It’s time to drag the intranet in to the twenty-first century. We need to think of the intranet as the digital workspace, or “my web at work.” As a worker I need access to all the tools and information I need to do my job. It’s becoming increasingly likely that not all of that lives inside the company firewall. And I won’t always be at my desk.
Gone are the days of the intranet being a single destination, a “website”, an online publishing – or rather broadcasting – medium for the internal communication function. Sure, there’s a place for internal comms on an intranet, just as there’s a place for payroll giving, blogs and project support tools, but it’s much more. It’s my web at work.
This new definition helps to clarify the role of the central intranet team in any organisation however large or small.
As Matt Jones once put it when discussing bbc.co.uk, “We’re not building a website, we’re building part of the web” – or words to that effect.
The role is not to lock down but to open up. To make the digital workspace as navigable as possible, and to make everything within it as findable and usable as possible.
the problem is not only in the definition but in the incorporation of the intranet as a business critical entity within a given organisation.
It seems to me an Intranet should have an intranet team comprised of members embedded in seperate arms/depts of the organisation.
i have a lot more to say about this, but I won’t fill up your comment space, maybe I’ll blog about it (smile)
That’s interesting Terri.
What would these embedded people’s skill-set be?
And what, if anything, would be at the centre? And where would the centre be?