Intranets as Social Networks
by Marlon McMartin, MBA - Managing Director, Office Ability
When we first began the design of Office Ability Intranet software in mid-2008 we, the design team, set out to discover the most important features available on the world's top Intranets. We studied many sources of information in the research that followed including published data, interview research, and survey information including published reports from the Nielsen Norman Group, the most rigorous Intranet survey conducted anywhere and a wealth of information from the business Intranet community.
categories:1. An Organization as a Community,
2. Information Management Within the Organization, &
3. Advanced Features / Extensibility.
These categories evolved some over time yet the main concepts were sufficient for us to focus our efforts and to develop a product that excelled in what we considered to be the 3 main areas, most important to a strong Intranet system. If we could do an excellent job in these three areas then we felt we would be well on our way to developing the best Intranet software available, period.
In one of our many planning sessions we were discussing community and Web 2.0 communication concepts when someone asked an interesting question... would a Facebook-like function be successful inside an organization?. The discussion that followed was animated and it was a memorable creative moment just talking about the possibilities that would be presented, such as:
- learning about others in the organization and sharing more about yourself,
- develop work groups and find out who is interested to join and strengthen the groups,
- more personalized business communication,
- breaking barriers to communication by adding a fun social element,
- making friends - friends are always a pleasure to work beside,
- finding common interests,
- enjoying the job more!... and the list goes on.
It became clear to us that ALL of these things would work to promote cohesiveness and collaboration and work to the strong benefit of any organization.
Not that we questioned the power of social networking or Facebook / MySpace but our learning process brought us to a conclusion that introducing social/business networking into a smaller, more controlled environment would only enhance the power of the medium. We made the decision that a social networking function was a must-have requirement for a strong Intranet and we include this feature (our FaceNook) as one of many that have been developed to strengthen the Organization as a Community.
Postscript:
In early 2009 we learned that the top Intranets in the world were beginning to adopt Social Networking-like features and the leading companies confirm our notion that the networking experience is delivering benefit to the business and promoting stronger working relationships.
Here is a quote from a January press release:
"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," said Jakob Nielsen, principal of Nielsen Norman Group. "As a testament to how important and helpful this movement has become, every winner in our contest this year offered one or more social features."
We will publish more from this press release on our blog in the near future as I am sure it will be of interest to those of you now researching Intranet systems.
Kind regards.
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.
