Looking For Intranet 2.0

"Helping you to get on, not get by, with information technology"

Looking for Intranet 2.0 In the world of fashion, the job of ‘cool hunters’ is to seek out emerging trends in street style and fashion for adoption into the commercial mainstream. Likewise, information and knowledge management cool hunters have been peering out over the firewall and observing how the consumer led innovation of Web 2.0 is changing the way we use, contribute and interact with information on the Internet. By James Dellow. For the early adopter, Web 2.0 presented an exciting world of user participation, social networking, rich user friendly interfaces and rapid Webapplication development that they eagerly copied to create their own internal version, called Intranet 2.0. There are now numerous Intranet 2.0 success stories from around the world – from the original Dresdner Kleinwort cited by Andrew McAfee through to Janssen-Cilag in Australia - that are urging the rest of us to adopt wikis, blogs and other Web 2.0 technologies into our mainstream intranets. But if your organisation has been slow to follow the Intranet 2.0 path, how can you judiciously buy into this trend? And perhaps more importantly, how do you know you have picked the right technology path? Despite celebrated success stories - and as with other information management technologies - there is no standard blueprint for implementing Intranet 2.0. This is partly because it is by no means

clear what Intranet 2.0 actually is, reflecting the fact that it is difficult to find consensus on the definition of the broader concepts bundled into the idea of Web 2.0. However, if we brainstormed the ideal themes and attributes of Intranet 2.0 we might pick out characteristics such as ‘user driven’, ‘social’, ‘collaborative’, ‘activity centred’, ‘Mash-able’ and ‘developed incrementally’. These are all characteristics inspired by the Web 2.0 experience, but of course they typically describe Internet experiences and an intranet is not the Internet – in other words, the goal of a user driven intranet describes the outcome but not how to go about providing it inside the firewall. If the fact there is no common blueprint is due in part to a lack of common understanding of Intranet 2.0, the greater gap is about understanding the needs of the organisation in relation to these new Web 2.0 technologies. Rather than debating definitions or focusing on what your Intranet 2.0 should look like, a better

©2003-2008 James Dellow/Chief Technology Solutions. Web: http://www.chieftech.com.au/ Phone: +61 414 233 711 Disclaimer: The information in this article is of a general nature. Please seek advice for specific circumstances.

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"Helping you to get on, not get by, with information technology"

Once you understand what you want to achieve, you should consider your Intranet 2.0 objectives for fit against three possible strategies

starting point is to focus on what you are trying to achieve. A Web 2.0 inspired intranet presents many potential benefits, including:  Ease of site management and improved usability;  Support for conversational collaboration (in addition to document-centric collaboration) enabling people to connect with each other more easily;  Better shared access to contextually relevant internal and external data, including publicly available geospatial data such as Google Maps;  Greater flexibility to meet emergent needs; and  A platform for others to create and share solutions. For some organisations Intranet 2.0 might also be cheaper to implement and manage – either through the use of open source software or through greater usergenerated content (reducing the need for dedicated content creators and content managers). Through these reduced costs it also becomes possible to implement technologies that might have previously been cost prohibitive – for example, collaborative workspaces; however it is important to recognise that achieving these particular outcomes is not limited to the Intranet 2.0 – open source is valid strategy in other

technology domains and distributed authoring is already a well established content management approach. Once you understand what you want to achieve, you should consider your Intranet 2.0 objectives for fit against three possible strategies: 1. Tactical Social Computing; 2. Enterprise Web 2.0 (or a Web 2.0 Oriented Intranet); and 3. Enterprise 2.0. If none of these fit, then the option of achieving Intranet 2.0 through alternative and complementary technologies may also be available, depending on your vision. To explore each strategy in turn: A tactical social computing strategy involves the use of social computing tools (typically wikis, discussion (or chat) forums, and blogs) to solve a particular business challenge. For example, using an open source wiki as a content management system to save money, a project team that uses a blog to improve collaboration, or an HR department that launches a forum to gather feedback and answer questions from employees. On close inspection, many of the reported case studies and examples of organisations implementing Enterprise 2.0 actually represent the success of a tactical social computing strategy. In some respects, a tactical

©2003-2008 James Dellow/Chief Technology Solutions. Web: http://www.chieftech.com.au/ Phone: +61 414 233 711 Disclaimer: The information in this article is of a general nature. Please seek advice for specific circumstances.

