James has published his latest 'Future intranet principles' post, and this one focuses on 'putting people at the centre of intranets':
"Up to this point, the central focus of intranets has been content. How to write it, how to publish it, how to maintain it and keep it up to date. This matches the intranet’s role as a publishing platform, and an internal website.
Intranets in 2015 will put people at the centre, supported by content, tools and collaboration"
This concept, 'people at the centre' or, understanding that 'information is socially situated' as James Dellow describes it, has huge potential for intranets. Some organisations are starting to do this already, including some we're working with right now and one notable winner in the 2009 Intranet Innovation Awards (I hinted at this in a post just before we unveiled the winners, and some great points were left in the comments section).
On that point, below I've republished my editorial column from the 2009 Awards report, focusing on 'people-based intranets'. Several months on, I stand by everything in here, especially the last sentence. What do you think about this concept?
Like those in previous years, this year’s Award entries show that it’s possible to design a powerful, effective intranet that will do what’s expected of it, and do it well, while providing collaboration tools, conversational spaces, filtered and targeted communication, efficient, money-saving applications and more. This year we’ve even seen a number of intranets with striking visual designs that compare favourably with the latest trends on the Web. That’s some progress. But where are we heading?
Underpinning several entries this year is a sense of something significant happening at the leading edge of intranet design: people as the focus, and the very essence and foundation of the intranet.
This year’s entry from IDEO demonstrates just how important people are to an organisation. IDEO’s people are its intranet. Remove them from the equation and the site would be no more. That’s in contrast to the vast majority of intranets, where the ‘staff directory’ is just one, albeit usually the most popular, application.
Instead, and as the IDEO team suggest: ‘Build pointers to people. Rather than attempt to capture everything someone knows in a database with the hope that others will tap that database, we strive to identify the key bits of information that help one understand who someone is in terms of expertise and experience, so that person can best be leveraged.’
This is a compelling concept that has massive potential for intranets and intranet teams. When designing an intranet, don’t just make it user-centred, make it user-based: search for a product and you’re presented with the product owner(s) and their related contact details pages, blogs, feeds and FAQs and the latest processes specific to their products and services.
For the individual staff members, their information is drafted straight from the organisation’s HR systems and automatically kept up to date, while presented in the same rich interface and design as all other systems, actions and processes.
Staff directories, collaboration, social tools and personalisation feature throughout the 2009 Awards. But fundamentally changing the focus of intranets and starting with people, and building on social tools from the very beginning as opposed to adding them as features... that will be one of the most important intranet developments ever.
