Hyper-personalisation of the intranet

Ahhh personalisation. We say we want you, some say they need you, but when it comes to the intranet, few of us will actually use you... In fact you'll be lucky to see 10% start checking feature boxes....

At last week's Intranet Leadership Forum event in Sydney one of the points was, "personalisation is a tough nut to crack." It is. You can provide lots of functionality and customisation, but how much does it end up being used? Do the majority of users even know they can determine their own small set of quick links on that right-hand column? You'd be surprised.

But if there's one company who might be able to crack this nut, it's Sun Microsystems. Just after the Intranet Leadership Forum session I read this edition of the Source for Communicators from Melcrum, which describes how Sun is diving head first into the future with it's new, hyper-personalised intranet, dubbed "WebNext":

WebNext will allow each employee to tailor their own site, relevant to them – but this is a big step away from the local portals and customizable homepages of old. The program is being referred to as Project 90/10, because the company wants everyone's website to be 90% populated by the things the employee cares about and uses every day on the web, 10% by the things the organization is pushing down to them – and it's being built with that specific usage ratio in mind.

This is a bold step but at the time of doing so, so was the launch of a corporate-wide public blogging system, a CEO forum in Second Life, publishing 10k filings by RSS at the same time as the were filed officially, and a whole heap more.

I have followed the Sun story for some time, they've featured in numerous articles and case studies I've been involved with, and it remains a great example, possibly the best, of using social tools in the enterprise. I'm curious to see if this personalisation attempt will work and hopeful that it does. It would be great to see that nut get completely smashed.