Have we forgotten about the design of social tools for the intranet?
Microblogging, blog, wiki, discussion forum and instant messaging; Facebook, Delicious, Flickr and LinkedIn. They were all designed in the internet space to engineer certain social behaviours that encourages people to share, learn, collaborate and connect. With their popularity and success, organisations start to wonder how they could capitalise it for their internal environment. Hence, we start to see the growth of social intranets over these recent years; and many are not doing well.
Management wants positive outcomes and the employee wants to get the job done. For the intranet to earn its place in an organisation, it must help employees do their work better. Hence, social tools must primarily enhance work and anything more than this is a bonus. There are 2 compelling reasons for this statement:
Microblogging, blog, wiki, discussion forum and instant messaging; Facebook, Delicious, Flickr and LinkedIn. They were all designed in the internet space to engineer certain social behaviours that encourages people to share, learn, collaborate and connect. With their popularity and success, organisations start to wonder how they could capitalise it for their internal environment. Hence, we start to see the growth of social intranets over these recent years; and many are not doing well.
Some observations inform me of the following macro issues:
- Many organisations are presumptuous on the benefits that could replicate within their firewalls
- They know the tools but have little idea how to implement one
- They went on to implement quite a few and staff start to get confused
- Intranet teams underestimated the effort required to drive adoption for each tool
- There is a lack of examination in the elements of social tools for application in work
At the individual level, there are issues around fears, uncertainties and doubts (FUDs)
- Is it really OK to blog?
- Is it safe to put authoritative content in a wiki?
- Will I look dumb to post this question?
- Is it another gimmick that will die off?
- Is the organisation forgiving if I make mistakes in my advice?
- Wouldn't it be better for me to connect outside where there are more and readily available practitioners?
- Wouldn't it be better for me to share externally to develop my social influence?
- Wouldn't it make more sense to share my social life in facebook?
- ... and the list goes on
- Staff want to get quality work done quickly
- Any tool will do, as long as it works well
- Most people will socialise on sites like Facebook and GooglePlus rather than the intranet. Even if people do socialise on the intranet, the effects organisations hope for are marginalised by these popular internet social networking sites.
- The workplace is where people want to work (more than socialise), and we should capitalise on the intranet for staff to do just that. Introducing social tools with unclear intentions on how they support work will receive less fanfare from staff.
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Designing the tool that works!
I hear on many occasions that intranet teams want to get rid of corporate email systems, as if they are causing some serious evil. But they fail to realise that replacing emails with less effective intranets are double the evil. Yes, email aren't good for many things. But people are so used to email that they are now sub-conscious in overcoming it's flaws. Moreover, we have innate abilities to see patterns well and we can cognitively group messages just by glancing at them. For some time now, email applications have allowed us to view messages in meaningful collections Email messages are easy to compose and can reach the intended recipients with very little effort. There is no surprise that email remains the ubiquitous choice for messaging and collaboration.
Thus when we design social tools for the intranet, we have to convince ourselves that our intranet is more superior if we want to dismiss some of email's usages. This is not possible without the close examination of social tools and features.
Social computing tools are nothing but a collection of features. When organisations are successful with Yammer, WordPress, Confluence or any other available tools, it's not the product that helped them succeed, but rather the configuration of distinct features that support their business activities in a coherent and efficient manner. (And of course the importance of change management efforts which we see emphasised throughout the intranet blogosphere). When we extract all these desirable features, we get a feature set that enable us to formulate social tools that are suited for an organisation's purpose. If this turns out to be Yammer, Wordpress or..., then good for you because you'll save on the implementation effort. But, it may not.
Facebook wall is a great example. Would you call it a blog post, a tweet or a discussion? No. But can you resonate some of its features with popular social tools - Yes.
I hear on many occasions that intranet teams want to get rid of corporate email systems, as if they are causing some serious evil. But they fail to realise that replacing emails with less effective intranets are double the evil. Yes, email aren't good for many things. But people are so used to email that they are now sub-conscious in overcoming it's flaws. Moreover, we have innate abilities to see patterns well and we can cognitively group messages just by glancing at them. For some time now, email applications have allowed us to view messages in meaningful collections Email messages are easy to compose and can reach the intended recipients with very little effort. There is no surprise that email remains the ubiquitous choice for messaging and collaboration.
Thus when we design social tools for the intranet, we have to convince ourselves that our intranet is more superior if we want to dismiss some of email's usages. This is not possible without the close examination of social tools and features.
Social computing tools are nothing but a collection of features. When organisations are successful with Yammer, WordPress, Confluence or any other available tools, it's not the product that helped them succeed, but rather the configuration of distinct features that support their business activities in a coherent and efficient manner. (And of course the importance of change management efforts which we see emphasised throughout the intranet blogosphere). When we extract all these desirable features, we get a feature set that enable us to formulate social tools that are suited for an organisation's purpose. If this turns out to be Yammer, Wordpress or..., then good for you because you'll save on the implementation effort. But, it may not.
Facebook wall is a great example. Would you call it a blog post, a tweet or a discussion? No. But can you resonate some of its features with popular social tools - Yes.
One response to “Designing social tools for the intranet”
Hi Simon, thanks for your insightful blog post. I agree that as a user, it doesn't matter what the tool I am using is called so long as it helps me to do the same tasks/job more efficiently/effectively and get connected with key people more easily . It'll be great if we could simplify and reduce the number of tools eventually at least at the front end such that the user feels like it's e.g. could be just one tool to meet multiple working needs. Simplicity is the key for users. Whatever new intranet we design, it should come from user perspective and answer "What's in it for me?". To the users, it doesn't matter who owns the intranet or parts of the intranet but what are the benefits for them when they use the intranet. If we expect users to move on to an intranet which replaces email, yes, the new intranet should be much better to entice users to move away from emails. As you mentioned, change management is important and so is the intranet usability.
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