The Legacy Intranet

People keep telling me that with the advent of social media, my company’s intranet is going to change beyond all recognition, and that everything we’ve done up to now is just the ‘legacy’ intranet, and old hat!

I don’t accept that.

I heard the same argument way back at the beginning of the 1990s when the web first emerged. People said then (probably the same people) that everything that had come before it was legacy and would be consigned to history. And before that, TV was going to kill radio. Even earlier, radio would kill paper.

Firstly, it seems to be human nature to want more… To know more. And these new channels, features, services add another content layer, not a replacement layer.

Secondly, the reality is that these pre-existing ‘channels’ adapt and behave differently. Take paper. There are more magazines now than there have ever been, although the newspapers are collectively in trouble. We’ve moved away from newsprint, to much more of a leisure and niche focus for our paper consumption. The same will happen on the web. Traditional intranet content will become reference material, with the fast moving, continually evolving, connecting content moving to the new channels. It really doesn’t spell the end for intranets as we know them.