De-perimeterisation of the intranet - myroyalmail

2012-10-21

Its not a particularly social or interactive site, but the UK post office's employee site, myroyalmail is interesting for a couple of reasons:

On the second point it certainly fails the standard intranet test, but that external access probably drove the business case for its great mobile design.

The Royal Mail themselves have a heritage of challenging established ideas about corporate IT systems and were founding members of the Jericho Forum. In 2001, former employee, Jon Measham, outlined one the foundational ideas in the Jericho Forum, which is the concept of de-perimeterisation.

The Jericho Forum describe de-perimeterisation as:

De-perimeterisation is simply the concept of architecting security for the extended business boundary and not an arbitrary IT boundary.

Source: Business rationale for de- perimeterisation (PDF)

It would be nice to think that the approach taken with myroyalmail was influenced by that mindset.

The site was launched in November 2011 and runs on Drupal.

Hat tip Sharon O'Dea.