beatnic - just wondering

Blurry Fondle - Originally uploaded by Beatnic

Try typing Doodle in to your phone. Mine says Fondle.

It’s time to drag the intranet in to the twenty-first century. We need to think of the intranet as the digital workspace, or “my web at work.” As a worker I need access to all the tools and information I need to do my job. It’s becoming increasingly likely that not all of that lives inside the company firewall. And I won’t always be at my desk.

Gone are the days of the intranet being a single destination, a “website”, an online publishing - or rather broadcasting - medium for the internal communication function. Sure, there’s a place for internal comms on an intranet, just as there’s a place for payroll giving, blogs and project support tools, but it’s much more. It’s my web at work.

This new definition helps to clarify the role of the central intranet team in any organisation however large or small.

As Matt Jones once put it when discussing bbc.co.uk, “We’re not building a website, we’re building part of the web” - or words to that effect.

The role is not to lock down but to open up. To make the digital workspace as navigable as possible, and to make everything within it as findable and usable as possible.

If you have web apps like travel booking systems or services like discussion forums running on your intranet you already have personalisation. Whether it’s any good is down to how well it’s designed and presented and how it feels to use.

For company intranet homepages I don’t think there’s any question that personalisation will become increasingly common. The likes of Netvibes, iGoogle, MyYahoo and even Facebook have raised people’s expectations in this area.

The risk is that companies confuse personalisation with customisation and jump on the bandwagon, rushing to provide all the latest functionality before considering what people really need.

So here are three definitions that should help when thinking about this:

Top-down content

Content that’s there because you work for Company X. Examples include share price information and company-wide announcements.

Personalised content

Content that is there because you’re you. You are in a particular role, in a particular department, at a particular level. How? Either the system knows who you are, or you’ve told it about yourself or a combination of the two.

Customised content

Content (and sometimes positioning and formatting) that you’ve chosen based on a particular set of options. You have subscribed to the latest news about design and have chosen to have the headlines appear in a list on the right hand side of the page. You’ve chosen a particular look and feel for the page.

There is absolutely no reason why the three types of content can’t share the same space. Good interaction and visual design is essential to ensure people can clearly distinguish between them.

If the content is relevant and well presented, intranet personalisation can help make the digital workspace more joined up and navigable, and it can help employees have a better understanding of their overall work environment.

See also: Gerry McGovern’s recent article Intranet personalization: does it work?

Ever since I saw them and started using them I could see that if we had Delicious, Technorati and Bloglines on our intranet it would change the way we work and our perception of what an intranet is.

It’s something I’ve been presenting on at events recently to fellow intranet professionals.

There are so many reasons why this is important and exciting. Here are three:

• it takes the intranet to the next level and beyond the “firewall” - covering the web, the stuff you can see through your browser (whether it’s hosted internally or externally)
• teams, projects, communities of interest, communities of practice have new ways to share information, including bookmarks
• potentially fascinating (and useful) insight available from the tag-clouds that start to appear, an organic topology of interests and a real-time overview of what an organisation is thinking and maybe even which way it’s going

Thanks to Chris Tubb for sending me a link to this article by David Millen, Jonathan Feinberg, and Bernard Kerr of IBM about the excellent sounding stuff they’ve been up to in this field.