Much has been made of the social media revolution that dominates most of the public discourse about the Internet and the evolution of the World Wide Web. It's no wonder then that by the end of 2008 social media (Web 2.0) had become more popular than email (Nielsen Online) and that today four of the top eight most visited websites are social media sites that didn't exist a few years ago (Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia, Blogger).
This popular revolution has also sparked a much-needed revolution across the borders of the corporate firewall, on the corporate intranet. Long the poorer, maligned cousin to the Internet, the corporate intranet has stagnated under limited or virtually bankrupt budgets and the long held perception that customers and the corporate website are far more important investments. Thanks largely to the social media uprising, more collaborative vehicles such as blogs, wikis and social networking have jumped the firewall and have taken flight on the intranet. Increasingly these Web 2.0 tools are transforming the intranet from static, corporate-driven newsletters into dynamic social communities.
Knowledge sharing
While the popularity of 2.0 tools on the Internet is certainly a driving factor, more and more organisations are investing in social media as a means of enhancing the employee experience. According to the Intranet 2.0 Global Study 2010 (involving 530 participant organisations across the World, conducted by Prescient Digital Media: http://digbig.com/5bbsds), the main drivers for investing in intranet 2.0 tools are employee collaboration and knowledge sharing.
A full 76% of organisations with 2.0 tools have invested in them to improve employee collaboration which is generally defined as the work and knowledge employees share for the completion of day-to-day work, often including shared projects. Social media enhance an organisation's ability to share knowledge by empowering employees with processes to share knowledge in a structured environment, and with easy-to-use tools that facilitate this sharing (in spite of physical and geographical boundaries that have typically prevented this type of knowledge sharing; or limited it to unstructured vehicles such email and documents).
Closely aligned to, and interrelated with, employee collaboration is knowledge management: 71% of organisations using 2.0 tools do so to improve knowledge management. Knowledge management is loosely defined as how corporate knowledge - both tacit and explicit - is stored, retrieved and reused for achieving corporate objectives. Notice there is no direct reference to technology, but technology has a role to play (particularly search engines, content management systems, and social media). Effective knowledge management requires three key components:
Participatory individuals - employees who are willing, able and active sharers of tacit knowledge.
Process and rules - defined rules and standards (eg corporate taxonomy) for categorising and storing information and knowledge.
Technology - physical infrastructure including software that enables the above and allows for effective knowledge retrieval.
Knowledge management has typically been some ethereal wish or ambiguous 'strategic thrust' with little or no specific direction, and often involved great expense with huge investments in document management systems, search engines and corporate taxonomies. On the other hand, social media have proved to be very effective in achieving rapid knowledge sharing and management success with minimal cost, and not a lot of effort. As such, the explosion of social media has not been very costly, and has produced successes that were not previously attained (nearly half of all organisations (47%) have spent under $10,000 on their intranet 2.0 tools, according to the Intranet 2.0 Global Study 2010).
Intranet 2.0
For the record, intranet 2.0 merely describes, albeit vaguely, an intranet that features 2.0 or social media tools. Intranet 2.0 applications can include all of the fine social media we've come to love such as:
Blogs
Wikis
Podcasts
Social bookmarking
Social Networking
Photo and video sharing
Discussion forums
Instant messaging
User commenting
User ratings
User tagging.
Some of these tools have been around since the early 1990s but their rapid adoption on the corporate intranet passed the tipping point in late 2008, and exploded in 2009. Intranet 2.0 tools were once a passing fad or a pipe dream; today intranet 2.0 is mainstream technology. Consider the overwhelming abundance contained in the findings of the Intranet 2.0 Global Study about corporate intranets:
87% have deployed at least one 2.0 tool;
55% have deployed enterprise-wide (for all employees)at least one 2.0 tool;
53% have blogs (18% have enterprise-wide blogs);
52% have discussion forums (18% have enterprise-wide blogs);
51% have instant messaging (18% enterprise-wide);
49% have wikis (17% have enterprise-wide wikis).
