Corporate intranet

I've been talking to numerous owners of corporate websites lately to try and understand where the "internet prescence" of large enterprises is heading in the future.  In my view the future for the "corporate website" looks bleak. Online services in large organisations are gradually melding, with the intranet, extranet and internet growing closer in technology, content and resourcing; due to synergies and efficiencies achieved. This could be good news for the "internet teams" but it isn't. In fact, the emerging trend is for increasing access to be given to intranets for people outside the firewall; suppliers, contractors, customers, former staff etc. Major companies globally are looking to open up to their marketplaces, customers and consumers. They are also looking to increase their presence and engagement with social media and emerging 2.0 technologies.

Employees want to connect with each other, and more importantly, they want to connect with the company and senior management. A study by Towers Perrin found that employees overwhelmingly want to know “that leadership is interested in them.” Social media on the corporate intranet (Intranet 2.0) presents a unique opportunity for all employees at all levels and geographies to better connect, and share information and knowledge they might not otherwise share or learn. In fact, distance – both geographical and intellectual – between these connections is often significant with little if any filtering from one side to the next; an information gap that is not easily bridged in larger, dispersed organizations. For example, the Towers Perrion study also found that:

RSS (Real simple syndication) is perhaps the greatest Web 2.0 technology... that you've have never heard of (well, not us, but our less nerdy friends and colleagues). Some, geeks like us, use it in My Yahoo! or iGoogle... and many don't even know that they use it when they subscribe to a blog or a newsfeed. It is this lack of understanding of this incredibly powerful technology that is the major barrier to adoption of it on the corporate intranet.

BT, once known as British Telecom, has 160,000 intranet users in 170 countries. A key driver in its technology strategy is an overarching corporate goal to be “recognized for innovation and great service...” This innovation has many forms BT uses a combination of technologies to help pull together this wide-ranging and disparately located population. At the heart of this technology, BT's intranet has become a mission critical business and communications system.

One of the biggest challenges that any company faces is harnessing the knowledge that is in the brain, computer files and filing cabinets of each individual.There could be a person down the hall whom you've never met, who is the expert on a particular issue that you are trying to tackle. Why start from scratch when that person has already built a base of knowledge that you could use?But how do you know that expertise is available right under your nose? You might run into that person in the lunch room or at the water cooler, but companies are beginning to understand that they should not leave knowledge sharing to chance.Building a usable knowledge database of the human assets of an organization--details about the skills and training of each person in the company and the projects to which they have contributed--is one way that forward-thinking companies are using Web technology.

IDC estimates that an organization with 1,000 information workers can expect $5 million a year in annual salary costs to be lost due to the time wasted by employees looking for information and not finding it.Enterprise search technology helps businesses save this money by making it as easy to find information inside an organization as it is on the internet. Good enterprise search technology drives business by connecting people to the knowledge they need and provides them with a single view of relevant business information across disparate information sources such as email, CRM, intranets, and multimedia repositories.Whenever a company has corporate knowledge in more than one repository, there will be a need for enterprise search to provide the bridge and deliver a unified view of relevant information. And with email being one knowledge repository that every company typically has, there is one huge reason alone to deploy enterprise search for email.

Traditional document management is undergoing rapid evolution. Here's a guide to the stages, "From Jurassic Management to 2001: A Document Odyssey."Intranet peephole. First, document management vendors thought they'd take care of this pesky little intranet thing by letting users view the documents in the corporate repository through a Web browser. It's amazing how long the industry thought that this was going to be an adequate response to the Web. Slime mold evolved faster than that.Intranet poor relation. Then the Web browser version was enabled to do some of what the fat client could do. But it was designed for wimpy, effete users who didn't need to grasp the full-bodied manhood of the fat client. In short: Real men use thick clients.

The Gatherer crawls your corporate intranet, extranet, Internet, or even competitor Web sites, then gathers information (HTML, text files, MS Office documents,presentations and PDF files). You determine which information you need and how much of it you'd like, and the Inmagic Gatherer does the rest.

When called in to help corporations with their Intranet publishing efforts, we often find that they suffer more from a pure content problem, rather than a CMS challenge. Here's a nicely analytical checklist to review before taking a new run at your Intranet efforts. Compiled by noted Australian consultant James Robertson, "Sixteen Steps to a Renewed Corporate Intranet" may seem overwhelming at first, but following them will make your job easier in the long run...Review Robertson's Checklist

For some time, corporate Extranet efforts have tended to focus on supply- and demand-chain optimization, as well as CRM. As more sophisticated forms of e-commerce evolve, however, naturally attention is turning to content management. But in this regard, can your Extranet content be managed as a kind of extension of your Intranet? Intranet guru Martin White astutely observes that the way you're chunking and managing your Intranet content might not quite fit the bill...Read what White has to say about it

Here are 2 good postings around "Web 2.0" impacts the enterprise. In a nice article by corporate communications consultant Shel Holtz, discusses why intranets are stagnant. To quote: "The intranet of 2006 looks pretty much the same as it did five years ago". Holtz argues that some elements of Web 2.0 could be applied behind the firewall to make intranets more relevant. In a related blog entry, controversial IT watcher Nick Carr asks whether Web 2.0 is enterprise ready. His conclusion: "It's not impossible, but it's a long way from a sure bet."