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02 December 2009

The latest trends for Intranet development

This IBF blog post from Paul Miller about the coming of “Intranet 3.0” gives 3 very good examples of large corporate intranets pushing the boundaries of internal communication and collaboration.

Although I am not a fan of these meaningless numeric names such as Web 2.0 or Enterprise 2.0 (I’ve even seen Web 1.5 being used!) the eight Intranet 3.0 trends listed can - when combined - represent no less than a workplace revolution.

The 3 organizations given as examples are Sun, IBM and Nissan. The common theme I picked up between these cases is the strategic importance given to embedding the Intranet in business operations. This quote from Ethan McCarty (IBM) is spot on:

The intranet is so deeply woven into daily life at IBM, it's part of every employee's day to use it,[..] You take a very mundane task and turn it into a social activity. Collaboration isn't separate from work.

I particularly like this quote because the same thing should be said of Knowledge Management as a whole. KM initiatives are successful in the long term if they enable knowledge sharing processes that cannot be dissociated from operational activities. So, in other words, in such context, if you don’t share knowledge and collaborate intensively, you’re simply not doing your job. However, this requires a corporate culture not only conducive to knowledge sharing, but encouraging it.

1 comment:

Ethan Rand Robert McCarty said...

Thanks for using my quote in such a complimentary way. I've been thinking lately about intranets as services rather than sites...I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on that.