According to Chris Lynch from TIBCO Software Inc., there’s been no shortage of people saying that social computing represents the next wave of the corporate intranet, the latter being a piece of technology that’s been perpetually disappointing. For a place that’s supposed to be the starting point of people’s day, it has never lived up to that expectation.
The first wave of intranets were static, imposing too much friction for end-users who wanted to post new information. People had to wait for their IT department to hack HTML code and update the page. Then came the second generation of intranets — the self-service variety — that brought more functional use, but ultimately the most time you spent there was during your first and last week working at the company. They also lacked a critical element: People. Who does what? And who can help me get my job done better?
So naturally, enterprise social computing came to save the day and deliver that critical people element, right?
Well, yes, but that isn’t the most complicated part of the equation.
The new intranet will be a heterogeneous environment of systems across the whole company — and the challenges of actionable integration points and relevancy will far outweigh the people part of the equation. What the social intranet won’t be is a homogeneous, monolithic software stack that only incorporates people and systems based on one vendor’s view of the world. As a new generation of CIOs take the ranks, they’re realizing such a strategy for their corporate intranet isn’t “good enough” at all.
Click through for five tenets of the new social intranet, as described by Chris Lynch from TIBCO Software Inc..
In the social intranet, everything in it — from content to people to data from systems of record — must be tied to a particular subject or top-level architectural construction. The purposes of this will be two-fold: One is obviously to increase the chances that people find what they’re looking for. But more importantly, it gives them a mechanism to filter this information as it comes to them in real-time.
This also helps with discovery.
Depending on the maturity of your intranet, your people have different ways of finding information. If it’s old, they’ll search the static HTML pages and experience difficulty finding the information they need. If it’s slightly newer, their searches might yield better informational results, but they’ll lack context since the information is devoid of who or what generated it. Consequently, the careful use and management of top level social architecture subjects will be key.
With regards to relevancy, speed matters, too. Information became stale quickly in early generation intranets because it required IT’s help to update. The social intranet puts publishing tools right at employees’ fingertips, and gives them the power to update and change information on the fly.
It’s tempting to think you can have one company provide everything in your intranet, but the reality is you need a stack that’s technology agnostic. Otherwise, you’re going to have to mold every single piece of integration to that vendor’s way of doing things. Open Web standards and RESTful APIs are key in this endeavor, but they alone won’t work. A strong integration framework that incorporates custom business processes will be essential as well.
Even in the year 2011, there’s many pushing for a “their way or the highway” mentality, and that will stifle the success of the social intranet. By insisting on one particular development framework, or pushing the religion of cloud-only versus on-premises and ignoring all the nuances in between the two, it makes it hard for companies to think holistically about how they piece together the relevant data and systems they need to make their intranet a successful work tool.
The social intranet shouldn’t care where your data lives; it should aim to provide your employees with a secure location to access relevant data and people in context of where their work is getting done.
No, it’s not a community manager, because you’re managing more than just people. This administrator will focus on corporate intelligence – the ability to apply social analytics and business intelligence within the confines of your social intranet to understand key trends, content, and conversations happening around your company.
They will also do some lightweight information management. This will offend the sensibilities of social purists – who think the crowd alone aided by search can manage data – but they can’t.
For example, you want to empower end-users to create their own subjects, but sometimes, they’ll categorize something in the wrong area, which will muck up filters and search results inside your intranet. Thus, the administrator should be able to move things around and categorize people and data with a simple drag-and-drop. Ideally, this person’s overall organizational and business process knowledge will be a more applicable skill than the hacking of any code.
Simply pulling in events via a REST API or integrating via OpenSocial won’t be enough to make your intranet a place that people rely on to get their work done. If they can’t execute business processes from right within the intranet, and instead have to toggle away to the application in question, then their motivation to live in your intranet will wane quickly. That’s not true integration with enterprise social computing tools.
True integration with the social intranet must be bi-directional. If your company’s Oracle Expenses system sends an expense report into your activity stream, you should be able to view and approve it right there. If you want to upload a document to your document management system, you should be able to pull it from your computer, write a message in your social platform that puts it in context, and post it to both the intranet and the document management system.
The social intranet needs to let users shift from asynchronous communications to live ones more easily than what we see today. Though video and Web conferencing have been around for years now, it requires so much effort (calendar invites, pass codes, etc.), and is managed outside the corporate intranet (mainly in email). Worse, by the time those meetings finally take place, the collaborative conversation that generated them has gone cold, context is lost, and the ideas seem more dull.
If you are having a great conversation with a few of your product and marketing colleagues inside your corporate intranet via a microblogging post, you should be able to quickly chat live with them with as little friction as possible.
