Top tips for intranet 2.0

Compiled by: Luke Tredinnick L.Tredinnick@londonmet.ac.uk, December 2011

These tips will help you successfully integrate web 2.0 technologies into your intranet, helping transform the intranet from a static reference resource, to a dynamic, predominantly user-generated collaborative platform. Intranet 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 will not suit all kinds of organizations. Without centralised oversight of the content being produced and shared, they imply ceding considerable power over content to end-users. They therefore also imply the investment of considerable trust in employee’s by senior managers. But where the culture of the organisation enables that investment of trust, Intranet 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 will help to realise the dynamic, creative potential of the collaborative workplace.

Tip 1: Understand the philosophy of Web 2.0

Web 2.0 is often discussed as a series of technological advancements in the delivery of web content: blogs, wikis, RSS, micro-blogging, social networking, tagging, social bookmarking and folksonomies. However, behind the development of these technologies, and informing their use in Web 2.0 technologies, is a radical re-conceptualisation of the relationship between developer and end-user, content production and content consumption. Web 2.0 is more than merely a set of technologies, it is an articulation of a radical trust in the creative potential of collaboration and open content development. If you want to successfully introduce intranet 2.0 and enterprise 2.0 approaches in the workplace, you need to understand this ethos, and to some degree share it. End-users have an unerring eye for spotting bandwagon jumping.

Web 2.0 is of course closely associated with user participation and user generated content. Behind this focus on participation is something more significant for the organisation. Web 2.0 subtly inverts the traditional conception of information and knowledge. It treats information and knowledge as not objective entities, but things always constructed in social interaction, and in the interaction between users and information systems. Folksonomies do not pre-exist the collection like a traditional classification scheme, but emerge out of that collection and the use made of it by users. The pages of a wiki are not prepared and published, but constantly transformed throughout their life-cycle. This necessarily involves prioritising users over content, and putting users in the driving seat of development, and this is not only implies a political point of view of the relationship between authority and the individual, but also a radical trust in the responsibility of the community as a whole.

Tip 2: Decide whether intranet 2.0 is right for your organisation

The benefit to the organisation of intranet 2.0 and enterprise is its capacity to capture the real expertise and the real information needs of employees in real time. The risk, however, is in the uses that employees will make of the capacity to freely edit and amend information. For many organisations, this risk will not outweigh the benefits. But for intranet 2.0 and enterprise 2.0 to be successful, the organisation has to buy into this radical trust its entirety. Users will generally not contribute to an open publishing platform if they feel that their contributions are somehow provisional. They will not contribute to a blog if they feel that their contributions could have negative consequences for their work or their careers.

Nevertheless, despite this investment in radical trust, intranet 2.0 has found itself succeeding in some surprisingly conservative corporate environments, from law firms to financial services. At the heart of this success is the relationship between employees and managers, and the degree to which employees already feel their contribution is valued by the organisation. It is not only the creative or tech sectors that can make this collaborative and participatory mode work. 

Tip 3: Decide what kinds of tools are right for you organisation

There are different kinds of tools associated with Web 2.0 that serve different kinds of functions. All take advantage of existing or virtual social relationships and user participation. Folksonomies, social bookmarking, social citation, and social tagging are approaches that are useful for organising and making visible existing collections of material, either online or offline. Social Networking Services (SNS) help create productive networks out of existing social networks. Blogs and Wikis enable collaborative authoring and the harnessing of collective expertise.

It is unlikely that you will want to use all possible tools at your disposal, not least as this will tend to alienate and confuse the end users. Doing one thing well is better than doing many things poorly. In general, the kinds of tools that will be right for you organisation will depend on what you are trying to achieve in the intranet 2.0 or enterprise 2.0 project. But it is always important to work with the existing culture of the organisation. For example, internal blogs will be more viable in organisations which use less collaborative approaches to authoring and capturing expertise, and wikis more appropriate in organisations where collaboration on producing resources is already well established. If there is an established collection of information that needs to be organised and made available (such as an existing intranet), social tagging and folksonomies may be appropriate. If you are starting from scratch, a wiki would probably be more useful.

Tip 4: Choose between in-house and external tools

There are many existing third-party social networking services, social citation services, and social bookmarking services. Many are well established and offer excellent resources. Many will enable you to create and tailor content collections to social networks to you own needs, by offering private and public settings, and enabling you to establish groups. It is not always necessary to re-invent the wheel, and often it will be quicker and more efficient to incorporate existing services into your intranet rather than attempting to create a useful resource from scratch. Obviously, the choice will depend to some degree on the sensitivity of the material that you are attempting to collect or organise.

Tip 5: Provide a framework for collaboration

Collaboration and participation will be more difficult to establish if there is no existing framework within which individuals can work. An entirely empty wiki is likely to remain unpopulated, as users struggle to identify how they can contribute. When users can see clearly where their contribution can be made, they are more likely to contribute to a resource. Therefore as far as possible establish a framework within which contributions can be made. If you are using a wiki, provide starting pages, perhaps for each department or working group within the organisation, from which the content can begin to grow. If you are using blogs, create separate subject-groups so that users can understand how their efforts might contribute to the resource. If you are attempting to generate a folksonomy, start with some simple tags across the collection. These kinds of organising structures will help encourage collaboration.

Tip 6: Understand the 1/10 rule

No matter how used to collaborative and participatory modes your organisation is, you will always come up against the 1/10 rule. Roughly speaking, for every ten users who access a resource such as a wiki or blog, only one user will contribute. For small organisations, this may be an impossible hurdle to overcome. However, for small organisations, intranet 2.0 and enterprise 2.0 are probably not ideal solutions in the first place. However, do be prepared for relatively low levels of participation, and do not get discouraged by it.  Remember that the people who do contribute are not a random sample, but a self-selecting group of employees who are often in a better position to contribute to the resource than others.

Tip 7: Trust your users

The final tip represents the ethos of Web 2.0, intranet 2.0, and enterprise 2.0: trust you users entirely. That is not to suggest that things will never go wrong. Occasionally you will find inappropriate content emerging in collaborative environments. But trust you users to not only contribute relevant and timely information, but to also to moderate contributions as a community, and to understand that content generated within collaborative tools is always contingent, and never the final word. The content of intranet 2.0 is unlike intranet 1.0. Not because it represents an emerging conversation rather than a final authority. But because it is honest about its own contingency.

About the author

Luke Tredinnick is a Senior Lecturer in Information Management at London Metropolitan University and Course Director for the MSc on Digital Information Management. He is the author of Why Intranets Fail (and How to Fix Them) published by Chandos in 2004, Digital Information Contexts, 2006 and Digital Information Culture, 2008. 

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