The Trouble With Intranets

Reading back over this blog I see that I was at one time a big fan of the concept of a social intranet.  I am less so now.  The main reason is that I've come to the conclusion that intranets carry too much baggage to be able to help facilitate enterprise social networking (ESN).  Even the term " intranet", dating back as it does about 17 years, is problematic.  It means so many different things to different people, with the default probably being what that 1997 intranet could do, but with a few more bells and whistles.  Actually, I've discovered that intranet platforms not unusually were conceived back in that era and have been updated piecemeal over the years, but that's a bit of an aside.

Most people, when they hear the word intranet, probably think of one or more of these things:
- a library of dull but necessary stuff such as policies and forms
- a mouthpiece for management, probably edited by Internal Comms
- a handful of quite useful applications such as an IT helpdesk or a place to order supplies or claim expenses
- some attempts to pep the site up with branding and/or widgets from the web such as the weather or how well the tube lines are running
- a staff directory.

This is all quite good stuff and I don't deny that it has value.  It seems always to take more time and effort to create than something based on a 17 year old concept should, but then it does have to be tailored to the needs of the organisation concerned and so, broadly, I'm fine with that.  However, its value is way off what's possible and what modern organisations need to be aiming at if they are to achieve the agility and responsiveness that current-day market conditions dictate.  The main reason is that the content of the traditional intranet is almost entirely supplied by the centre or the top of the organisation.  HR, Internal Comms or the CEO's PA probably contribute 90% of it.

But modern intranets include " social", do they not?  This, is it not, is where the important interactions and discussions all across the organisation, top-down, bottom up, across silos, happen, surely?

They could, but by and large they do not.  This is because " social" cannot just be tacked on to an intranet, or anything else for that matter.  But if you buy a social intranet that is what will probably be attempted.  Because the ESN angle will be perceived as just one, relatively small part of your intranet implementation.

Perhaps this looks like blaming the software, which is putting the cart before the horse?  It isn't really.  As I said at the beginning, it's the perception of what an intranet is that's the problem.  That goes equally for the average user's perception, senior management's perception and the intranet team's perception.  Each helps the other down a road to an intranet that maybe does quite a lot of things but definitely isn't an ESN.

Matters are made worse by the complexity of the typical intranet platform.  I pride myself on being quick to learn the ins and outs of them.  But there are often so many features, and then quirks or bugs, that it can take me weeks or more to become even a moderately competent administrator.  Add to that the hidden time sink of permissions.  The platform usually allows a great deal of flexibility and granularity of permissioning.  This makes it both difficult to set up a permissions model and tempting to go for one that is far more complex than necessary.  In turn this leads to a high maintenance overhead.

All in all then, I'd say by all means choose a social intranet if you're sure it meets your organisation's needs, provided you exercise due caution in relation to the pitfalls I've mentioned.   But if what you primarily want to do is introduce enterprise social networking I'd be inclined to look at simpler, standalone solutions, and put the time into adoption rather than set-up and maintenance.

Wikis and Blogs: same but different?

It struck me today that the types of Web 2.0 tool (or at least, publishing rather than finding tool) can be roughly divided into two paradigms. We could call the first the add-a-post paradigm. Into this camp fall blogs, Twitter, discussion forums (or bulletin boards, if you're old school) and, I think, social networks. The second paradigm could be called the overwrite paradigm. It includes not only wikis but Google Docs, Zoho and online mindmapping like Mind42.

It also struck me that the first paradigm seems to be the more intuitive for most people. Or at least, it seems to be easier to get people to adopt it. Much has been written about the problems involved in getting wikis to take off. As Jay Hariani says here, "When we hold presentations with the goal of explaining to users that Word is the past and Clearspace, Confluence, Zoho, or Google Docs is the future, they often smile politely, but have trouble seeing how things might be. Selling them on the E2.0 ethos of knowledge reuse, search not store, and folksonimies takes a lot of convincing." Why this is, isn't quite clear, although I suspect it's a combination several things:
- people like to see 'their post' being responded to rather than changed;
- they might feel diffident about changing someone else's work
- they might feel an overwrite paradigm space is 'owned' by someone else in a way that they don't about an add-a-post space.

If I'm right about all this, it will take longer to see widespread adoption (assuming other things are equal) of the overwrite model in organisations than it will for the add-a-post model. The only exception I can immediately think of would be for a heavily templated or structured overwrite space which meets a clear and specific business process need.

What do you think?

Mainstream KM ignores Enterprise 2.0

I went to a meeting of information specialists last week, about Knowledge Management. The main speaker runs a course at a London University (note: A London University, not the University of London). She had also persuaded a few ex students, now working for City firms, to talk about their KM experiences at work.

With one exception - the lady from Ernst and Young - they did not seem to be aware of any of the key 'Enterprise 2.0' tools of blogs, wikis, RSS, social bookmarking. Or at least, not aware of their potential application in organisations for knowledge sharing. After the presentation I spoke to a young guy who is signed up on the course in question. He seemed a lot more tuned in to Enterprise 2.0 than his tutor.

I was thoroughly disappointed by the experience. Is it typical of the 'KM World' these days?

Social networking bandwagon is rolling

I've spent the last few weeks working very intensively to help get a website launched. It's a women's fashion site, and all of us who have been involved are pretty pleased with ourselves at how much we've achieved in such a short time. A few years ago such a site would have been simply an online magazine, perhaps with eCommerce included. From now on, social networking is de rigueur.

