What Flavor is Your Intranet?
Intranets have a flavor. Put another way, when someone says “intranet,” what do you think of? A collaboration system? A method of disseminating news? A way to tie all your internal apps together?
I discussed this some time ago over on our sister blog, Gadgetopia. I outlined three types of intranets:
The collaboration platform. This type is very big on two-way publishing. Users publish just as much as they consume. […]
The internal Web site. This type is based on one-way publishing. People who interact with it are divided into two groups: consumers and publishers. […]
The distributed intranet. In larger organizations, your intranet very quickly becomes decentralized. You end up not with a single, definable “intranet,” but with dozens or even hundreds of small applications […] that you group around common infrastructure […]
I still believe that beyond a certain point, all intranets become distributed. People start to want to put [insert app here] “on the intranet,” which usually means (1) make it look the same, and (2) make it so I don’t have to log in again.
Digital Web Magazine approached this same concept in Three approaches to Intranet Strategy. They divided up the flavors like this (emphasis mine):
Knowledge Management […] There could be document repositories, individual file warehouses, financial and statistical data, Web-based reports from legacy systems, decision support documents, vendor information, databases, and other information that previously was only available to one person or a limited group of people.
Communication and Collaboration […] An Intranet model of collaboration and communication promotes discussion, learning, and assists with offline communications.
Task Completion […] Instead of using the Intranet to find things, people use the Intranet to do things.
They make a great point when they discussion the difference between “Knowledge Management” (what I called “the internal Web site”) and “Communication and Collaboration” (what I called “The Collaboration Platform”).
In a system geared towards knowledge management, individuals contribute and have access to a wealth of information, but never interact with other knowledge creators.
As they point out, a big difference between strategies or flavors is whether they’re one-way or two-way. Additionally, if they’re two-way, do you know the target of your communication? Are you responding to Tom’s discussion board post? Or are you sending a “Change my 401K Allocation” request to the nameless, faceless void of Human Resources?
In practice, the dichotomy between the different flavors is not strict. All you need is someone to say, “we need an announcements section, some discussion forums, and a way for people to interact with the payroll system.” Congratulations, now you have all three.
Intranets are less a dogmatic manifestation of one strategy, and more a drawing together of different resources across a company. There will likely be a “news section” and some collaboration tools and some applications. Refer back to my previous point that, at a certain size, all intranets become distributed.
In the end, how well do you draw it all together? How well do you present all these resources as a homogeneous whole to the end user? That’s the real trick.