Intranet Futures

Last week I was invited by Paul Miller, founder of the IBF to be ‘in conversation’ with him in front of an audience at an IBF meeting. The idea was that we’d have a conversation about the future of intranets and then turn it into an open forum. And it worked very well. There was an audience of about 25 people, from a range of different organisations. It was also good to catch up with some people in the audience whom I interact with on Twitter etc., but had never actually met.

We had a wide ranging discussion, covering a variety subjects and we certainly stimulated a useful debate amongst the audience.

One subject we discussed was senior awareness and ownership of the intranet – where many organisations are moving to more of a shared ownership model, to replace the single ownership model that existed up to now. This is happening because of the continued elevation up the criticality scale of intranets and an increasing role in business process and change, rather than being exclusively the domain of comms activity. At present, I think most intranets are managed out of communications – primarily because they’ve been communications led, not because of any underpinning logic. However, the changing role of the intranet does not seems to be putting pressure on communications people to relinquish their role and I think that may be because we’re adapting into this new, broader, business focused role.

We also discussed why some organisations with excellent intranets give poor customer service and whether the intranet could be an enabler for improvement. This opened up an interesting discussion around the difference between intranet, internet and extranet. Although I’ve been saying this for some time and it is yet to happen, I firmly believe the distinction is breaking down and that in future we’ll just have The Net and people will be able to access any information that is relevant to them no matter where it sits, or where they are. There are one or two technical challenges with that approach however, and there’s also a usability challenge as people take comfort in knowing where they are. In other words, knowing that a particular piece of content is ‘inside’ an organisation (and therefore may be privileged) is important in terms of how people view it and use it.