One line of conversation at the recent IBF24 event that really struck a chord was provoked by a simple one line tweet “The intranet is dead”. At a time when so many organisations, including my own, are investing in their intranets, it was a striking comment.

Alex Manchester believes that the name ‘intranet’ certainly carries too much baggage but that conceptually, it’s hard to say if intranets are dying a slow death to be replaced by the digital workplace.

Pragmatically, what’s in a name? It doesn’t really matter what you call it, what it does is what really matters. I think the intranet is not yet dead, but the current and previous expectations of what one must deliver certainly is.

I believe that a great intranet is a communication, collaboration and transactional/executional workspace, accessed through useable, accessible beautiful interface that both reflects and drives corporate culture. Intranets that are not this already in some way are already dead or dying and intranets that only do this in 5 years time will go the same way. Intranets are not destinations, they’re journeys – evolve or expire.

The story of consumer electronics in the last few years has been one of convergence. Consider your mobile phone — 10 years ago you could place voice calls and, possibly, text messages. Now, it’s your music repository, your camera, your internet access, your satellite navigation, your games console, your pocket library and if the iPhone 4 is your bag, a video conferencing device. The story of intranets is also one of convergence and will certainly be in the future.

I think the intranet in 5 years time will work in the same broad headlines (Communication, Collaboration and transactions) but boundaries between these, and the depth to which they go, will change. Convergence will bring office stalwarts like shared meetings and telephony to the intranet, data will be in the cloud accessible from whereever your office is. Work is not a place, it’s a verb and the intranet, accessible from anywhere, will be your gateway. Such convergence brings convenience (with possibly some compromise) and that will be all important in the future workplace.

The intranet is dead; long live the intranet.

Intranets are strange beasts. Hidden behind the corporate firewall, they’re very often the practical hub of an organisation serving employee needs. Equally, as we learnt during @thoughtfarmer ‘s presentation, an intranet can be an ignored sink hole of woe. Optimised for Netscape 4.0 indeed …!

I enjoy events such as IBF24 as much for the official comment as the peripheral insight afforded through Twitter. Viewing other company intranets is an opportunity that many corporate intranet folks do not often receive and, frankly, they should grab it with both hands. Grab too some excellent ideas: Who could fail to be impressed with the Ernst and Young people networking graphical tool, or the slightly more achievable British Airways Outlook email signature creator? I’ll be including both in future developments.

A healthy debate was had on the subject of ‘beautiful intranets’, with many intranet examples presented to fuel the conversation. Beauty is a somewhat subjective quality, but with intranets, there must be a practical aspect to the description. An intranet is a place of work; it’s a place of transaction, communication, collaboration and engagement in varying degrees – I think ‘beauty’ is excellence in execution and efficiency in these four platforms. Naturally, there is an aesthetic element to the question, but aesthetic beauty over practical execution does not make for a good intranet.

To paraphrase William Morris, the 19th century British designer and writer “Have nothing in your intranet that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be useful and beautiful”. (As if Morris knew what an intranet was – original quote from The Beauty of Life)

(The award for the most beautiful intranet went to Intermón Oxfam, managed by Julia Serramitjana. In announcing the award, note was made of the clarity of function of the site as well as the use of pastel shades. A little flippantly, I did ask how a company might apply that pastel thinking when their brand is so clearly bright red as mine is. Consensus has it that bright is fine when applied as an accent rather than across a page. We might apply that thinking on the next design change)

I think the joy of events like #ibf24 is that it gets intranet managers out from behind the firewall. It was great virtually meeting so many of you — stay in touch.

Yesterday was another auspicious day for our work intranet as at 06:00 EDT, we launched the new HR portal section bringing self-service tools to our employees.

Culturally, it’s a major change. We’ve shifted from a traditional HR model (providing local HR experts aligned to functional teams) to a centralised support model with aligned self-service intranet facilities.

The intranet aspect of this launch has been an major undertaking. It has seen us switch from a simple simple SharePoint iteration to a multi-variation model to manage the various language options across our geographies (US English, US Spanish, Canadian French, Canadian English, UK English, French, Belgian French, Belgian Dutch and Dutch).

A few facts to share:

• Switch from 1 to 9 SharePoint variations
• New menus to accommodate HR content
• 2000+ pages of multi-lingual content
• 12 Integrated SAP HR transactions
• New “MyLinks” section to enable web bookmarking
• Integrated employee benefits functions
• Integrated job search functions
• New “workbench” page
• Enhanced employee profile page

This new launch is a major piece of work and a huge step change for our intranet which, up until now, has largely been a communication and collaboration vehicle. As good as that content was, our employees had no “compulsion to visit”, meaning the site was mostly for browsing rather than for action.

Bringing transactions to the portal adds that employee “compulsion to visit” which will have knock on value for the news articles and executive communications. In the long run, I hope that our employees will that the ease of information access and flexibility of use will outweigh the negatives of not having an HR expert immediately to hand — but only time will tell.

Tomorrow I’ll share some of the initial feedback

In the early 1980s, a Russian governmental delegation came to London to talk to their counterparts and understand more about the capitalist system. One asked “Which minister is in charge of making sure there’s enough bread for the people?” and was dumbfounded with the response that no-one was. The opportunity to make a little dough (pun intended) was the mechanism for ensuring there was sufficient bread with 1000s of unrelated but interconnected parts bringing fertiliser to field, wheat to mill, flour to baker, bread to shop. It’s remarkable that it all works really, given the lack of orchestration.

