I wrote this in June 2005. The history of intranets is one of a slow burn of adoption (or innovation, if you like). But the pace of technology change is increasing, email is being challenged... is it time now to dust off the intranet imperative and think about about where we go next?

What exactly is an intranet?

The nature of intranets is changing. In fact the term intranet itself is rapidly losing meaning as the Internet interpenetrates organisations through a mixture of business-to-business marketing, extranets, hosted application services and of course personal use of the Web at work. The traditionalist view of intranets, one that concentrates on static information built around an impregnable information architecture, creates a risk for organisations that may be oblivious to the rise of collaborative and dynamic “application-nets” that connect users to people, places and things.

Consider for a moment - what exactly is an intranet? The most simple or basic definition defines it as a restricted, private computer network that uses TCP/IP (Internet) network protocols to facilitate data transmission and exchange within an organisation. But when we look at modern intranets (and extranets), this definition raises more questions than answers – for example:

• Restricted or private to whom – does this include business partners or even customers?
• What is the computer network - does it end at the PC on your desk, the mobile phone in your pocket or a kiosk on the shopfloor?
• Does data include self-service systems, rich media, access to Web - and video conferencing and business intelligence tools that empower staff to get their work done?

Clearly the potiential demands placed on intranets are moving well beyond their original scope of simple access to information and documents. In fact paralleling other changes in our working environments, intranets now need to support always on, always connected access and provide flexibility and interactivity on demand. The technologies to do this already exist and the key challenge for many organistions is how to manage the evolution of an intranet into a multifaceted application-net in a controlled manner.

Of course while you can choose to ignore this imperative, be aware that technology has a habit of winning. You may find your users taking the path of least resistance (like returning to the dreaded network drive) or they will pick their own user-driven tools that will ensure they can get the job done.

The Strategic View of Intranets

Organisations need to control how their intranets will evolve into application-nets. The right approach for achieving this control is a management response that starts with developing a strategic view of their intranet. This strategic perspective does not prescribe the exact future form of the intranet as an application-net, but it provides the basis for creating a system architecture that will facilitate it. The critical point of difference between this new architecture and the old approach is that the intranet imperative forces us to broaden our horizons in order to understand more fully the fit between people, places and things.

This new strategic view should be built from understanding four key elements:

1. People and Process - understand who the current and future users of system will be, where they are located and what work activities the system must support;
2. Content - not just documents and information, but the collection of applications and other data in the system;
3. Infrastructure - The basic technical structure or features of the system (e.g. servers, networks, content management software, etc) and also the human support functions (e.g. helpdesks, trainers, technicians, etc); and
4. Governance -– the management controls (standards, committees, etc) that deal with the form of the infrastructure and the nature of the content in the system to ensure it meets the needs of the organisation and its users.

But like any type of strategic planning, the application of this strategic view must take into account the overall context of the organisation. Steps for understanding the strategic context and incorporating it into the design of the new architecture include:

• Business and Technology Analysis - Develop a strategic understanding of the intranet and how this technology, at its most fundamental level, relates to the overall strategy objectives of the organisation;
• System Audit and Gap Analysis - Complete a review of the people, processes, technology and content that already exists within your organisation to identify the gap between where you are and where you want to be;
• Manage expectations - Negotiate performance outcomes with your stakeholders to link the evolution of the intranet to the organisation's objectives; and
• Innovation - Look outside the organisation to learn from leading practices, understand the different options that are available in the market, and emerging trends.

These steps take us beyond simply asking how users will contribute and access information in the intranet and instead make us focus on the bigger picture, resulting in an architecture that is better aligned to the needs of the organisation.

From imperative to action

The intranet imperative is driven by unstoppable technology advances that affect how people work with and use information technology in the workplace. These include:

• Blurred lines between people, places and things - the distinction between intranets, extranets and Internet sites is changing;
• Rich media and interactive content - the scope of content has expanded to includes more than static documents, text and images;
• Always on, always connected - the working environment and intranets need to be delivered through new channels, such as mobile phone, wireless PDAs, voice and kiosks on the shop floor;
• Next generation networks - awareness, presence and locality will be built in; and
• User-driven software - users will take the path of least resistance and will pick less sophisticated tools if they get the job done.

Unfortunately for the average intranet manager or management team these changes will of course increase the complexity of dealing with already existing document-centric challenges such as information architecture, effective search and content quality. For example, expert designed information architectures will need to co-exist with those created by user communities. In practice what this means is that we will see organisations embrace different degrees of control, standardisation and integration in order to align their application-nets with the strategic goals of the organisation. For example, centralised authoring will live along side self-publishing systems such as wikis and blogs because it makes business sense rather that isolated decision to choose one over the other.

What may be worse still for some teams is that the technology of the intranet will no longer be isolated from other parts of the organisation. Under these circumstances the system architecture becomes even more critical as both a plan but also as a process for engaging with the rest of the organisation, both in terms of needs but also to create the right operational linkages. So, applying strategic thinking and designing a system architecture for your next generation intranet represents more that just a nice theoretical step but is instead a critical success factor.

Summary

We now understand that the nature of intranets is changing. Unless you use strategic thinking to broaden your concept of what constitutes an "intranet” into a next generation application-net, then you risk losing control as technology leaps ahead without you. You can prepare for this challenge by:

• Understanding why the nature of intranets is changing;
• Analysing the strategic context of your intranet today and what will be needed moving forward; and
• Designing a new system architecture that will facilitate this change so it is progressive, evolutionary and beneficial rather than chaotic, revolutionary and disruptive.

