A practical Intranet 2.0 strategic framework

You might have a detected a change in mood here on this blog in recent posts, particularly in relation to that thing we call Enterprise 2.0/enterprise social computing?

Really there isn’t a change in mood as such, but I do feel we are reaching a point where the hype around this stuff is beginning to disappear and it is time to look seriously at how we go about really putting it into productive practice (for example, Luis’ focus on freeing us from a dependency on the inbox). As Samuel Driessen comments on another recent post on this topic:

“the current tools support the old KM theory in a better way by: be more usable, easier to adopt, more social, offer more communication channels.”

I don’t actually want to get into the Knowledge Management vs Enterprise 2.0 debate again, but speaking more generally and about intranets specifically, I have to agree that we’ve simply never had it so good before. For example, just look at what Nathan has achieved here in Australia. I’m still not sure if I agree its an example of Enterprise 2.0, but that really doesn’t matter if there is a positive business outcome, which there clearly is in this case.

And here is the problem – the reality is that many organisations aren’t going to reach the idealistic goals of Enterprise 2.0, at least not yet - but you know, that is probably ok. If we are ready to shift our focus and assumptions about intranets away from static content publishing, then what we do have is some cool and exciting new (and not so new) technologies on hand that can improve the way people work with information and how they connect with each other. But in doing that, we need to avoid the risk of setting expectations too high. So how do we do that?

Well, for those of you who haven’t yet read it please take a look at my Intranet 2.0 article, which is now available for download (PDF, 185KB) – this is the unedited version and is a little longer than the one published in Image & Data Manager (IDM) magazine. It reflects my thinking on this space that has been developing over the last year or so with the objective of developing a practical Intranet 2.0 strategic framework.

As always I would love to hear your comments.

In the meantime, maybe I can find something else to blog about ;-)

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