Blogging, Socialising, Podcasting. Its Intranet 2.0

Intranet 2.0
From the above discussion, you must have got the hint that Intranet 2.0 is about Social Networking, Blogs and Wikis etc. Enhancing communications and collaboration with employees, and improving employee investment and retention are primary considerations while establishing an Intranet 2.0 network.

The latest buzz word for advancing knowledge-sharing is 'SMIFing' - social media inside the firewall. This refers to Web 2.0, or in this case, Intranet 2.0 paradigm shift which has been building for the past few years where collaboration and free speech reign, and users are encouraged to network and form the content of the site.

Intranet 2.0 offers employees to share, collaborate, discuss issues with other employees in the organization through blogs, wikis, forums, communities and contribute more effectively to the organization.

Web 2.0 technologies generally disconnect content and design, thus freeing up the content creation process from concerns about consistency in design and navigation. Web 2.0 technologies also allow a far greater degree of collaboration in the creation of content. This makes possible the idea of Intranet 2.0, an intranet where only the visual design is determined in advance, and the content and structure is provided wholly by users.

According to the report published by IBF (Intranet Benchmarking Forum), the corporate world is embracing the social side of the Intranet 2.0 with open arms. The report highlights two basic elements of new corporate intranets:

 

 

 

The intranet increases functionality when file management (databases), print management, bulletin boards, and directory abilities are added The Intranet, as a whole, also needs to include certain functions and abilities. The following features may increase the intranets usability.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Intranet 2.0 tools
The tools of intranet are similar to that of Web 2.0.

Intranet 1.0 V/s Intranet 2.0
Intranet had some of the disadvantages in previous times. It lacked social context which nowadays is indispensable. However, a recent study by Deloitte found that companies are finding social networking as more of a nuisance than anything else. Apart from this Intranet 1.0 was expensive, stiff, hierarchical and less functional. This prompted the users to shift from 1.0 to 2.0.

All the differences in the above table must be lucid except taxonomy versus folksonomy. Let me elucidate this. Taxonomy is the general subjectwise classification of content that we have been doing traditionally where the user does not have the flexibility to create a new category/class, while folksonomy is bookmarking through social websites like delic.io.us or You Tube tags.Folksonomy is a portmanteau of the words folk and taxonomy, hence a folksonomy is user generated taxonomy.

The taxonomical approach cannot take into account the full nomenclature and cultural nuances of an entire organization, and all of its teams, nationalities, and roles.

Although ‘tagging‘ is often promoted as an alternative to organization by a hierarchy of categories, more and more online resources seem to use a hybrid system, where items are organized into broad categories, with finer classification distinctions being made by the use of tags,” according to the Wikipedia file on “Tag” (metadata).

According to Lemieux, the benefits of the hybrid, taxonomy driven folksonomy include:

Why Intranet 2.0
At BT, 4,000 employees formed their own “BT Facebook” site. BT took note of the situation and in response built its own social networking site called MyBT. The basic idea is that you can not prevent your employees from surfing social networking websites as it is human tendency to socialize and talk. So Intranet 2.0 offers a great platform for your people to collaborate with colleagues and friends in the organization and be more productive.

Jeremy Burton in his piece for ZDNet’s blog says that,” For most people, the human drive to connect and share is stronger than the duty to spend every possible moment "being productive". No matter what, people will find ways to socialize and share during work hours. It might be best to treat this like sex education: If your employees are going to "do it" anyway, why not encourage them to channel their social-media impulses in smart, safe ways that can potentially help your business?

While booming on the Internet, blogging on the corporate intranet is only in its infancy. But corporations are taking note. Corporate intranet blogs represent one of the hottest communications opportunities in employee communications since the advent of the intranet itself. Project blogs are created at the outset of a new project to update the developments and progress related to the project to help the team members and other employees (indirectly involved in the project).

There are myriad benefits of employing Intranet 2.0 which can be covered into two-

(1)Hard benefits, and
(2)Soft benefit

Hard benefits are those that can be observed in the balance sheet of the company while soft benefits are those which affect the functioning and morale of the employees.

