Intranets as Social Networks

When we first began the design of Office Ability Intranet software about 3 years ago, the design team set out to discover the most important features used by a variety of organizations and made available on the world's top Intranets. We studied many sources of information during our research, including, published data, interview research, survey information, and published reports from the Nielsen Norman Group, the most rigorous Intranet survey conducted and a wealth of information from the business Intranet community.

When creating the design basis for our software, we worked from 4 main design principles:
1. The Organization as a Collaborative Community
2. Optimized Information Management
3. Widely Useable Features / Flexible Extensibility
4. Simple & intuitive for both Users and Administrators

As the general design basis evolved and took shape, the main concepts were sufficient to focus our efforts and to develop a product that excelled in these areas. If we could do an excellent job focusing on the main objectives, we felt we would be well on our way to developing the best Intranet software available.

In one of our many planning sessions we were discussing community and Web 2.0 communication concepts when the question arose... how should a collaborative web-based community function inside a successful organization?  The discussion that followed was animated and the subject is revisited on a regular basis.  Through these discussions, the underlying design basis for OfficeAbility as a collaborative community has taken shape and the solutions provide the ability to:

• learn about others in the organization and sharing more about yourself;
• develop work groups that can be used for either public or private collaboration;
• provide functionality for business communication as an alternative to email;
• break barriers to communication by adding an open social element;
• give everyone a voice, not just management and Intranet administrators;
• provide a platform that will reinforce the organizational culture;
• give all employees access & encourage participation.

It becomes increasingly clear that ALL of these things work to promote cohesiveness and collaboration, to the strong benefit of an organization.  With OfficeAbility we have designed a social media component that functions within the closed organizational community. Our initial objective to include a social function as a must-have requirement for an Intranet has continually grown in popularity with our customers.

It has also been confirmed be external studies.  For example, Jakob Neilsen, principal of Nielsen Norman Group, has stated that:

"Social networking ideas pioneered on the open Internet are being applied today to intranets not just for the sake of offering the latest and greatest features, but because they deliver true business benefit, the most important of which is allowing employees to share information and knowledge more easily, and in some cases, bring more personal information into the workplace, promoting stronger connections among employees."

Marlon McMartin is founder and Managing Director of Office Ability Intranet software. This article is copyright protected and may only be republished provided there is reference given to the author and a back-link provided to www.OfficeAbility.com.