Corporate Intranets - Dilapidated State

Dilapidated walls of corporate Intranets

Its really fascinating and agonizing to listen to different definitions of Intranet. In many companies, corporate Intranet is one of the most neglected areas. At best it is related to some document storage and retrieval which will in turn be christened as "Knowledge Management portal". The biggest problem with this version of Knowledge Portals is that they act as Document Storage without a context and a voice i.e if one were to look at the document at certain point in time what they are sure to miss will be the context in which  the activity was performed and the human voice which covers the upsides and downsides of it.

In this dynamic world, typical top down marketing  will bound to be extinct as a concept sooner or later. The new world is pushing marketers to create a right ecosystem which involves customers, employees, vendors, partners and the company itself with a human voice. A place where people sing, dance, enjoy music , talk to each and do business. An ecosystem thus created will be the so called New Age Intranet. This intranet will help the members of the ecosystem to :

• Co-exist
• Communicate
• Collaborative
• Innovate

This is in essence is the basic purpose of the intranet.

Take for example, one member of the ecosystem- employees. Each employee has a Personal Voice . A Personal voice that has become more expressive,vociferous thanks to new age social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Yammer etc.. Each employee is looking for opportunities to communicate with the senior management of their company, collaborate cross functionally which inturn will improve agility, customer centricity  to name a few. If the organization is blind to this expectation of the new age force, then the employees are bound to get Intranets that will have document management, versioning capabilities, role based access and all other features to justify restricted access to information in a free world - Perfect Oxymoron. 

For sure, collaboration and innovation will just be buzz words in the power point presentations.

It is difficult to wake up a behemoth company to this radical change on new generation Intranets. The only thing that will make them realize the need for change will be shrinking top lines, brand value erosion. Nokia is an excellent example of a sleeping behemoth who is losing big time to competition.The latest email from the CEO suggest how the company has been blind to the changing trends in market and losing out to competition.

Build the ecosystem and collaborate,communicate enthusiastically. As the say" Success will follow you... Hands Down!!".