Blending

Yesterday I was interviewed by Marc Wright of Simply-Communicate.com for a ‘how did I get here’ feature on the site. It was most enjoyable, and quite rewarding to think back through the progress we’ve made on intranets in the UK.

Towards the end of the interview we started to discuss what the next ‘big thing’ might be. Of course, there are lots of things I could have talked about, but I have been thinking recently about blending.

Lots of boundaries seem to be breaking down and all our edges are blurring. What I mean (I think) is that things are increasingly being blended.

For example, people often go on about the need for a good home-life balance, but that implies having an amount of each at either end of scale or balance – in other words the two are kept separate. The reality of flexible working however is that home life and work life are increasingly blended. I access my email whenever I can, not just between 9am and 5.30pm. I don’t mind logging in and doing stuff at weekends or on a day off. Similarly, I have no qualms about popping out to attend to something in my home life on a work day. It’s totally flexible. And I’m measured by the contribution I make and whether or not I hit my targets, not by whether I’m at my desk or not. More about flexible working in a later post.

Also, with the definition of an organisation becoming more flexible – we have employees, contractors, partners, suppliers, even customers as part of our organisation – it’s difficult to know what constitutes inside and what outside. Employee or not. It’s become a blend of the two. This possibly means the end of intranets as we know them. Something I predicted a few years ago. It certainly means changes for the way we manage communications.

With the continued rise of user generated content, I think we’ll increasingly see this new kind of content become integrated with ‘traditional’ content - a blended solution. We’ll see much more commenting on news stories - like on the BBC site – directly within the story, rather than in a separate section. This could change the dynamic of who has the authoritative voice.

Similarly, as people get used to aggregating content for themselves, we’ll start to see content being blended with applications much more than now. I think this is particularly relevant inside an organisation. We used to talk about how we could put together web sites that were “sticky”. In the new world, people won’t come to the site, but will pull the content into their aggregator or portal. They’ll increasingly also be pulling applications into the same portal. Content is going to find it harder to get eye time.