If your organisation has no intranet: An opportunity

I have recently had a series of meetings with a number of small and medium size, high growth, knowledge intensive firms in the professional services sector. None of them has an intranet. My reaction and advice is "Great opportunity. Don't get a traditional intranet."

The concept of an intranet is a great idea. Making all relevant content accessible to everybody in one place. But many companies' intranets suffer:

• Information changes quicker than the intranet team can update it. No content is static.
• When the perception is that the information on the intranet is not up to date it stops being the first source for vital business matters
• The intranet structure typically reflects the shape of the business as of yesteryear
• The process for updating information on the intranet involves finding out who is responsible for a particular page, then describing a proposed change in an email which gets added to a work queue. Most people only involve themselves once in that process if they don't see the page updated within a short time
• Ownership is often skewed: When only a few people can edit stuff on the intranet, an "us" and "them" culture arises. In the worst cases, the intranet becomes the object of blame and ridicule.

The opportunity available to organisations without an intranet is to use some of the new social tools and build an open intranet. An open intranet is one where any user can create a new page and every page has a nice friendly Edit button on it. Anybody within the organisation who wants to update or add information is empowered to do so.

Doesn't that approach lead to chaos? is one of the objections. To a certain degree it does, but there is order in the chaos. This type of intranet will not necessarily evolve into a neat hierarchical structure. But that is not a problem: The information itself is not necessarily hierarchical in nature, and navigation aids exist to work with information organised by different means (search, links, tags etc.).

Can we trust our people to write and edit the information on the intranet? is another one. You already trust your people to advise clients on business strategy so I don't see why not. Besides, most tools offer mechanisms that facilitate review of recently updated content, and everybody is free to correct inaccuracies. Similar information is already being exchanged via email; with no transparency, no mechanisms to discover inaccuracies and limited ways of collecting information for the purposes of wider sharing.

An open intranet helps develop a culture of sharing relevant information and encourages broad participation in maintaining that information.

Tags: intranet wiki open intranet SME information sharing participation

Comments

[Hans Henrik H. Heming]

Great post Lars - I like your point, well put.

In fact my own company - Connecta - advice our clients to use social software as a catalyst to drive conversations towards better knowledge-sharing and innovation capability :-)

And your right, a living company, is based on bottom up processes, not the usual "I know what you need to know management".

A question I like to ask though - how do you, as a leader, make sure that the right knowledge get's into play as part of the conversation, as part of the bottom-up approach?

All the best
Hans Henrik

[Richard]

Good point Lars, I guess it reflects the victory (of sorts) of search over directories. You often don't need a hierarchy as search takes you to your object of choice.
The browse factor and ease of use of social software can only foster community and sharing.

[Sam]

I've given similar advice to clients recently; yesterday a private equity client asked me how I would start an intranet if I was doing so from scratch (an enviable position to be in).

I recommended they use a wiki; with only 35 people in the potential community and no KM resources, a traditional intranet is unlikely to fly whereas they'll be able to replicate the basics with a wiki quickly and cheaply; for their business purposes, where sharing and developing fast changing ideas is essential, a wiki will deliver 80% of what they need.

However, I don't think that wikis will replace the traditional enterprise-class intranets. Intranets will continue to be a place to publish the organisation's official position, eg. on risk management policies, although I suppose you could simply finalise and lock-down a wiki equivalent so no further edits available; even then, I think that intranets are inherently trusted more as the final "truth" on an issue. But I think we'll see wikis complement intranets by providing a truly interactive segment to intranet sites, and will likely be used for actually creating the intranet content in the first place.

Sam

[eer]

I agree. I run a pretty large company in canada and it wouldn't work without it.

Real Money Spells

[Mark Robinson]

I think this is an excellent topic, and I have a question. I work at a large company (about 5000 employees). What are the first essential steps that must be taken to introduce a company wide wiki?

For example, should some kind of structure be established right at the start? Or, should it be left to evolve? If there should be structure, what are the fundamentals?

And a related question: how can you get employee commitment right at the start?

[Flug Südafrika]

Intranet is a must have option in every bigger firm. Ok, There are alot of "problems", but there are also alot of reasons which speak for Intranet!
I think everybody must become the "know-how",and than its easy to enjoy the considerable advantages. Greets, Flug