I'm not going to go into detail about the project, or even name the site, as the work's ongoing and there might be perceived to be commercial confidentiality issues. (Sorry!) The point I want to raise, I guess, is that I get the impression that just about everyone building a website these days is going to want it to have a social networking component. What does this mean? I think it means that there are soon going to be a heck of a lot of places one can go to on the web to interact with others. I'm not sure how many social networking sites we want or need. Is the latent demand so great that they'll all thrive (at one extreme), or will the whole 'market' consolidate down to 2 or 3 biggies, like Facebook and MySpace?

Any thoughts?

Enterprise 2.0 - the big and broad picture

This interview with Don Tapscott, well-known guru and seer in the world of technology and business, is interesting for the way it paints the Enterprise 2.0 future as being a major revolution. Don also covers a range of topics, from the importance of the expectations and behaviour of the younger 'net generation' as they enter the workforce - a point referred to in my previous posts - to changing business models. He thinks it's going to be big - massive - which may be true as he's a bit imprecise about timescales. Worth a read.

Which companies are blogging and wiki-ing?

I'm getting the impression that plenty of large companies pretty much haven't heard of the Enterprise 2.0 concept, and I've been surprised how "off the pace" some information management professionals are on the subject. Good news, perhaps, for those like myself who see these companies as their market.

But if all organisations were at that stage then it would be even more of an uphill battle than it is to turn these ideas into reality. Fortunately there are some early adopters who, as far as I can tell, have had some success with their projects. I'm going to sprinkle a few names around that I've picked up over recent weeks. I don't have first hand knowledge of the success of these projects, but I've no reason to believe that they have been over-egged any more than any project is. Here we go.

The BBC has adopted wikis and blogs at the instigation of Euan Semple. At a function I attended recently Euan mentioned one example that sticks in my mind: joint authoring of a policy document by about 90 authors, in a fraction of the time that similar documents have taken to produce the traditional, sequential way.

Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein (DrKW) achieved extensive use of a wiki in their (large) IT department, thanks to the efforts of then CIO (now Confused of Calcutta) JP Rangaswami.

Allen and Overy has implemented social software, driven by Ruth Ward and colleagues, and aided by Headshift.

According to Lars Plougmann a major pharmaceutical firm he worked with created an intranet from a wiki, and generated user traffic that was so great as to be embarrassing to at least one guardian of a traditional, 'top-down', centrally-managed intranet in another organisation - especially since the wiki needed no maintenance.

I find it helpful to quote examples like this when trying to convince the sceptics that there might be value in all this. But, of course, that's OK for those organisations, isn't it, but we're different....

'Great minds' thinking alike

During a very interesting discussion with Nick Chapman of Thrupeople this week, the topic of young graduate entrants to companies came up. Nick agreed with me that this group is significant when it comes to take-up of Enterprise 2.0. We found ourselves agreeing that the culture of many organisations is in all probability incompatible with the expectations of this group. We kicked around some ideas for addressing the issue with a social networking approach. Nick suggested I might do some research among a sample of graduates to see what those expectations and aspirations might actually be. I might well do so, especially since I missed this ITT.

After the meeting with Nick, having already formed the view that there were a number of minds, great or otherwise, thinking alike on this topic, I picked up the March 2007 issue of Information Age, and read this:

...a generation of IT-savvy graduates - all of whom have whiled away their university years in 'chat rooms' and on social networking sites - now entering the workforce. "This generation has different values from the baby-boomers...tending to be more transparent, willing to share information, used to getting things more immediately, and wanting to interact quickly."

Increasingly, employers have had to become receptive to to the expectations of what Forrester Research has dubbed the 'Millenials' - those born between 1980 and 2000 - making collaboration a key recruitment issue....For many of these people, going into a company which says, 'No, we do it this way', is going to seem really antiquated...

Do you get the impression, as I do, that we have a strong driver for social software take-up here, and possibly for organisational culture change? Could such changes be a prerequisite for attracting the younger generation into the workforce, and a real differentiator between successful and unsuccessful organisations?

My Generation

Well, not mine, actually. I'm in my late forties and certainly don't 'hope to die before I get old'. I'm talking about the recent graduates and other young people in their early twenties currently entering the workforce.

Personally I've been using 'social software' in the form of discussion forums (mainly for my hobby of motorcycling) for about six years. I'm old enough and ugly enough to have become a fairly hardened sceptic about the possibility of such apparently trivial activities taking hold in an enterprise. But the younger generation are not. It's reasonable to guess that many of them have presences online, in the form of MySpace sites and so on, and that they may expect similar facilities inside their employer's firewall. I'm not the only person to think this (not surprisingly). Euan Semple, for example, has made the point in his recent, minimalist post on the subject. But one or two recent discussions with people trying to 'do KM' inside organisations bear this out, and it makes me optimistic.

Why? Because, for the younger set, at least, you can sweep aside all the usual issues about how hard it will be to break habits, change the culture, etc. Just build and they will come. These young people also tend to be eager to show how knowledgeable they are, as they thrust their way up the hierarchy. At least that is what I was told by an information manager at one of the Big Four accountancy firms the other week. This, too, is helpful: it's a driver for content.

This all sounds very positive. Just set up the software, tell the twenty-somethings about it, and off you go. But is that the biting of nails I hear in HR and legal departments, as the prospect of MySpace-style material appearing all over the corporate intranet?