Lately I’ve had a lot of discussions on the ways of getting awareness for social software in companies (large and small). As noted before this is no easy sell or an easy subject to begin with. Yet the needs are obvious, people are not satisfied with the existing ways of collaboration …
For the companies that are waking up to the importance of helping their people deal with all the information overload (for their productivity) and capture, generate and leverage knowledge some collected articles on knowledge work, enterprise 2.0 and infrastructure:
Here, e.g. Lars Plougmann holds that having no intranet is an opportunity. Yes, wikis are beginning to achieve main stream adoption, all in all embedded in a wider trend where social software of all kinds are getting adopted:
“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 [from too many design/implementation/usage/… faults]
Lars advises to leverage 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.
Interesting comments as well, like this one:
[…] how I would start an intranet [for a small knowledge-worker organization] 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.
and
[…] I think we’ll see wikis complement intranets by providing a truly interactive segment to intranet sites […]
Another article I noted appeared in E-Commerce News, pointing out new as a service-offerings and some interesting cases of unconventional intranet design and implementation after laying out the case for more collaboration and user-centered implementation:
[…] intranets can be installed with a one-size-fits-all application, an industry-specific turnkey intranet application or delivered as a hosted offering similar to tradition ASP products.
[…] not all companies are eager to implement the new technologies that are redesigning the options available in traditional intranets.
[…] Some intranet products have a focus on wikis, he said. Another trend he has observed is a rush for companies to support what workers were asking for. Clearly, the most flexible intranets are those designed with Web 2.0 functionality in mind.
[…] “The whole thing behind the new intranet is expanding collaboration by opening it up to the entire company. […] The original idea for an intranet was to share knowledge in closed departments. People are now realizing a larger need to spread information within the company, he said. Technology today has made it easier for corporate executives to do this.
“We are now seeing a power shift in companies over how information is used. Historically, people in organizations couldn’t share ideas. Now, blogging within a company creates followers and inter-reactions”