Wednesday 22 October 2008

Are we really ready for Intranet 2.0?

Over on the AppGap blog, Shiv Singh thinks it time to shrug off our old assumptions about intranets and focusing on building next generation intranets (Intranet 2.0, perhaps?). He concludes:

Intranets have a long history in most organizations dating back to the mid 1990s. That’s what drives its current perception. The organizational silos within IT departments that separated intranet ownership from other business applications made sense at the time but don’t anymore. Today, employees demand more consolidated interfaces where all the information, collaboration, self service and business application access needs are met.  Its probably time for the departments to reorganize to more directly align with employee expectations and less by application ownership.

Maybe its time to dust off my next generation intranet manifesto, The Intranet Imperative, which was published here on this blog in June 2005. In the introduction I wrote:

The nature of intranets is changing. In fact the term intranet itself is rapidly losing meaning as the Internet interpenetrates organisations through a mixture of business-to-business marketing, extranets, hosted application services and of course personal use of the Web at work. The traditionalist view of intranets, one that concentrates on static information built around an impregnable information architecture, creates a risk for organisations that may be oblivious to the rise of collaborative and dynamic “application-nets” that connect users to people, places and things.

Hmm. Three years later, are we ready to shift those assumptions yet - what do you think?

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