The social intranet
While the use of social media has exploded, and with it employee collaboration and knowledge sharing, these tools are still in their infancy. As the numbers reveal, most organisations have 2.0 tools, but those that have deployed them enterprise-wide are still part of a small minority. Fewer still have integrated social media into the intranet or portal home page but these trailblazers have created the next generation of intranet: the social intranet. I define the social intranet in 'The Social Intranet (white paper)' (http://digbig.com/5bbsds) as: 'an intranet that features multiple social media tools for most or all employees to use as collaboration vehicles for sharing knowledge with other employees. A social intranet may feature blogs, wikis, discussion forums, social networking, or a combination of these or any other Web 2.0 (intranet 2.0) tool with at least some or limited exposure (or as an option) from the main intranet or portal home page'.
However, a few employee or executive blogs do not constitute a social intranet. A social intranet requires wide participation, or at a minimum, the opportunity for participation by most or all employees that have intranet access. Social intranets require social media: blogs, wikis, and user comments, to name a few. More advanced social intranets may incorporate multimedia, user tagging, and social networking that are integrated into multiple channels including user profiles (such as the feature set produced by Microsoft SharePoint 2010 or Lotus Connections). A social intranet need not include:
All social media tools (two or three will suffice);
The participation of all employees (but be open to most employees); and
A technology platform that is strictly a social media platform (e.g. blog or wiki platform).
In short, intranet 2.0 is very similar to a social intranet, but you can have 2.0 tools and not have a social intranet.
Case study: The BC Government (BC Public Service)
While it's easy to think that 2.0 and social intranets are for cutting-edge technology firms or massively wealthy Fortune 500 types, social intranets are appearing in organisations of all sizes, industries and geographies - even in government. @Work is the Province of British Columbia's employee intranet portal for The BC Public Service of 30,000 employees.
BC Government social intranet home page, @Work
In the post euphoric wave that followed the successful hosting of the 2010 Olympic Games, BC re-launched its corporate intranet in April 2010. In just 50 working days from development to production, a tiny team built an interactive intranet to support employee communications and collaboration. This work was completed within the existing site budget using an open source platform (Drupal). The new social intranet features abundant 2.0 technology including blogs, wikis, discussion forums, enhanced user commenting, user ratings, multimedia, mobile access, user tagging, RSS, and dynamic home page feeds (ie most discussed, highest rated, most viewed).
@Work is so popular that the new wiki platform, Wikilumbia, had 80+ entries in the first 30 days, and the volume of comments and the number of employees commenting on content have more than doubled. Says Rueben Bronee, Executive Director, Public Service Initiative, Government of BC 'the biggest challenge I think we'll continue to face is not on the technology side but on whether or not - from the employer and the employee perspective - we actually have the level of trust required to take full advantage of this new environment'.
Toby Ward is the founder and CEO of Prescient Digital Media, an intranet consulting firm that has worked on more than 100 intranets (including many Fortune 500s). Read hundreds of his intranet columns at http://www.IntranetBlog.com or download his Social Intranet white paper at http://digbig.com/5bbsdq.
The FreePint Family is a family of resources to help information workers be more effective, raise the value of information in their organisations and contribute to success.
'FreePint... provides most of my professional development because it won't come through work and [other resources] just don't cut it.'
FUMSI Forum: Do you have a research question? Post it to the FUMSI Forum, where professionals share Q&A and useful tips on how to Find, Use, Manage and Share Information. It's free.
![[Reuse options]](http://license.icopyright.net/images/icopy-w.png){kind=small}
Much has been made of the social media revolution that dominates most of the public discourse about the Internet and the evolution of the World Wide Web. It's no wonder then that by the end of 2008 social media (Web 2.0) had become more popular than email (Nielsen Online) and that today four of the top eight most visited websites are social media sites that didn't exist a few years ago (Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia, Blogger).
FreePint Shop:
VIP LiveWire:
