Tuesday, July 19, 2005

The Dynamic Intranet We are seeing more and more companies interested in expanding their existing intranets with weblog technology. The blogging trend seems to be driving intranets to become more dynamic conveyors of information and conversation in organizations of all shapes and sizes. The scenerio is pretty consistent - the organization has spent lots of money (relative to its budget) on tools that no one really uses either because they are too complicated, suffer from restricted access, or were designed to solve a different problem. It generally goes something like this: the older systems were designed primarily for document storage and management - (ever get anything useful from sifting through hundreds of old powerpoint presentations...) requires knowledge of the specific system, training, and support as well as a working knowledge of html (i.e. too complicated for the average user) designed to communicate from the top --> down (most of these messages are universally ignored because there is no opportunity for dialogue - and its the dialogue not the decree where problems are solved) has a limited number of "seats" and any additional seat adds cost to what is normally a "fixed" budget ("I could use the system except that I have to fill out a req, get permission from my manager, and have the IT folks install the thing... yeah right") Interestingly enough, in most all cases employees don't have access to the intranet, but have email accounts. So, guess where their information goes. No surprise. Yet, when you ask anyone assciated with the intranet to encapsulate in one word the biggest problem they want to solve - the answer is always communication. Increasingly, I see intranets becoming much more dyanmic, fluid environments, capable of capturing the daily conversations that drive the decision making process. Something like daily blog posts connected through RSS. (Not new news for bloggers, but new for the mainstream.) This transparent daily communication forms a critical path - you can see issues raised and action taken - if you don't see any action taken - that should point out another problem. A review of the discussion postings (imagine an RSS Reader subscribed to these various sites) tell you who the contributors are - if you need more detail - post a message. My guess is that one of the interested contributors will answer. The lesson here is that small, fast moving entities loosely coupled through the intranet using weblogs don't need to worry about communicating - the conversation created by the work flow is simply available to others within the organization when appropriate. The time that used to be spent finding the project, figuring out who the participants are and asking for permission to be included can now be spent digesting information from other areas to determine applicability to a particular project and the best course of action. In the end, its always better not to have to reinvent the wheel. 5:27:04 PM    comment []

© Copyright 2005 Scott Young.