Intranet 2.0 is a new term coined recently to describe the Intranet as an Enterprise 2.0 tool. On the one hand we still have a lot of first generation intranets that are not much more than electronic billboards. Many of them are run by one guy in IT, which means you need approval just to update a punctuation mark. As a result, the intranet is rarely used except for an occasional look at the expense report policy.
I developed the “ThoughtBoard” above to highlight what I see as the key differences between Intranet 1.0 and Intranet 2.0. From what I’ve seen, most Intranets were developed as an afterthought and not supplemental to the corporate strategy. Most IT departments are focused on supporting the needs of the Enterprise and not developing strategy for it. Their work is mostly tactical so they focus on that. Tactics are easy to develop, because they say, “I’m going to post this.” If they post it, they are seen to be successful.
Intranet strategy is completely different and requires participation from all of the division heads. Ostensibly the needs analysis is similar to implementing an ERP system because we all want different things. In reality, Intranet 2.0 vendors are building tools that adapt to the changing needs of the Enterprise. For instance using MindTouch, you can swap out project templates for polling templates on the same page. Don’t like your project template, then change it on the fly (with the proper permissions of course). Sharepoint 2010 appears to be headed the same direction, but it’s not available as of the date of this writing.
Building an Intranet 2.0 asset so that the Enterprise can become more competitive over time is a strategy. Sticking with an electronic bulletin board that serves as your Intranet is not facilitating the growth of your corporation. It’s time IT becomes more strategic by understanding how their corporations need to function in order to operate more efficiently.
In my experience, IT is backlogged to the point of firefighting and does not have the political capital to develop enterprise operational strategy. As a result, everyone complains about the IT department as a bottleneck and not providing tools that enable the creativity and knowledge creation of the enterprise.
The next time you find yourself wondering why your Intranet is not providing any value because it hasn’t been updated in 6 months, you’ll understand why. Make a change and explore the new tools that are making your competitors better at what they do. Don’t get left behind.
(Cross-posted @ Seek Omega)
Hi Mark,
I love the posts on CloudAve, which is one of my favorite source of information, but I think that this time, your post is not at the quality level that I’ve been used to. It looks, to me, more like a promotion for your company than the kind of great content that is published on CloudAve… I regret to have to tell that there is alternative solutions to SharePoint 2010 and Mindtouch…
You mention, in your post, the companies which still have “Intranet 1.0, not much more than electronic billboards”!
I must admit that I know some of them, but I’ve also met much more companies with dynamic intranets. Not all of them are Collaborative and/or Enterprise 2.0 based, but it’s not the caricature that you describe!
Go and attend conferences, such as Intracom Paris (http://bit.ly/2hXBy) or Webcom Montreal (http://bit.ly/40OFy), and you’ll be surprised. Browse Jane’s blog on intranet strategies (http://netjmc.typepad.com/globally_local/), and you’ll have a good view of what is the state of the art.
Best Regards
Alain Risbourg
http://www.google.com/profiles/Alain.Risbourg
Alain,
As Editor @ CloudAve I try to make sure we stay balanced and neutral. Frankly, I don’t think mentioning Mindtouch once amounts to self-promotion. In fact the very reason I invited Mark to publish here was that I found he could separate his job and his publishing activity, speaking about overall trends without getting sales-y.
If you’d like to write about those other solutions, I’ll be more than happy to publish a guest post from you.
Zoli,
Thank you for your reply to my comment, and for your proposal, but I regret to decline it : I’m lacking time. I must find some time for my blog and for a new venture. Sorry!
But if you agree, I can push your proposal to some people whose contribution might be of interest for your audience, and who might be interested by such a proposal.
Regards
I have to agree with the Author. Most of the intranets are static and merely billboard advertisements for the company. I believe most of the recent Intranet surveys have shown that most don’t incorporate Web 2.0 tools and thus the Intranet becomes a one way message board without employee feedback.
Chris,
As we don’t work in the same place, I can’t speak about the state of the art for your market/your customers, neither for Mark’s.
But here are some hard figures in my market, mainly intranets from large companies (F5000):
1 – From the ‘2009 intranet observatory’
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http://www.observatoire-intranet.com/index_en.html.
You can download the results (or I can send them to you). This is an annual survey about best practices. answers were from 120 people working within 118 companies: Surveyed companies are 91% French, 2% from Quebec or Belgium; 70% are private companies; size of the intranet is split: 22% over 5000 users; 35% between 500 and 5000 users.
Here are the results about the perimeters of those 120 Enterprise intranets (multiple answers)
– 97% Information, communication
– 49% 2.0(Collaboration, profiling, personalization)
– 46% knowledge management
2 – The Global Intranet Strategies Survey 2008
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http://www.netjmc.net/intranet-trends/jmc-global-intranet-strategies-survey-details.html.
Results (from the slideshare synthesis) are the following :
22% of companies are in Stage 3 (stage 3 means intranet is the “way of working”).
In those,
– 57% have portal and collaboration spaces and
– 25% have social media or networking spaces.
Best Regards
Alain
Alain,
If your survey is defining 2.0 as collaboration, profiling and personalization then we’re not on the same page. Did the survey further define these high level features? What Intranet system are they using?
Intranet 2.0 is about data integration, mashups, dashboards, projects, and marrying them with collaborating teams. In effect the intranet becomes the DNA of the organization.
There are more authoritative sources like Gartner and Forrester that contradict these surveys. Enterprise 2.0 is not being adopted by large companies (yet). I believe your definition of 2.0 does not align with the thought leaders in the space. The surveys above are very 1.0 and maybe 1.5 at best.
My quick observations:
1. The 2 surveys contradict each other.
2. Also the survey is 91% French? That doesn’t appear to be a global sample.
A more relevant Intranet 2.0 survey can be found here: http://www.prescientdigital.com/articles/download-summary-report-of-intranet-2-0-global-survey/?searchterm=intranet%20survey
Hello everyone,
I’m the author of the The Global Intranet Strategies Survey 2008 and am closing the 2009 edition this Sunday night.
A couple of facts that might interest you and feed this discussion.
The 2008 survey had 226 organizations who participated from around the world:
Main regions: Europe 50%, North America 34% and Asia-Pacific 15%.
Size: 33% under 5,000 employees, 21% 5 to 15,000, 23% 15 to 50,000 and 23% over 50,000 employees.
Well over half the organizations have experimented with social media tools but few feel they have optimized them. An example is wikis, where only 10 % of the Stage 3 intranets (the most advanced stage in 2008) have optimized them, with another 75 % testing them.
Without going into detail here, the overall results show that lots of organizations are experimenting but we are still far from a tipping point overall.
I know The Prescient Digital survey and the author Toby Ward well. He and I have communicated about our results. Our results are different, but given our different survey strategies, they actually support each other very well. Toby’s survey was an “Intranet 2.0” survey, so attracted people interested in 2.0. mine was an Intranet Strategies survey, and attracted intranet managers in general.
I blogged about our complementary results at length in my post “Will Intranets become scientific” with lots of examples.
http://netjmc.typepad.com/globally_local/2009/07/will-intranets-become-scientific.html