The social intranet is not just about adding a layer of social collaboration tools; it is a platform that combines the powers of push with the powers of pull to supply anyone who participates and contributes within an extended enterprise with the information, knowledge and connections they need.
Why traditional intranets fail today’s knowledge workers
by Oscar Berg
http://www.oscarberg.net/2010/07/serving-long-tail-of-information-needs.html
Knowledge workers need a social intranet
There are plenty of definitions trying to define what a social intranet is, but most of the ones I’ve seen have not been able to see beyond tools and technologies. They don’t succeed in describing the paradigm change that is transforming intranets into something completely different from what they are today.
The social intranet is not just about adding a layer of social collaboration tools; it is a platform that combines the powers of push with the powers of pull to supply anyone who participates and contributes within an extended enterprise with the information, knowledge and connections they need to make the right decisions and act to fulfill their objectives. It equips everyone with the tools that allows them to participate, contribute, attract, discover, find and connect with each other to exchange information and knowledge and/or collaborate. It connects information demand with information supply in knowledge-intensive businesses, something which can only be done by involving all employees in the information supply, removing bottle-necks created by the production model (such as approval workflows and that everything must fit in a central taxonomy) and enabling employee-to-employee information exchange.
When it comes to information supply, the previously dominating “less is more” paradigm is being replaced by a “more is more” paradigm. A social intranet must necessarily be designed for information abundance. The increasing volume of information resources needs to be seen as opportunity to be embraced rather than as a problem – a problem which can only be solved by reducing the body of information down to an amount which can be managed by a few people (relatively to the entire population of the extended enterprise).
Although too many options can decrease your performance and create stress, information abundance does not equal an abundance of choice; the social intranet is a pull platform with mechanisms for automatically attracting relevant information and people to you. What’s important is that the options you are presented with are relevant and usable. But that’s another issue. The point is that the information you need is not there in the first place, chances are that none of the options you will be presented with will do. That’s of course an unwanted situation as you might not be able to perform your task or you might make an incorrect decision that can have serious consequences. Deliberately hindering information to reach people is not the way to avoid the sensation commonly called information overload, because as Clay Shirky argues the problem is not the amount of information but rather that the filters we have fail to sort it properly for us. We need to get the filters in place instead of blaming and demonizing (“Tsunami of data”, “firehose of information” etc) information supply and arguing that the only way to solve this “problem” is to limit supply.
The social intranet also has an important part to play when it comes to supporting serendipity; enabling people to find both information and people they didn’t know they were looking for. To do so it must have mechanisms that allow information and people that might be useful to us to be pulled to us. Spending time and effort searching for relevant information and people where there is information abundance just won’t pay off. We must have ways that “automagically” attract useful information and connections to us. We just need to implicitly and explicitly share what do and know to other people in our networks, to people who share our interests, or to people who happen to pass us by at any other kind of cross-road.
Needless to say, the push-based production model used for most intranets will still have an important role to play – but only as a component within a social intranet. It will continue to serve the most common, stable and predictable information needs. Even though it is important and sometimes critical that these can be served efficiently and effectively, the greatest value that can be created with the use of an intranet relies on the long tail of information. This is because the long tail of information supports the core of a knowledge-intensive modern business: the knowledge work.