Endangered Species The Corporate Intranet

Endangered Species The Corporate Intranet

THE VERY IDEA THAT WE’RE STILL DOING OLD-FASHIONED, BROWSER- BASED, NEWS-PUBLISHING INTRANETS IN THE MOBILE ERA IS DOWNRIGHT ANTIQUATED. THEY’RE NO DIFFERENT THAN ROTARY-DIAL PHONES. AND THEY’RE GOING THE SAME DIRECTION AS YOUR OLD OLIVE-DRAB ROTARY PHONE DID — AND AS A RESULT OF THE SAME TECHNOLOGIES.

The question facing intranets should be how internal collaboration and communication tools are going to evolve in the world of social, cloud and mobile — and whether there’s any place left for the traditional intranet down the line. We shouldn’t be asking if enterprise social will replace the intranet, but rather how long the whole idea of a browser-based intranet portal really has left in the face of mobile apps and form factors (of which social is only one example).

You may not like the message. You may care a great deal for your intranet. You may be tied to it for professional, emotional or financial reasons. You may not see how your company could live without it. And I get it. Believe it or not, I envision, plan and build intranets in my day job. I’m close to this patient. But I know where it’s going.

The Intranet is Dead, Jim

Very few of my enterprise customers will want to hear me say this: The hoary old concept of the intranet is dying. This may sound ridiculous from someone whose business is built in part on constructing those intranet portals for some of the world’s largest companies, but it’s not as radical an opinion as it might seem. Just look around us. Enterprise-size companies are notoriously conservative in how they buy, deploy and adopt technology. Those companies aren’t interested in being leading-edge unless it gives them a clear leg up on their competition — ideally in revenue generation, but also in employee retention, idea generation, efficiency and effectiveness. That’s why we’re still talking about enterprise social and not just doing it everywhere. There are still plenty of old-line business leaders who need convincing about its value.

Sooner or later, though, some visionary will have the guts to throw out his intranet in favor of deploying and managing a suite of mobile apps officially supported within his organization. There’s nothing an intranet does that you can’t do in an app.

Think about it: Intranets serve two primary business cases — communication vehicle and knowledge repository — and often intersect with collaboration platforms to provide a third document collaboration. The reason why is fairly obvious. Mobile is how people live. Heck, the mobile experience is often so compelling (dare we say, addictive?) at this point that more and more states are actively legislating the use (or disuse) of mobile devices by drivers. People literally can’t keep their hands off of their mobile phones without a law expressly forbidding it.

It’s a foolish executive who won’t sooner or later recognize the power of leveraging that sort of powerful user experience in engaging his knowledge workers.

It will happen. Yes, it won’t occur overnight. Much like switching off email and making the leap to enterprise social as your first-choice internal communications channel, it takes a lot of guts to be the person who kills the intranet.

In reality, intranets will go out with the proverbial whimper, not a bang. But they will go out. Their replacements are already here, in slowly increasing use today.

Here’s how it’s going to go down.

… Long Live the Intranet

What does an Intranet do? Primarily, it’s a communication vehicle is for publishing and increasingly, via social channels, sharing content. Companies keep rolling out new publishing portals for their corporate intranet, designing them beautifully to support their internal brand and culture. But how useful are they, really?

Overwhelmingly, information workers consume content on mobile devices in their personal lives. Occasionally, that’s done via a browser, but there’s nothing you can do in a browser that you can’t accomplish with a more targeted mobile app. Multiple apps exist for content sharing — not just text, but images, audio, video — enterprise social feeds, reading magazines, one-to-one and group messaging, and even collaborating in the creation and editing of documents.

Now that these services are available via the cloud (Software as a Service (SaaS) in action, folks) and Mobile Device Management is maturing, why not simply roll an approved set of these out to all of your users and call time on the intranet? If the apps exist for both iOS and Android, you are flexible from a BYOD perspective as well.

I’m not advocating killing off the things intranets do. Those things are useful and necessary in a huge enterprise. What we’re talking about is evolving them, changing them to fit how people interact with their information (and with one another) now, here, today.

There’s a whole industry of people who will keep building intranets for companies so long as they ask us to, but if they instead ask themselves what will really land with their users, the answer is simple. The intranet in name is dead, yes, but its use cases will live on triumphantly in mobile.

Users might not be asking for a set of work-related apps, but their behaviors — again, we now need laws just to keep drivers off of their smartphones — indicate that the sheer convenience and portability of an app-driven set of “intranet” features will probably be consumed quickly and easily. That’s only going to increase as young, tech-savvy Millennials continue to replace the Baby Boomers. And it should happen a good deal sooner than you probably think.