our internet sites just isn’t productive.

Ultimately, the way we typically govern our information repositories hamper an individual’s ability to share their knowledge. And this is the thing that social computing tools have over our intranets – instant gratification.

Wikis have soft security models: anyone can create new content; change content; correct spelling mistakes made by others; correct facts; expand the ideas; and interlink content all without a formal approval processes. Ultimately, it means that those who want to create content and contribute are free to do so without the hurdles we’re used to seeing with intranets.

Blogs are pretty much the same. In it, people share their personal thoughts and ideas and self-publish their information without the proverbial chains of the information gatekeepers. If we look back to the rich oral history of many of our cultures, blogging is a reflection of the need to story-tell, carrying with it important information not only on the what – the facts like the reports we typically store in our recordkeeping systems – but also the meaning behind the why and how.

And this is where our intranets have gone. It’s not so much a suggestion that intranets are out-of-date, but that as technology grows, we have new tools that are better suited to the ways in which we want to share knowledge and information at work. So long as our CEOs and CIOs understand that these tools won’t deliver knowledge management themselves, but help to enable it, I don’t think I mind so much if traditional intranets fade away.

M

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[1] Lawton, S. ( 1995) Intranets fuel growth of Internet access tools. Dgital news and review, 24 April, 1995

[2] Melcrum Intranet Survey (2001)

[3] StepTwo Designs (2001)

[4] Manchester, A. (2007) Intranets: getting senior management buy-in. The Melcrum Blog. 27 August.

[5] Leib, R. (2008) Wiki-ize Your Intranet. ClickZ. http://blog.clickz.com/080309-131558.html

[6] IBM Institute for Business Value, The Global CEO Study (2006), March.