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.

Do social intranets have a future?

The last eight months or so have been interesting times, as the old Chinese curse has it.  My experience consulting for Interact has taken me into about 20 companies and has given me a real insight into how each of them views the 'social' side of their (planned) social intranet.  There is a wide range of intentions, from, at one extreme, 'Not for the forseeable future' through to 'Gimme gimme gimme'.  Most are somewhere in between, perhaps best expressed by the phrase 'interested, but cautious'.  There is also often a difference in attitude between the intranet team (keen to go for it) and the senior management (perceived as sceptical or anti).

I suspect enterprise social networking is being given the time of day by more executives than a couple of years ago mainly because of the mainstreaming of Facebook and Twitter.  Even the most hardened laggard will have a close relative or friend who uses these.  This fact has raised consciousness of the ubiquity of these tools, but is a double-edged sword for those like me who'd like to see more Web 2.0 in the workplace.  On the one hand I can refer to activity streams, for example, as being 'like Twitter', thus short-cutting the explanation. On the other hand in doing so I'll conjure up whatever impressions, possibly negative, that person has of the content of Twitter, thus making it more difficult to get them to see that it could be different on the office social network. 

Anyhow, this is a summary of sorts of where we seem to be, with some organisations swimmming but many still trying to put a toe in the water.  What I want to do now is pull in other trends and factors and think about how things will go from here on. 

At EurocloudUK the other week (thank goodness the speakers and topics were more up-to-date than the website! - sorry, Phil, David!) it was suggested by David Terrar (@dt) that the three big trends in technology at the moment are:

• Social
• Mobile
• Cloud,

and that together these form a tidal wave for change.  I think I agree with this.  These forces are strong enough to sweep away the resistance and objections of the more traditional sort of IT manager, although in more heavily-regulated environments that resistance might take longer to founder.  I can see that in maybe a couple of years time - yes, that soon - there will be little if any need to use a PC to do work.  At ISKO UK last week Steve Dale (@stephendale) showed a photo of his two year old grandson ably using an iPad.  I agree that his generation will not be pushing mice around.  Combine these truly user-friendly devices, tablet and smartphone, with Cloud (SaaS) providers of not only 'social' but all the applications that we now traditionally think of as being inherently about client/firewall etc - but much more user-friendly - and you can see where enterprise IT is headed. 

Yes, but: what's the relevance to social-in-the-enterprise?  I think the social-cloud-mobile triumvirate mentioned above is going to - eventually - result on the virtual disappearance of the membrane that separates people within organisations from those outside it.  I'm not sure though.  And there's a huge amount to be said about that, touching on issues such as trust, confidentiality, transparency.

That's probably for a later post. 

Joining Interact

I've just started a new role with a company called Interact.  They develop and market intranet software.  They were hiring and I got into discussions with their CEO, Nigel Danson, and things developed from there.  Having been pretty impressed with their competitor Igloo's product, I considered the bar to be high for Interact to impress me, but impress me they did.  I also like the 'roving consultant' nature of the role, and gelled very quickly with Rachel and Steve who also interviewed me. 

Have I gone over to the 'dark side', throwing my independence to the wind and from now on becoming nothing but a walking, talking, tweeting plugger of one firm's products?  I don't believe so.  I'll do my best to 'tell it as I see it'. Interact are clearly strong on running intranet seminars and their annual conference is a major event.  They like to emphasis the benefits of intranets rather than merely pitching their own product.

I'm looking forward to joining them.

No-one ever got fired for....

It used to be 'for choosing IBM'.  Over time, that became 'Microsoft'.  Arguably, now it's 'Sharepoint'.  It certainly seems that way to me.  A huge percentage of large corporations have chosen it for the portals / intranets, yet I don't hear much enthusiasm for the product.  The best that commentators seem to be able to come up with is things like, "It's very flexible - if you've got the development staff to tailor it", or "We know the supplier's going to be there in five years".  In other words, weak praise, mainly driven by safety concerns.  Maybe the recent purchase of Yammer will change things, but it's too early to say.

In the meantime, there are some excellent out-of-the-box and/or SaaS social intranets that are virtually unknown by comparison: Interact, Igloosoftware, Thoughtfarmer, MangoApps, to name but a few that I've looked into or used recently. 

Maybe it's time people did start getting fired for choosing Sharepoint instead of properly investigating alternatives such as these? 

The push-pull conundrum

We've launched our social intranet at the charity I'm working for. It's been going for about three weeks now. Needless to say there have been a few technical issues, some of which are minor bugs of the sort that you get with any software and one or two of which have been more problematic. On the whole, though, the platform (Igloosoftware's SaaS offering) is working pretty well already, and adoption is coming on apace.

Aside from bugs, one of the key concerns that keeps cropping up relates to the intended demise of 'All Staff' emails. Reducing or eliminating these is supposed to be one of the benefits of the new set-up - a reduction in spam and an increase in choice as to information consumed. I've explained during my training sessions how this can work: scan the activity streams, subscribe to content you're interested in and/or visit the site often.

But it's not quite that simple in practice. In fact, All Staff emails, with all their faults, are a lot simpler. It takes a little while to figure out exactly how to optimise your alerts, and how they are working. Even if you've got them set up just how you want them, and even if there are some that have been set up by an administrator for all staff, there is still uncertainty. The user remains uncertain that he'll see that crucial message (especially about cakes in the kitchen - we like our cakes at the charity) and the poster isn't sure who's seen it.

Of course, there's never certainty that everyone has read an email, unless you specify a read receipt and go through all of them to check - not too likely for over 100 staff. But at least people have only one place to look for that critical message.

Our solution? Really key messages from 'the centre' go out as specially formatted emails, everything else goes (or will go) onto the intranet somewhere, and it's down to you to make sure you see it. Emails can still be used for sub-groups of staff, but people are being encouraged to link to content on the intranet rather than to put it in the email itself.

Whether this will work well or not depends on how quickly people take to the new platform-centric, 'pull' concept. That might in turn be a function of people's experience to date with Web 2.0 on the Internet, which will vary from person to person.

If you have any other suggestions for tackling this one, please post a comment.