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!

Tomorrow's Intranet Is Already Here!

I was in a workshop the other day with my colleague Richard Dennison and we were thinking about the future of Intranet content. Richard summarises our findings nicely on his blog. The key consideration for me, was that we’ve now created a world inside the organisation where all content can now be classified as collaborative. Previously, we’d used words such as definitive, official and so on which implied it was owned and published by and individual, or very few. Official content is probably already a minority of the content we have available to us, and as a proportion of the total it will continue to shrink. What’s interesting about this new world is that this democratisation of publishing and crowd-sourcing of content is just the beginning of some fundamental changes we’ll see in the very fabric of organisations over the next decade. Businesses can no longer hold on to the top down structural models and processes constructed centuries ago during the age of empires. Big changes are foot!!

Feature on Simply Communicate

I mentioned in a post the other day that I'd been interviewed by Marc Wright at Simply-Communicate for a 'How Did I Get here Feature'. Well it's now on the website. Enjoy!

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.

Knowledge or Information?

I’m doing a fair amount of work these days on the governance arrangements which need to be in place for some of the new social media tools, such as blogs and wikis.

The wiki phenomenon in particular is an interesting one.

One of the key success factors for traditional intranets is the implementation of tools to ensure content is kept up to date, is usable, accessible for people with disabilities, and complies with the organisational policies and any regulations that affect your industry. Important so that users can have confidence that the material they are viewing is safe to use as part of their business dealings. Trusted content. This is most often achieved by having clear ownership of content. Someone you can pin responsibility to. However, in the new collaborative world of crowd-sourced content there is often no one particular owner of content, so who do you pin responsibility on?

This means we need to think differently about content governance.

But there’s another dimension. People sometimes refer to the content on these collaborative platforms as knowledge. Explicit knowledge. I don’t think there’s ever really been agreement about when explicit knowledge becomes information. There are as many views as there are practitioners. Whichever way you look at it a significant overlap will exist between knowledge management policies and information management policies. The two need to be taken together.

Then you have the issue of whether a single organisation – even some of the largest – can ever really generate effective ‘crowd-sourced’ content. Wikipedia is a good example of effective crowd-sourcing and the wisdom of crowds. It depends on a substantial volume of people having sufficient knowledge of a subject reviewing and editing content such that its accuracy and relevancy increases in, typically, small incremental steps. However, inside an organisation there are often only a handful of people who have sufficient knowledge of a subject to make a valid contribution. A handful of people does not constitute a crowd! So what happens is that the wiki platform – put in place for crowd-sourcing content – starts to be used as a (sometimes simple) content management platform, by-passing the controls and policies in place on the normal content management system. Sometimes this is done for mischievous purposes – to get people out of the rigour associated with owning important content. However, it’s more often because the wiki platform is so much easier to use than the official organisational content management system. So you can’t blame people.

You can add to that the tension between knowledge management (keep everything so we can learn from it) and information retention (get rid of everything as soon as you can).

And the fact that a wiki platform will often contain a mix of genuine crowd-sourced material and individually owned ‘published’ content.

It’s complicated.

So what’s the answer? Should we re-classify traditional content managed intranets as ‘legacy’ intranets and move to a different form of governance for the whole intranet, or should we try and force different kinds of kind onto different platforms, which will be difficult as people will naturally gravitate to the platform of least resistance?

What is clear however, that the drivers of these policies are still there, and in fact are becoming more prevalent. Growing concerns about data privacy, identity theft, stories about the potential impact of loss of data etc. mean that governance is likely to be tightened rather than relaxed. Another tension.

I’m going to have to think about this some more! Watch this space.