What is an intranet?

Intranets in large organisations are fundamentally different in nature to intranets in small organisations. In fact I believe only large multi-site intranets can truly be called intranets. Single site intranets are not really intranets as they tend to be managed centrally, with content responsibilities detached from the processes that generate the information. However, I think the social media platforms - in particular wikis - offer a chance to change this. So, instead of going to expensive design and production agencies, these smaller organisations should deploy a wiki platform, tell people about it and then see what happens. I'm sure you'll then see a true intranet emerge - i.e. with distributed content responsibilities, with the added benefit of building in collaboration capability from the start. Just a thought.

Social Media Panel

This week I took part in a panel session on Social Media at the British Library. I was on the platform with Euan Semple, ex-BBC and well known in social media circles, and Conrad Bird, Deputy Director of Government Communications.

It was an interesting morning. I still find it surprising how many organisations are still thinking about whether social media is important to them, or the theory and concepts. Few seem to be dealing with the practicalities of introducing and running blogs, wikis, social networks etc. on a day to day basis inside their organisation. I don’t understand why the delays.

Inevitably SharePoint came up in the discussion and I was interested in Euan’s view that SharePoint does not support transformation. It reaffirms the status quo. This is something I have felt for sometime. SharePoint is far too comfortable, it is not a disruptive technology. It integrates well with the way we do things, with the existing culture, and with the existing technologies. It doesn’t force change. In my view it is far better to go with an open source wiki type solution, or a Facebook type social network which causes an organisation to re-think many things, taking us out of our comfort zone.

We also discussed revolution or evolution - and whether fast evolution is the same as slow revolution. I think not. Revolution implies a radical shift in many things, whereas evolution is a much less challenging affair. Having said that, one of the keys to success when deploying social media tools into risk-averse organisations (and amongst risk averse colleagues such as HR and legal) has to be to emphasise the evolutionary dimensions. Even if the results are revolutionary.

Is Google turning into a Follower?

Google has a reputation for turning things on their head and shaking the market up, but this recent announcement makes them feel much more like Microsoft, who have built their dominant position by being the second mover in the market place.

Actually , I quite like the idea of Knol, which takes the Wikipedia "wisdom of crowds" principle and adds a "moderated by experts" dimension. It also seems to add other crowd tools, in particular content rating. This is the kind of approach that is more likely to find traction inside and organisation, that the simple Wiki one.

I wonder how Wikipedia will respond?

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.