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The Failure of Traditional Intranets

by Bill Ives

August 12, 2010 at 3:12 am · Filed under Enterprise 2.0

Oscar Berg posted a useful piece on why traditional intranets fail today’s knowledge workers that I learned about through Twitter and Marcia Conner. Oscar begins with some stats on the increasing amount of knowledge-based work. He writes that a study by The Work Foundation estimated our workforce has 30 per cent in jobs with high knowledge content, 30 per cent in jobs with some knowledge content, and 40 per cent in jobs with less knowledge content.

Oscar notes that knowledge work is less predictable and repeatable than traditional industry work. Move over Fred Taylor. He adds that the structure of knowledge work typically emerges as the work progresses. I would add that it is very context dependent and this argues against the concept of best practices, at least the static kind. This makes it hard to know in advance what knowledge you need. This means that you need to place control over knowledge access in the hands of the worker and not the system. It argues against scripted solutions.

Most traditional intranets do not provide the flexibility for knowledge access that knowledge workers require. As Oscar writes, “most of today’s intranets primarily consist of pre-produced information resources which are intended to serve information needs which can be anticipated in advance. They aim to serve people who perform predefined and repeatable tasks.” This is so nineteenth century.

Now in the twenty first century we have the potential to address these needs through a social intranet (aka enterprise 2.0). This is more than a simply adding collaboration tools. As Oscar writes, “It equips everyone with the tools that allows them to participate, contribute, attract, discover, find and connect with each other to exchange information and knowledge and/or collaborate.” Ahem.

I have just given you the highlights. Hopefully this is enough to make you want to read Oscar’s complete passage.

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Janet KuntzAugust 16th, 2010 at 12:39 pm

I agree with the premise, but there are methods that can be applied to facilitate and support knowledge-based searches. The first is understanding how people access or search for information. A great article by Donna Spencer on 4 modes to seaking information http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/four_modes_of_seeking_information_and_how_to_design_for_them explains how people search for information. Once that’s understood, an organization can then define the second element – the tags to apply to information to better support retrieval. Defining these tags is often overlooked when discussing good intranet development.

emcconne_readsAugust 12th, 2010 at 3:48 am

The Failure of Traditional Intranets: Oscar Berg posted a useful piece on why traditional intranets fail tod… http://tinyurl.com/2dmmogn