Intranets: the tech-head perspective

This interesting post over at 37signals is effectively the company polling its universe of customers and friends over possibilities in the intranet software market. That's an interesting communications exercise in itself, but I link to it because it suggests (in line with a previous post here) that the concept of "an intranet" is not in good shape.

What comes out of the "tech-head" perspective is that no-one has come out with an earth-shaking software product as yet, but Microsoft Sharepoint seems to be edging into an industry lead.

Sharepoint's special value is in facilitating collaboration over documents (through the integration with MS Office apps.) It also includes things like RSS and blogs.

To me, the lessons for IC types are:

1) People will choose and stick with communication channels that make their life easier. There's a lot of talk about the possibilities around "new social media" in IC, but that will inevitably involve technology choices. The right medium is one that people will get some value (for them) out of using.

2) Point One highlights the potential for IC professionals to gain extra traction if they work to understand and influence the information management policies in their organisations. People are happy to find that Sharepoint has blogs and many become enthusiastic users of them, but the system lives or dies by it's usefulness in "information management" rather than "internal communication" per se. (That might not be a fun fact, but it is a financial reality at a lot of companies.) As such, it's important to make sure that these two agendas complement each other rather than conflict. That means both an interest in the widgets IT is buying to solve intranet problems and a wider interest in the connections between "information management" and "internal communication overall.

 

Technorati Tags: business processes,information managment,information technology,internal communications,intranets,IT

The two worlds of business communication

A newsletter from Mindjet (who make the excellent MindManager mind map software) reminds me again of the two ways people tend to talk about "communication" in business and my own uncertainties about where they join up:

1) There are those known as "Internal Communication" professionals and they focus largely on what might be termed "community communications issues." This ranges from the hardnosed business case models around communicating "brand values" in the organisation to created "engagement" to potentially softer strategies around more journalistic exercises which create and reinforce a sense of community and well-being within the organisation.

I've spent a fair amount of time writing about these aspects recently.

2) The other people who tend to work with "communication" are IT consultants and Business Process Re-engineers, who (like the Mindjet people) largely talk about communication in terms of the needed exchange of information to make a business process happen. If you're designing a new widget, then there has to be an exchange of information regarding costs, design parameters, market needs, etc.

It is my feeling that these two worlds, which have largely been long separate are now starting to touch at the edges. Two major reasons why spring to mind right now:

a) The rise of the "knowledge worker." This deserves a post on it's own, but in short, industries are changing. Service industries are often all about manipulating information and even traditional manufacturing industries are finding that competitive advantage depends more and more on how they do things and the design of the things they make. As a result, the "knowledge" of various businesses now sits more than ever with the people. Where processes used to assume that people were interchangeable parts who existed to facilitate the process, we're gradually learning that in real "knowledge roles" the process isn't so easy to institutionalise. As such, the technological/process imperative is now more about enabling communication than specifying it.

This has parallels with:

b) The rise of social media. It is social media technologies, as much as anything that have produced an awareness in internal communications types (not to mention marketing departments too) that "message management" is a dying proposition. Where previously IC might have felt it was the medium of community information exchange in a company, it's clear now that people can talk to each other in myriad ways. Forward thinking IC professionals recognise this and seek to work with it, and thus they are also looking more at enabling communication than specifying it.

Where I think a crucial confluence exists is that the existence of communication technologies does not mean that necessary communications are taking place.

As such, in knowledge work, there is a need to bring the two perspectives together. From the BPR angle there is an expertise about incentives and formal rules for promoting specific information exchange and from the IC side there's a much greater understanding about the human issues around communication, which becomes ever more critical as the information we seek to communicate becomes more human (less numeric, less precise, less quantifiable) as the task involved becomes more abstract and more creative.

Add that together and that's some sense of my gut feeling of how the two worlds can help each other a little.

 

Technorati Tags: business processes,communication,information exchange,internal communications,knowledge economy,lateral communications