The original intranet, intranet 1.0, typically began as a nothing more than an online bruchure hosted on some techie’s desktop, buried in the IT basement. Intranet 1.0 grew and evolved rapidly, more so at some organizations than others, but in some respects, faster than corporate websites who had a few years’ head start with the advent of the ‘super information highway’:
- Version 1.0:Ð’Â Welcome page (a welcome message and a phone number)
- Version 1.1:Ð’Â Bulletin board (simple communications)
- Version 1.2:Ð’Â Corporate newsletter (structured news & limited document management)
- Version 1.3:Ð’Â Help Desk (simple transactions like the employee directory)
- Version 1.4:Ð’Â Corporate Store (more complex transactions such as e-HR and self-service)
- Version 1.5:Ð’Â The Portal (authorization, authentication, application & database integration)
Though not every intranet has followed such a clear evolutionary path (in fact, only 15% of organizations have a full portal solution, according to the 2010 Intranet 2.0 Global Survey, conducted in the Spring of 2010 by Prescient Digital Media), the technology itself and many leading organizations (IBM, Cisco, and Verizon to name a few) have blazed this enterprise trail.
The trail has lengthened considerably as of late with the advancement of social media, and the intranet has made an evolutionary leap to version 2.0 – the social intranet.
The social intranet
The phrase social intranet has only appeared in recent months (late 2009) to describe an intranet with social media features. Although with any emerging technology there is likely to be disagreement on the precise definition of a new term, I describe a social intranet as the following:
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 make a social intranet. A social intranet requires wide participation, or at minimum, 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.
Read a detailed description of the “social intranet” with accompanying case study by downloading the full white paper, The Social Intranet: Social Intranet Success Matrix .
One fascinating (I hope) thought that just struck me…do we also need to talk about the social extranet? What is the role that the social intranet plays in helping people interact with customers, suppliers, and partners?
I disagree. While the “social” label may have been coined recently, the tools or applications which make up a social Intranet have been available on the Lotus/Domino platform for at least five years. We built just such a system from common templates on the Domino platform at a manufacturer that I worked for several years ago. And the geographically dispersed team I lead at IBM prior to that made extensive use of the same technology. Over half of IBM's Global Services division in Canada work from home and without these tools this would not be possible.
It may be true that in 2009 some companies and also the open source community began packaging suites of applications and calling them social Intranets. But the tools themselves have been around for years.
You disagree with what? I didn't say social media on the intranet hasn't been around for years — it has been. I just said the “social intranet” label has only surfaced in recent months. Social media in fact has been around for more than a dozen years. I implemented intranet discussion forums on a telecom intranet in 1998.