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"Helping you to get on, not get by, with information technology"

strategy might be thought as Intranet 1.x and could provide a valid innovation pathway for introducing Intranet 2.0 to your organisation. This approach may also help where you need to demonstrate a business case for management and the IT department. However, just like any tactical technology approach, it is important to understand that this strategy can not by itself deliver a sustainable Intranet 2.0 system over the long term.

An Enterprise 2.0 strategy is something quite different from either the tactical use of social computing or the narrow adoption of Web 2.0 technologies.

An Enterprise Web 2.0 strategy (perhaps better described as a Web 2.0 Oriented Intranet) embraces standards-based technologies of XML, ATOM, etc, Web-application frameworks (such as AJAX, Adobe AIR, etc) and software development philosophies of Web 2.0 inside the enterprise, but leaves the social aspects behind. In this approach you will find there is more to Web 2.0 than blogs and wikis with the potential for organisations to get value from:  Dashboards that can be rapidly “mashed” together in days to answer an emergent business problems;  Alerting systems that integrate information from internal and external systems using RSS; or  Rich and intuitive AJAX interfaces on Web-applications that people want to use and reduce the need for extensive end-user training.

If you follow this path, be aware that an Enterprise Web 2.0

strategy may perhaps unintentionally open the door to Enterprise 2.0. Once the lid is off the box, it may be difficult to quarantine the social aspects from the technology components of the Web 2.0 software development philosophy. The nature of Web 2.0 tools and a key ingredient of their success is that they empower users to build their own tools and contribute content, so getting the benefits of Web 2.0 technologies without the social element will need to be carefully managed. As a partial alternative, some organisations might also find that traditional intranet portals tools, such as Microsoft SharePoint, can provide a good enough Web 2.0-like capability with the right governance processes and configuration. However, an Enterprise 2.0 strategy is something quite different from either the tactical use of social computing or the narrow adoption of Web 2.0 technologies – it is both a technology and business change, where social computing tools both help to flatten and also reflect the flatness of organisations. Harvard Business School associate professor, Andrew McAfee, who coined the term Enterprise 2.0 in his 2006, provided us with the SLATES (Search, Links, Authoring, Tags, Extensions, Signals) model to define the basic technology requirements of an Enterprise 2.0 system and a tactical strategy is unlikely provide the entire infrastructure required to meet

©2003-2008 James Dellow/Chief Technology Solutions. Web: http://www.chieftech.com.au/ Phone: +61 414 233 711 Disclaimer: The information in this article is of a general nature. Please seek advice for specific circumstances.

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"Helping you to get on, not get by, with information technology"

If your organisation isn’t prepared to weed – or for that matter innovate – then an Enterprise 2.0 strategy is likely to be a difficult option.

that criteria. For example, where an organisation implements a standalone Wiki, the elements of the SLATES model is only achieved within that Wiki – once users leave the wiki environment for another information tool, such as email, then the model breaks down. In other words, for it to work the SLATES model must apply across the information workplace - not a single siloed tool, since this represents a tactical strategy instead. While on the surface it might appear difficult to spot the subtle difference between a tactical strategy and Enterprise 2.0, the key difference is really the relationship between the enterprise social computing environment with the shape and culture of the organisation. To quote Michele Egan, who was writing about her experiences at the World Bank in 2004: "Collaboration and facilitation (rather than control and vetting) are key drivers in the successful utilization of new and existing technologies, as well as in unleashing the willingness of people to contribute with their effort... Let a thousand flowers bloom does work, even if you have to pull a few weeds on occasion.” McAfee also recognised the tension that Enterprise 2.0 might create in organisations that follow this path:

unilateral control and to express some level of negativity. Whether a company’s leaders really want this to happen and will be able to resist the temptation to silence dissent is an open question. Leaders will have to play a delicate role if they want Enterprise 2.0 technologies to succeed.” Remember, if your organisation isn’t prepared to weed – or for that matter innovate – then an Enterprise 2.0 strategy is likely to be a difficult option without an appropriate investments in social capital building, change management, risk management and governance. The final option outlined here is to consider alternative and complimentary pathways for breaking out of the traditional intranet model. These include some revolutionary and not so revolutionary ideas, including:  Metaverses – ‘3D world’ (or ‘metaverse’) technologies such as ‘OpenSim’ (an open source version of Second Life) and Sun’s ‘Project Wonderland’ allow organisations to securely host these environments internally and represent a complete departure from the traditional concept of the intranet and how users interact with it;

“These tools may well reduce management’s ability to exert ©2003-2008 James Dellow/Chief Technology Solutions. Web: http://www.chieftech.com.au/ Phone: +61 414 233 711 Disclaimer: The information in this article is of a general nature. Please seek advice for specific circumstances.

