Remember Intranets?
by Bill Ives
The excellent post by Jeremiah Owyang, The Challenges, Evolution, and Success Factors of the Enterprise Intranet, leads off with the sentence, “Enterprise Intranets are an often overlooked corporate asset.” He goes on to show how they don’t get the respect they deserve.
Jeremiah outlines the challenges, the evolutionary stages, and the success factors. He concludes his evolutionary stages with “Fast forward to today (no pun intended), the enterprise intranets are starting to see social features, (some call this Enterprise 2.0, but I prefer to focus on outcomes) where employees can go beyond collaboration on ideas and start to tell others about themselves, connect with others, and share information.”
I agree with this (except the part in parens) and most of the advice he gives but will it still be called intranets? Jeremiah does not like the term enterprise 2.0. Several years ago Kathleen Gilroy and I wrote a report on Intranet 2.0 for Melcrum on Preparing for Intranet 2.0: how to integrate new communication technology into your intranet.” My feelings were hurt that the name did not stick but the wisdom of crowds was right since enterprise 2.0 is about more than the intranet (I think we still offered some useful advice that is largely still relevant). Also portals seems to be mostly only be used for doorways now (I named my blog wrong, too, but it was started in 4/04 and I had been working on enterprise portals for the past few years).
There have been a number of terms floating around such a writable intranet, etc.) but until there is a better replacement for intranets, I prefer enterprise 2.0. It is not perfect, nor is web 2.0 but it seems to be sticking. I still do not like knowledge management, it seems an oxymoron but the term was useful and the concept has stuck. Intranet seems to have too many tactical (rather than strategic) associations for many of the reasons that Jeremiah pointed out. Components of it will remain but when some companies replace their old school intranet with Facebook, something is happening here than goes beyond an upgrade. And do not forget Janssen-Cilag, the pharmaceutical company that replaced their intranet with a wiki because they thought it was better to encourage people to add content than to control it (and they still had the control, just more subtle)
