I read a great article in the Wall Street Journal today written by Andrew Blackman about Intranets. The title of the article was "Dated and Confused" which in my opinion is a perfect description of the corporate intranet.
The article discusses several points about corporate intranets and then notes how wikis and blogs are being used solve traditional intranet problems. For smaller startup-up companies like Parlano, where I work, wikis and intranets are the same thing. We use our internal wiki as well as Sharepoint to store documentation and information for our company. Having used an internal wiki for several years I can say that the problems of intranets have only partially been solved by wikis.
The problem areas can be divided into a few categories.
Input
First is the problem of input, or getting the information into the intranet. Several people in the WSJ article were quoted as saying that the information they needed simply was not available on their intranet because the people who had that information did not post it; instead the information was "in someone's head, or on a drive somewhere I didn't have access to". Everyone who has experience using any type of corporate intranet or blog has had the same experience. You have information to share, but you are either not sure where to put it or you don't know how to format it properly. You try to figure it out but then you run out of time and the thought or information is forever stuck in the depths of your mind.
We use two wikis – one is a basic open-source wiki and another is twiki. Both make it much easier to publish information although you are still required to learn the formatting tricks. In our first wiki it was nearly impossible to upload a file. You could do it, however it required uploading the file to a share and then manually formatting the url so people could link to the file. You want document versioning with that? Forget it. The second version allows for file versioning and is somewhat similar to our SharePoint implementation. So there are improvements. But still, what if you don't know where to put the information?
Output
The second major problem is getting the information out of the intranet in order to use it. While the age-old problem is organization and finding the information you want (one company in the article recently had 212,000 pages on their intranet!), this is lately being solved by sophisticated search. The problem of the intranet is the same one I have on my hard drive: I can't remember where I put stuff and therefore I need a good desktop search. If you have a good search on your intranet or wiki then organization should not be your problem.
However, I still find it difficult to get files from an intranet site, a good wiki, or even SharePoint. Part of this comes from me being a software developer by trade and being used to a good source code repository. The other part comes from me now being in management and needing to access information from my laptop while on a plane. With a good source code tool you can, with one click of a button, synchronize all of your data and download anything that is out-of-date to your pc. That way when you are disconnected you can still access everything. When you reconnect your changes are automatically sync'ed into the repository. It drives me crazy that our intranet solutions don't do this and therefore I have to manually check timestamps of documents when I can't remember whether I edited it since it was checked out. Hopefully SharePoint 2007 has solved this problem and I just don't know it yet. Or maybe I have to wait for further Groove integration.
The Rub
With all of that said, the real problem is the concept of dynamic vs. static information on an intranet site. The WSJ article addresses this and refers to Social Networking aspects of Microsoft's and IBM's latest products. I particularly like the "social distance" concept in SharePoint 2007, where searches return not only documents, but also people knowledgeable in the search, where the people are listed in order of how well you know them.
In the end, however, an intranet site is created to address a topic. And as David Gootzit from Gartner said, "The value of any network is dependent on participation, on the numbers involved". But if the site is related to a topic, then where is the topic-based conversation in the search results? And, if the success of the site is dependent on the participation, where is the metaphor for facilitating real-time collaboration around that topic (rather than amongst individuals)?
We have often discussed how Persistent Chat, which is a real-time, topic-based conversation between people, can turn the model of an intranet upside down. It can do so by creating a dynamic, real-time communication environment where people always start their days in order to communicate with others around their topics of interest. Yet the conversations in these "channels", or rooms, ultimately lead to exchanges of documents, tasks that need to be assigned, or artifacts that need to be logged. While much of the discussion around this, and even the decisions, can be found in the "backchat", or history of the chat conversations, a Wiki page or intranet site dedicated to that topic is the perfect complement to such a conversation.
Intranets have been around for years and companies have spent millions, if not billions of dollars funding designs and redesigns of their corporate intranets. While it still remains to be seen, I am willing to be that none of these redesigns will work until real-time communications, such as Persistent Chat, are added into these historically static collaboration environments.
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