What’s the difference between Intranet 2.0 and a social network with groups
Getting an internal Facebook (social network and group feature) is a standalone tool, it has nothing to do with the Intranet, does it?
Unless you can structure it yourself like Nathan Wallace did with a Confluence wiki…not sure if SocialText can achieve a similar thing, but I believe OpenText Social Media, Lotus Connections, Jive, Awareness, Traction, Telligent, Connectbeam, and more suites made of components rather than designed as an Intranet.
Getting an internal Facebook that is designed as an Intranet replacement is more like Intranet 2.0, and seems to be what ThoughtFarmer are doing.
I suppose the third category would be to alter your existing Intranet by mashing in these types of features.
The latest Neilsen report on the social intranet says a few interesting things on this point:
“It’s important to integrate social features with the main intranet to avoid burdening users with double work.”
“That said, several of our case studies successfully implemented a staged approach, initially separating social features from the main intranet because of their different design and feel. Eventually, these features should be integrated, ideally as part of a bigger project to redesign the entire portal.”
I guess the difference I’m making here is that these new social network/group tools are mainly about connecting and collaborating, whereas Intranets are usually about profile information on each unit, heavily used tools and links, and news from teams to the rest of the organisation.
In this sense it seems designed tools like Thoughfarmer are combing the best of both worlds:
Doing work/finding stuff
- individual connecting with the organisation
- individual sensemaking
- collaborate in groups
Company information, tools and news
- make a profile page for your team with links to lots of info and what you are about…and also news your team wants to share with the organisation
- find common tools and links (timesheets, repositories, etc…)
- a company homepage as the pivot point
This is taking us back to the true meaning of Intranet (via Matthew Hodgson), rather then the hijacked, vetted, static, one-to-many tool it became.
“Essentially, he observed that people were creating small websites inside their organisations to share knowledge and communicate information”
Matthew then explains it’s relationship with early KM efforts:
“…the idea that, much like print publishing, documents are worked on by individuals and then released to others once it is finished and officially approved. KM guru David Gurteen suggests that this “create and publish” behaviour is also likely to be the result of early knowledge management efforts to bring structure to information in the organisation and make it searchable and easily accessible to employees. Unfortunately, as Gurteen highlights, too often employees didn’t see any value in this for themselves and, as a result, such systems failed”
“The essence of this failure of early intranets to bring true communication value into an organisation and to its employees is perhaps bound with the lack of recognition and understanding of how knowledge is created and information is shared by people. It’s also the factor that underpins Web 2.0’s success where traditional intranets have tended to fail. That is, that information is shared through social networks, from person to person, and that there are a number of roles in that social exchange.”
Related
KM: Round 2.0
KM 2.0 is about “showing your workings out”
Is publish a dirty word in enterprise 2.0
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Another platform that provides a Facebook for the enterprise is blueKiwi - www.bluekiwi-software.com. There is a review on the Enterprise 2.0 blog: http://enterprise2blog.com/2009/08/enterprise-20-dark-horse-bluekiwi/ if you want to get a feel for it.
Comment by Marc Dangeard — August 20, 2009 @ 3:58 pm
Hi John,
I’ve tried to comment on
http://libraryclips.blogsome.com/2009/08/20/whats-the-difference-between-intranet-20-and-a-social-network-with-groups/
without much success from a train. Could you put the following comment
up for me?
Many thanks and looking forward to your answer.
Best,
Emanuele
—–
Hi John,
I was lucky enough to have personally worked on a number of Intranet
2.0 projects or into projects to strategically evolve the Intranet in
order to make it more relevant both to the business and the people.
Based on my own experience, the gap between old style Intranet and
Intranet 2.0 can be better imagined as a continuum with varied mixes
of 4 basic ingredients: content, communication, activities,
collaboration.
The social network is roughly connected to the last part but it could
also be the overall organizing principle for the entire intranet where
contents, company to employes communication, employees to employees
communication and self service functionalities can be embedded.
I think the right mix really depends from the business goals and the
people needs for which the Intranet 2.0 is designed. In some cases a
social network with basic document sharing and content management
capabilities will make it. Other times a full fledged and heavy
intranet 1.0 with strong process integration, workflows and minimum
social functionalities is much better.
To this goal Jive SBS 4.0 can now be integrated with content and
document management suites (Sharepoint being an example) and the same
could be said about Lotus Connections if you add Quickr and Websphere
Portal.
I think Oracle, IBM and Microsoft (and ThoughtFarmer and Liferay
Social Office) are the best suited to generally support an Intranet
2.0 project.
—
Emanuele Quintarelli
Comment by John Tropea — November 6, 2009 @ 1:09 am
Thx for your comment Emanuele
I like how you dissected the Intranet into the 4 areas of content, communication, activities, and collaboration.
And yes, it’s also depends on the business needs and goal.
I guess I was thinking from my point of view working in a global company with 5000-10,000 people
Something like Jive could not replace our Intranet, as we need profile pages for business units, etc as you see on traditional Intranets. But these traditional intranets do not offer communities, networking, collaboration.
It would be good if this was part of the Intranet, rather than another product…and as you say Jive SBS 4 is showing the step forward with integration into perhaps a tool like an Intranet.
Basically I envision our Intranet as being a place for information, and profiles for business units, but in a web 2.0 ways…and then also functions for social networks, and collaboration (groups, communities)…that’s why I like the idea of Thoughfarmer
Comment by John Tropea — November 6, 2009 @ 1:41 am
John, don’t get me wrong. I absolutely love what Chris is doing with Thoughtfarmer and he’ll be more than happy to read your appreciation
I just wanted to draw a growing connection between the old intranet and the new one, made up imho exactly by the new collaborative paradigm.
Thanks for your amazing posts
Comment by John — November 6, 2009 @ 8:54 am
I’ve got clients who are doing both the Corporate Voice thing (traditional intranet one-way communications) and at the same time, enabling the employee population to create their own pages, collaborative groups, projects, etc.
But, it’s not perfect yet.
See my response to this, and to your response on my earlier post, here: http://www.giatalks.com/2010/05/why-sbs-systems-and-intranets-arent-merging-yet/
Comment by Gia Lyons — May 12, 2010 @ 2:59 pm