It is generally accepted now that an intranet is far more than an internal phone book and document store, the portal approach has been adopted in many organisations with the intranet acting as a one stop shop for process specific business applications, management tools and links to business management systems. Increasingly, organisations are now adopting Enterprise 2.0 features which use collaborative and social technologies to improve business processes and bring increased efficiency to how organisations work. These tools make it easier for departments and teams to share information, develop documents and track progress on projects.
However, as more and more information is added to intranets valuable data can become locked away in separate silos, inaccessible by other employees. This can result in intranets acting more like information gatekeepers, limiting productivity and frustrating users, rather than achieving their intended goal of harnessing and sharing the collective intelligence of an organisation and providing a productive and collaborative platform for staff.
In my role as Intranet Consultant I come across many intranets that contain masses of fragmented information which is difficult to manage. Users find it increasingly difficult to locate what they are looking for, or are not even aware of its existence, leading to duplication of effort and frequently ‘re-inventing the wheel’. This is unproductive and inefficient and leads to frustration and a lack of trust in the intranet. I strongly believe that the future of successful intranets lies in their ability to eradicate these information silos in order for them to evolve into strategic, collaborative business tools providing better knowledge sharing, easier access to best practice and the ability for improved internal networking – ‘intelligent’ intranets.
But how will this be achieved? We are frequently guilty of expecting intranet users to fend for themselves when trying to find information and this needs to change. It isn’t just a simple case of getting the navigation right, intranets need to be proactive in getting the right information to the right people by understanding a user and promoting relevant content to them.
Typically, the onus lies with content providers to ensure the visibility of their content – this usually means manually linking content to other related content – not only can this result in highly subjective decisions, but it is not practical or reliable as it is time consuming and difficult (if not impossible) to find all other related content. My experience in working with companies to improve their intranets over the last five years led me to the conclusion that the best way to overcome this challenge was that intranets needed to liberate content providers from the constraints of author-generated links to other information. Intelligent intranets should automatically find and promote links between all aspects of content; between articles and authors, between authors and the content they are responsible for, between articles and similar articles, between comments and relevant blogs, between users and users.
Intranet content is an all-encompassing body of information and knowledge that has some very specific elements. It is a collection of information; of articles, best practice and events, a communication database for a who’s who, discussions and blogs. Whilst these are separate items they are not isolated. Connections exist between each and every one. These connections should be identified, created and promoted.
This happens every day on some very popular websites – consider a visit to Amazon, it welcomes you back and it recommends things to you; why? because it wants you to spend money, and how? because it has identified previous behaviour and has an intelligence to recommend something it thinks you will like.
The same happens on iTunes; you purchase a song and, based on your choice, it will recommend the top 5 songs by the same artist and based on the genre – via the ‘Listeners Also Bought’ function it will suggest five other artists and tracks you might like. You follow any of these suggestions and five more suggestions are made. Facebook follows similar principles; its ‘Suggestions’ links will suggest people who you may want to add as friends.
Intelligent intranets should log information such as browsing routes, search entries, documents ratings and hits and use this information to promote content to users. Intelligent intranets would know who you are, what department / teams you are a member of etc. and automatically create links to other information such as articles, discussions, events and people so that each piece of information is not isolated, but is part of a greater whole – the intranet information store. The more the intranet is used and the more content is added the more powerful and effective it becomes.
Intelligent intranets that seek out relevant content and actively promote it to users will revolutionise internal communication and knowledge sharing by making it easier to tap into the collective intelligence of the workforce. Intelligent intranets know what users want and need before users do. They learn and adapt and push relevant content to users and they make life easy for those providing content by automatically creating links to other related information. The more they are used and the more content is added results in a more powerful and efficient intranet. They provide a consistently positive experience for the user who can rely on and trust the intranet to help them do their jobs better, by anticipating their knowledge requirements and presenting them with relevant information.
Nigel Danson is a specialist Intranet consultant and MD at Odyssey, suppliers of Interact Intranet software. He has successfully delivered over 150 intranets to the public and private sector to help with communication, collaboration, knowledge management and business processes
Guest Post: Nigel Danson, Managing Director of Odyssey Interactive Ltd, discusses the emergence of the next generation in intranet technology – intelligent intranets.
