Have We Moved Past Intranets to Networks?

Tad Staley raises some interesting issues in his post, Social Intranets and Organizational Collaboration. He begins by rightly noting that the concept and term of “Intranet” is outdated and wonders it be rehabilitated with “Social” as its first name. My initial reaction is that this falls into the common trend of using a new technology like the prior one until the unique characteristics of the new one can be fully understood.

Intranets were about making content more accessible. But, as Tad writes at the, “heart of the trend toward Social Intranets is the interest in making collaborative capabilities more available throughout the enterprise.” To me this means dropping the term intranet as we are moving way beyond content accessibility. The focus is no longer on the document but on the person. As Tad rightly notes simply running an activity stream down a content focused tool does not make it really social.

Consistent with this thought Tad offers five forms of collaboration to consider with content collaboration being only one of them. There is also project and process collaboration, as well as communities of practice/interest and communication and coordination.

To take the next step in social business the term intranet needs to be dropped.  

 

Comments

[Theparallaxview]

Yes indeed - I've been remarking that 'social intranet' is an oxymoron to a mixed reception! I think we need to move on - an activity stream driven network is very different from a digital asset structured system of record.

[Matthew Weber]

Ideas themselves seem like social gregarious little beings, they thrive best when they can cross-pollinate with others.