The Intranet: anti-social network?

I pitched a session for the first day of the UKGovCamp unconference which was broadly about ‘Social’ Intranets. The byline was “Intranets as if people mattered: people-centric rather than document (or other content) centric collaboration.” We had such a good turn out that we formed a raiding party and commandeered a bigger room next door in a move that reminded me of Monty Python’s Crimson Permanent Assurance.

My argument was (and is) that collaboration which starts and ends with using enterprise search to find content, perhaps a report stored in an enterprise class document management system, which helps me to get my job done isn’t really collaboration at all and it is definitely not social. It may be useful, but it is ephemeral. Even if I go back to that document again, and even if I review and update that document (as part of some workflow) my relationship with that document is going to end, and probably quite soon.

If, however, on the way to finding that useful content, I establish a relationship with the person who created it, and as a result of that am linked up with other people with the necessary skills, knowledge and talents, I can begin to form more enduring relationship: networks of people I can call on to support me in getting my job done.

This model of people-centric collaboration is normal on the Internet (think LinkedIn, Facebook) where the social graph is king, people are ‘first class citizens’ and interactions between people (or perhaps by people on other content) are the activities we care about. It might seem like a small shift from being notified that ‘Such-and-such a report has been updated’ to the people-first alternative: ‘A named colleague has updated such-and-such a report,’ but I argue not understanding that people are what it is all about is the cause of most of the problems we experience with the Intranet (someone in the session described the Intranet as “the place where content goes to die.”)

Sharon O’Dea, Intranet Manger at the Houses of Parliament (check out her blog on the same session) made the case for what she, tongue in-cheek, called the “anti-social Intranet.” She argued that most people don’t want to collaborate at work, they want to get their head down, focus on the task at hand and get the job done.

It took me a while (in fact until the following day in the “CivilPages RIP” session) to grasp this point. I am Engineer who has spent most of his working life surrounded by other Engineers. Engineers are trained to seek out criticism at every stage of the work they do. Although it seems a little alien (and perhaps it is a function of hierarchical organisations like the civil service with prescribed communications channels) I am prepared to accept that there are other professions which don’t require that level of collaboration which is vital to Engineering.

But actually, my point wasn’t that every item of content should be crowd-sourced, or documents collaboratively edited, or even that you needed to find the right people to occupy the next step in an over-specified workflow. It was that Intranets ought to be about people, about what can (and does) link them, first and foremost.

The discussion was really illuminating. We had some very interesting questions about whether the very concept of the Intranet was harmful. It was argued that the model of the Intranet as ‘one-thing’ which was corporately controlled and delivered was perhaps an understandable response in the early days of the Internet, but now people appear to deal quite well with an Internet which is clearly not ‘one thing’ to them. They juggle multiple, overlapping webs, and we were challenged to accept that the same could be true for organizations.

We talked a lot about boundaries. We were reminded that social network analysis has demonstrated that the bigger a network, the more likely someone is to benefit from it. Examples were given of the use of social tools, like the proprietary microblogging service, Yammer which failed because the groups were too small (probably a good thing too, as they sounded like they were using the free version without the necessary security and admin controls. For an open alternative, check out StatusNet.) There was discussion about overlapping networks where people were intuitively able to share to the widest possible network which either policy allowed or they were comfortable with (for example: internal groups->Intranet->Extranet->Internet) and there was a discussion as to whether this continuum model of sharing was more likely to result in the culture change required to promote sharing in some organizations.

Time and time again we were challenged, particularly by Simon Dickson, to accept that, in the post-desktop age of the Internet of Things and ubiquitous computing, organizations simply do not have the ability to regulate employees access to the Internet at work, and that corporate Intranets which don’t work the way people want or expect them to will simply drive people to collaborate on totally unregulated (and potentially neither safe nor legal) way on the Internet.

Most argued that the Intranet would still be the place where, for example, staff handbooks or HR policies were best shared with the people in the organization. I challenged that by drawing an analogy with GiffGaff, the mobile network run by its members, where the community itself provides the technical support to its members. Perhaps on a social Intranet someone would be better served by asking an HR related question of a responsive community, than by trying to find and mine their way through a Word document.

In the final analysis, I agree with Simon. The online “spaces” which deliver most value to people will be the ones they use, wherever they are hosted. If an organization wants to foster collaboration amongst their people and encourage them to be more joined up, they need to provide online spaces for them in which they can safely and legally collaborate, but which allow those relationships to extend outside the organizational boundaries, and whose user experience delivers the goods, in the way they allow those bonds to form in a way which parallels their experience on the Internet.

…and that’s definitely not anti-social, but probably not even an Intranet!