The Reserve Bank of Australia has been critical this last week about the depressed attitude in industry towards the state of the Australian economy. Like the rest of the developed world, there is obviously no way Australia can entirely avoid the competition of cheap labour overseas or the impact of global financial markets. But there is also a risk that Australian businesses use this as an excuse - research published last year highlighted that only a small proportion of Australian businesses are employing progressive management practices. This wasn't some wonky marketing survey, but a piece of serious research highlighting that:

"high-performing workplaces are up to 12 per cent more productive and three times more profitable"

In a related piece of work, my Dachis Group colleague Dave Gray has been looking at what characteristics define long-lived, successful companies. He was shocked to find that the life expectancy of large companies has fallen from 75 years in the 1930s to only an average of only 15 years. Dave's conclusion is that these companies are collapsing under their only dysfunctional weight. Right now, the logical reaction in some businesses to this "weight" problem is to downsize and outsource. Others on the other hand are embracing this challenge (that 12%).

I come into contact with some of those progressive organisations primarily from a technology perspective, although some are also attacking it from a broader social business level. What is interesting for me in this process is to observe that here in Australia, unlike say the US, our issue or need for concepts like Enterprise 2.0 isn't so much about overcoming dominant command and control structures; rather we need to embrace social technologies so we can:

• Use them as a force multiplier that allows local companies to punch well above their weight in a global economy (social technologies are fantastic levellers).
• Enable these companies to turn ideas, insight and innovation into action more effectively (great idea, but what are you going to do with it?).
• Engage staff so that they voluntarily maximise their own productivity and professional development (carrot, not stick).
• Deliver better products and more personalised levels of customer service (get people to buy Australian because its simply better).

In our government too there is an opportunity that has been mostly missed to date in the Government 2.0 conversation about enabling those inside government and those involved with service delivery to use these same technologies to also work more progressively. This is a missing piece in a puzzle that has spent more time focusing only on the veneer of citizen engagement through social media.

Of course, I'm not claiming that social business tools like software for workforce collaboration and social intranets trump the global and local financial and economic factors faced by Australian businesses. I'm simply saying don't ignore the evidence about how to be more productive and profitable. When wrapped up with the right implementation approach, these tools provide a critical technology platform for helping this to happen.

Corning have updated their "A Day Made of Glass" video - you can watch the original here (you might also remember Microsoft's Productivity Future Vision video).

There is more background information here and an "unpacked" version of the new video.

Most of the critical responses to this idea have expressed an incredulous attitude towards the idea of eliminating what most people consider to be a critical business tool (remember the reaction to the BlackBerry outage a few months ago?). In some respects, many of the arguments against banning email are reasonable:

• Can you ban email if your customers and clients are using it? (to be fair to ATOS, they aren't planning on banning external email).
• Rather than banning email, users just need to manage their inboxes better.

However, on balance I think there is good reason for aiming to effectively ban email. But rather than outlawing it, we need to reinvent how we utilise email as a software protocol and also the ageing paradigm of the inbox, particularly where the assumed effectiveness is built on false assumptions around utility and information ownership. At a software level, email offers a number of important features - such as:

• Interoperability and extendability.
• It can work offline (although this is becoming less important).
• For the sender, it costs no more to send messages to 1 or many people where ever they are.
• Both sender and receivers can store and organise copies of messages exchanged independently of each other.
• Email addresses act a simple proxies for identification.
• Email accounts can be created for individuals, groups and also non-human systems.

These features provide a great deal of utility, although we can look at each feature and find many negatives too - for example:

• Email standards and extensions aren't implemented homogeneously, so users may have problems reading or processing an email.
• When you go online after an extended absence, your inbox is flooded with new messages.
• People send many messages that for the receiver are just transient or ambient information - but your inbox treats them as all the same.
• The independent nature of email messages contributed to fragmentation of the information chain, making it hard to know who knows what and people who should know made end up getting left out of the loop.
• An email address doesn't actually tell you anything about the user, who they are or why you should trust that identity.
• High volumes of automatically generated notification emails from non-human systems contribute to information overload.

In summary, we can say that email works as a pragmatic solution, but not without creating numerous problems for individual users and organisations a like. As a result there many solutions out there that help us to deal with everything from email processing to email data management. Some solutions are technical in nature, like help desk ticketing software or records management systems, but others focus on the user as problem and attempt to fix individual behaviours. But ultimately none offer a way of making email the perfect tool and it will take a leap to improve how we communicate and collaborate.

So, what is stopping us taking this leap? Thinking about this from a social experience design perspective, I think there are four key issues that need to be addressed to create something better than the email we use today:

1. Move to open work as the default. Email provides users with a simple system of directing messages at people - this falls into a mental information sharing model of open only by exception that is the default in most organisations, but it is also supported by a false perception that email is owned by the sender and private if we restrict the names included on the To, CC and BCC lists. Of course, this doesn't mean we stop supporting some private communication entirely!
2. Everything is Miscellaneous. Centrally designed information systems that enforce fixed, common models for organising information and work process don't work. These were designed with good intentions, but they aren't effective and only encourage the use of personal information stores.
3. Collaborate by staying apart. We need the same ease of interoperability between different social business software platforms that email offers - I shouldn't be forced to use your system, when I have my own, and neither should you.
4. Who are you? We need to shift from email addresses as identifiers towards a model where organisations can offer a better user identifier and profile that will enable messaging to take place through the right channel or system.

Its entirely possible that email protocols will continue to play a role in this new environment, but I think it will also depend on other Web 2.0 protocols like Activity Streams, Open Social, and ATOM. This actually hints that the death of email will come incrementally, if we wait for the technology to rise up and present better alternatives. In practice, the tide of data created by other social business software tools will make the traditional email inbox an unsustainable proposition.

The water is rising slowly right now, but don't doubt that the inbox will need to be reinvented at some point - the question is really when and how, not if.

BTW if you found this interesting, you might enjoy this presentation, Architected for Collaboration.

Image credit: Inbox Art CC BY-SA