 

The general hard benefits are-

The IBF in its report cited many benefits for corporates adopting the Intranet 2.0.These soft benefits include many others also that have been described below-

Other benefits include:

How Intranet 2.0 returns so much
The second part of the discussion involves how Intranet 2.0 helps in reaping such tangible and intangible benefits in due course of time. Using a blog as an internal collaboration tool is a key part of an organization’s own internal operations, with each of its small staff authoring their own blog to discuss clients, project updates, brainstorm and “general industry gossip.” This meets two needs: a simple repository for internal team reference, and an effective (and honest) communications channel to those in the organization who are most interested. So an employee does not have to go through various files and directories if he looking for an information. He can directly log on to the intranet blog and access the desired information. The other related answers to the queries as part of the “how” can be:

The idea is to communicate "awareness" rather than information, so that team members know what's happening, and who to go to for in-depth details. A company blog from the President or CEO could go along way to better connect employees with the executive floor. The correlation between employee satisfaction and the health of an organization’s employee communications is undeniable: each depends on the health of the other. This of course is nothing new to company CEOs at Sears, Cisco, Raytheon and many others who have written an intranet column on a regular basis for years.

W3 is the intranet home page to IBM’s to approximately 300,000 employees worldwide. W3 is a key component of IBM’s “Workforce Transformation Strategy” that lists the following as key objectives:

 

The complexity includes a proliferation of intranet sites that numbered nearly 10,000 in 1998 and now is approximately 5,000, more than 11 million pages, and a plethora of tools and applications.

W3 provides a single starting place for the workday that is personalized by the individual and profiled to their role in the corporation. Home page personalization features include Links, News, Stock Tickers, and What’s New.

A companion section to the home page called Working Knowledge serves up relevant content based upon their employee profile (geographic location, business unit, personnel role, etc.).

Working Knowledge is driven by a network of “cross-function, cross-unit Information Brokers or content advocates” that volunteer their contributions. These IBM brokers’ primary role is to understand and identify the relevant content needs for IBM's employee groups and delivering that desired content through working knowledge portal.

It's searchable, and there is a feature that allows the user to create custom categories using key words. W3 is organized by more than just topic. Content is delivered via the profile, so users can get information based on their job role, organization, location (site), country, geography and topics of interest in the employee profile.

The site features a wide abundance of productivity tools including:
e-meetings1

Despite their size the results have been impressive:

SabreTown has all the features of most social networking sites:

On SabreTown, users can post a question to the entire organization, and the site’s inference or relevance engine will automatically send the question to the 15 most relevant employees (based on what they’ve entered in their profile, blog postings and other Q&As that have been previously posted). The results have been spectacular: 60% of questions are answered within one hour (one hour!); each question receives an average of 9 responses (9 responses!). The system has already led to more than $150,000 in immediate, direct savings for the company, with much greater benefits not yet measured.

SabreTown’s success is summarized in one spectacular metric: 65% of all Sabre employees became active SabreTown members in the first 3 months! More than 90% of employees are active today.

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Planning Intranet 2.0
Those organizations which already have an Intranet are 90 percent done with the requirements for establishing an Intranet 2.0 blog. An organization should carry out the following check to know their intranet requirements as per the Melcrum study-

While the new social media tools of Intranet 2.0 are not yet critical, they are mandatory for any organization that needs a competitive advantage and wants to be an employer of choice to a younger, faster workforce.

The Intranet 2.0 is really an exciting prospect and more and more organizations are switching on to it e.g. SimCorp, McDonalds, Motorola, Intrawest Placemaking, Serena Software, British Airways, IBM etc. The internet is replete with examples of the successes of Intranet 2.0 in different business domains- Software, Construction companies, Airlines and defense etc. Open the lines of communication and knowledge-sharing is a sensible way through controlled flexibility in the land of Intranet 2.0. Collaborative tools like Wikis, FAQs, Blogs, Forums and RSS do have a legitimate role to play behind the firewall.

It does not matter what is the employee size of your organization, but it has been observed that larger is the size of your organization higher is savings. If you ignore the potential that Intranet 2.0 offers, you’re doing so at your own risk, and the perhaps to the benefit of your competitors that may have already embraced these tools, or soon will.