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"Helping you to get on, not get by, with information technology"

What are the key ingredients for implementing Intranet 2.0? The answer of course is ‘It depends’.

 Social networking sites as intranets – Software company Serena has championed the idea of using social networking sites like Facebook as a replacement for the traditional company intranet – or if you prefer, you can setup an internal social and skillssharing network instead;  Combine into a single extranet – Many organisations still operate separate intranet and Internet sites, but mature portal and newer wiki technologies already exist to make this kind of symbiotic combination a reality;  Support for mobility and other points of access – Most intranets are designed for full size computer users, but alternative access channels such as mobile computing and kiosks can be supported; and  Unified collaboration – The next evolution of the Unified Communication concept, brings same time interaction into the context of content, business process and business activities. In this short article, we’ve explored some of the many options for achieving an Intranet 2.0 that can suit your organisational requirements. While it might be counterintuitive against a background of Web 2.0 to suggest that an Intranet 2.0 strategy is necessary, with all these different choices such a strategy should help to clarify the right path by:  Providing an overall vision and blueprint for Intranet 2.0 in your organisation;  Outlining the innovation process for developing

organisational know-how about how to use, manage and get value from Intranet 2.0; and  Driving the development of a roadmap for implementing the supporting technology infrastructure. What are the key ingredients for implementing Intranet 2.0? The answer of course is ‘It depends’, however we can say:  Your organisation needs to know how to apply Web 2.0 inside the firewall and culturally being able to allow an Intranet 2.0 culture to flourish;  You need applications and services that can replicate the key ingredients of Web 2.0 inside the firewall to suit your objectives; and  All of the above must be supported by the right infrastructure that includes networks, servers, databases, search, syndication, aggregation and connectors. Unlike a traditional intranet, elements like search, syndication, aggregation and connectors that you might have previously treated as stand-alone applications are treated as part of the Intranet 2.0 infrastructure – in this architecture they provide the basis for further Intranet 2.0 application development, they are the beginning of the journey and not the end of the road. Organisational know how is also required, but unlike a traditional intranet, it must be embedded within the broader intranet user population to create an eco-

©2003-2008 James Dellow/Chief Technology Solutions. Web: http://www.chieftech.com.au/ Phone: +61 414 233 711 Disclaimer: The information in this article is of a general nature. Please seek advice for specific circumstances.

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"Helping you to get on, not get by, with information technology"

system of users where social mores and values, rather than technical controls, work to maintain its integrity and usefulness. The same eco-system of users will also help to make the intranet more sustainable through greater ownership. A few small successes might provide the business case and surface the demand needed to drive broader adoption of Web 2.0 tools and technologies.

All this does not rule out the efficacy of a tactical strategy in the first instance, a few small successes might provide the business case and surface the demand needed to drive broader adoption of Web 2.0 tools and technologies. It may be the organisation is not quite ready to make the leap to Enterprise 2.0 and making a start is the best way of gaining momentum - but remember the risks of not planning for broader adoption:  Technology failure (e.g. the performance of a wiki used by a single team does not have the capacity to support the entire organisation – a scalable upgrade path should be considered in advance and frequently re-visited);  Lack of adoption (e.g. less Web-savvy users find it harder to use tools based on the Web 2.0 paradigm); and  Non-compliance with enterprise information management requirements.

blueprint and roadmap – that fits one of the possible Intranet 2.0 strategies will guide you in the right direction. So stop trying to find Intranet 2.0 and get social: start the conversations that will help define your organisation’s digital future.

Recommended Reading: To learn more about Enterprise 2.0 and the SLATES model, see Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration by Andrew P. McAfee in MIT Sloan Management Review, Spring 2006, Vol. 47, No. 3, pp. 21-28.

A version of this article appeared in the September/October 2008 edition of Image & Data Manager magazine, titled ‘Too Cool for School’. http://www.idm.net.au/

However, once this strategy is in place, your Intranet 2.0 content, applications and services should be allowed to emerge in an incremental and experimental fashion. But remember it is not a case of ‘look, no hands!’ and instead you really do need to be prepared to do a little weeding along the way. And a good design – in the form of an vision, ©2003-2008 James Dellow/Chief Technology Solutions. Web: http://www.chieftech.com.au/ Phone: +61 414 233 711 Disclaimer: The information in this article is of a general nature. Please seek advice for specific circumstances.

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