Informalisation

Tomorrow I’m hosting the Intranet Benchmarking Forum meeting looking at our intranet. In putting together my 15 minutes of fame, I started to think about a potential clash between the increasing centralisation and formalisation we’re seeing in business right now, which is a natural consequence of the economic challenges many businesses face, and the increasing ‘informalisation’ of the intranet. We face a surge of user generated content via wikis, blogs, microblogs social networks and so on, most of which is spontaneous and informal. However, over the past 15 years or so, intranet professionals have focussed on governance of content, making sure it’s up to date, accurate, owned and so on. As the balance between this legacy ‘governed’ content and the new wave of informal content changes, so our governance approaches will have to change. Not only that, the governance we managed through the early days of intranet was necessary because users weren’t particularly savvy and we needed to take care of the content on their behalf. The user is much more aware these days and doesn’t need us to cosset them in quite the same way.

Does this therefore mean the end of intranet governance as an activity? Can we just leave it to the network to organise itself and the crowd to keep content up to date? Well, possibly yes, but also, no. Some form of governance will still be required – people in business still need reassurance that the information they are using is valid and accurate. That cannot be left to chance. However, as there will be many, many more content providers than before, we’ll see a few power users emerge in the information farmer role. They will assume responsibility themselves – in other words we won’t ‘appoint’ them – to look after content. These farmers will need our help and support. That will be a vital role for the intranet professional going forward.

The tools we use will also need to change. Content management systems have grown up supporting this formal world. They are entirely inappropriate for this new wave of less formal content, where users neither have the time, nor the desire to be trained on how to use a system. They’ll be looking for a user experience closer to that of Facebook, Blogger and the other social media platforms. They’ll just want to start using it. However, in our corporate worlds, change of this type is not comfortable for our programmes and projects. IT projects in particular have long lead times and there is a very real danger we won’t be able to reap the benefits of this greater knowledge base and collaboration because we can’t get the right platforms in place.

A final thought. We mustn’t get too precious about our governance processes. They are a means to an end. If we can achieve the same ends in a better, cheaper, faster way, then we should do so. Change affects us too!