Step forward 30 years. Who is it that ensures that the right wiki pages exist, or that they are accurate? Who regulates the blogs to ensure fairness in all aspects or that each youTube video has a reply? I sincerely hope the answer is no one individual — the answer is the collective community of users.

The free market world of social computing has already created marvellous resources such as wikipedia, youTube, millions of blogs and billions of tweets – countless petabytes of information of various levels of worthiness. All this we can pass on to others. All this knowledge nucleating from the provision of social computing tools. Like the scientists at the coffee break, all that was needed was the forums and then the creativity flowed.

But what I’m really excited about is the power of social computing behind the firewall on the corporate intranet. Here, we have the same community already used to interacting digitally (after all, employees are real people too!) But added to the collaborative confusion on the internet, is a genuine common purpose and a little orchestration from management. This could give the fledging knowledge sources some direction and speed up creation and usage.

Does a little orchestration of social computing outputs kill or strengthen it’s power? Is the free and open approach to knowledge creation the best way or does it need some rules.

I’ve really got into Twitter of late and am gathering a select group of followers. I find it useful place to vent, a useful place to network, to laugh and to learn. As an aside, much of the research into a forthcoming keynote speech I’m giving was found on the internet via Twitter.

For all that eulogising, I think it’s the functionality of twitter that I like as the interface on their own website is far from fully formed. To that end, I’ve been using a bunch of applications which interface back, including Tweetdeck, Lounge, Twitterfon and others. Tweetdeck, especially with their latest 0.25 update, is the pick by some way.

But dear reader, all is not well. My Macbook is well armed with 2GB of RAM and has a spritely processor, but Tweetdeck hogs capacity. It mostly hovers around 8-10% of my CPU (still way over the odds if you ask me) but will often spike into the 90s and higher bringing everything else to its knees. Close it down, reload and all is well for a while again.

Anyone else having the same issues?

In hindsight, all the clues were there but I wonder how many of us would have seen the investment opportunity suggested in this early review of the Google search engine. All said, it’s hard to imagine that even Google’s founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin could imagine how their project might develop.

The article makes note of the fact that even then, Google had ambition. In 1998, they already had indexed 25million pages and were soon to up that to a massive 100million — compared to today’s 8-10 billion.

The interface came in for some criticism noting that it was in need of a facelift. Again, hindsight tells us that the simple, clean, white-focused homepage set the benchmark in usability. It’s said that the interface was so simple because Page and Brin never got round to working on it and the beta design just stuck. Tempting to believe that.

“Will Google go commercial” the founders were asked, “we’ve no objections” the future multi-billionaires responded. $1000 invested in the fledgling company back in 1998 would now be worth $250million.

Missed opportunity.

Quick to setup, simple to use, the app allows you to edit and write any wordpress blog including self hosted ones like this.

The facebook app has made it easy to update my status and as a result, I’m editing regularly so, look out as I suspect this app will mean I’ll be blogging a great deal more

I remember when I started at University way back in 1991, the campus had hundreds of dumb terminals so that students could access their email and other services. They were truely dumb: no hard drive to speak of and little software loaded — all of that was elsewhere on the network.

Sounds familiar?

Yes, I think so. Recent announcements, such as those by Microsoft, demonstrate the latest direction that corporations are taking to service their IT needs. Instead of taking software and hosting it on their own networks, many companies are embracing SAAS : Software as a Service. Host it on their networks, access it via browsers much like you would a website, or like those early dumb terminals.

We don’t often see IT coming full circle!

We also take it for granted that software produced by a single company, such as Microsoft, will interact seamlessly. By and large, they do. But what I’m becoming increasingly aware of is that handshaking, that commonality being extended to websites that are not owned by single entities.

For example, you might be reading this posting in Facebook. You might be reading it on imjon.com, my wordpress blog. However, I actually wrote this post in Flickr! and simply exploit the connectivity to write once and post in many locations.

Clever, simple, connected. Not something you might imagine from three independent companies.

There comes a point in every project when silly season starts — it started for me 2 weeks ago. I’ve pinpointed the reasons and I’ll be clear to watch for the signs in the future.

When all is going well on a project, when the timelines are bouncing along nicely and budgets are being met, there’s a danger that project complacency kicks in. The complacency often manifests itself as over confidence in our ability to deliver and essentially, sneak in some promises which are above and beyond the original scope. Silly season leads to panics about managing expectations and about project timelines.

If you’re on a project and it’s going well, just warn against silly season. I’ve had a headache this week undoing the fallout.

Today’s photo, like others, was taken whilst I tapped away on my computer in my office. Figured out what’s wrong?

Oh it’s probably wrong to be vanity posting in this way! There are now 20 people in the photo a day (ish) (PADI) project, approximately 20 new photos a day and yet I’ve chosen one of my own to share!

This is no classic, but it’s a nice little look into domestic life. It’s just a fridge, but it’s also a fun playzone, a noticeboard, a shopping list holder!

I was working at home today so no time to get out with my camera and take photos. If you work from home, home is all you see. The fridge is my friend: it stores the milk for my tea.