As online collaboration tools continue to permeate the enterprise, intranet managers need to make their intranet the hub of internal collaboration or risk irrelevancy.

Collaboration means working together to get something done. At a minimum, I think your intranet should facilitate the following three types of collaboration:

Instant Collaboration

Goal: Share ideas and get immediate feedback
Offline equivalent: Face-to-face meetings & phone calls
Online solutions: MSN Messenger, Google Talk, WebEx, etc.

Instant collaboration tools include instant messaging and desktop screen-sharing. Your intranet should provide links or downloads for these tools and instructions on how to use them. Advanced integration could include an indicator beside names in the employee directory to show who’s online.

Project Collaboration

Goal: Plan and execute a project
Offline equivalent: Status meetings & war boards
Online solutions: BaseCamp, Central Desktop, eProject, etc.

Project collaboration tools usually include a shared calendar, to-do lists, message boards and a file repository. Your intranet should link to your project collaboration tool and include suggestions on how to use it effectively. Advanced integration could include a personalized to-do list on the intranet home page.

Mass Collaboration

Goal: Ongoing sharing, learning and connecting with teammates
Offline equivalent: Team off-sites, workshops, conferences
Online solutions: Confluence, SocialText, ThoughtFarmer, etc.

Mass collaboration solutions make it easy to create, share, and find content. They include wikis, blogs, and social bookmarking. The best ones leverage the network effect to aggregate individual contributions in ways that create value for the entire organization. Your intranet shouldn’t be integrated with a mass collaboration solution. It should be a mass collaboration solution.

The intranet team should pursue ownership of all types of online collaboration and integrate them into a single portal. The future for intranets is mass collaboration.

Further reading:

• Collaboration Types: Part One, Two and Three

• List of mass collaboration applications

Chris sent me a link to this post on the FastForward blog a few weeks back, pointing out the “me-first” design principle at the bottom. While I loved the article title, “Why can’t we build this on Sharepoint?” — a question that we’ve been asked and answered quite a few times when talking to people about effective social-software driven intranets — I thought the ideas around the importance of the individual as a design principle for a great intranet were bang-on.

“This design philosophy of building around the individual rather than the group profoundly changes the user experience. In the new web the individual contributor is at the center and everything emanates out from there. In an application like Sharepoint, the individual exists to serve the group and is empowered simply to publish and read inside a shared private space.”

I’m not quite sure there’s such a thing as the “centre” of your intranet — we’re all just a bunch of interconnected nodes on the network, after all, some with stronger ties to more nodes than others — but it got me thinking about one of the assumptions we made in creating ThoughtFarmer: people are important mechanisms to help you wayfind information.

If you’ve spoken with me about this, you’ve probably heard me say something like “people are the information architecture” or “people are how people make sense of information.” John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid’s book The Social Life of Information always captured that thought in a lovely succinct way.

Within ThoughtFarmer, the person becomes a fundamental unit of navigation, given as much importance as a top-level content category or keyword. And this is powerful because people know how to navigate networks of people by default - we’re born with that skill. Or if they don’t intrinsically know how to do it (you were raised by wolves, for example), it’s pretty easy to learn. Arguably much easier than a controlled vocabulary or specialized taxonomy. Social networks aren’t anything new, they’re our default mode of existence. Cliques, organizations, clubs, companies, friends, enemies, sports fans: as human beings, we’re pretty excellent at organizing people into structures (formal or imagined), creating spaces to encourage or discourage participation and contribution. And with all of this social software flying around, we’re getting better at recognizing the signifiers of social groupings.

Content is interesting and may become valuable, but the meta-communication of the content (ie: Who wrote this?), especially within larger corporate environments where you simply might not know the author even if they work in your same building, is very interesting. And who that person reports to, and who they manage, and what division they work within, and what other stuff have they been writing about… That’s really, really interesting.

Content is a bi-product of social processes, an artifact of our working lives. How do we navigate social processes and provide users with an intuitive wayfinding system?

Easy: it’s you.

Much of our work on the information architecture of websites, both intranets and public websites, is focused around creating hierarchical keyword structures, creating yet another system that the user has to learn to find something, our own private Dewey Decimal System. And even the good ones, like those created using card sort methods and actually testing the users, can have the users looking for the quickest escape route: the search box. Search is in some ways a rejection of browse, from having to learn yet another series of semantic structures that help me make sense of the content, my job, my company, and the world around me.

Sure, once you understand how it’s all laid out, you can be effective in finding what you need, but more often in a workplace setting, it’s a matter of finding who you need and then having them present or direct you to the content that is going to help you complete your work — or better yet, have them help you find the person you really need, the person with the answers.

In a recent post, Lars Plougmann describes the opportunity for firms without an intranet to move directly to an open intranet using social software tools. A brief summary:

• What’s wrong with traditional intranets? They’re always out-of-date.
• What’s an “open” intranet? One where every page has a nice friendly Edit button on it.
• Won’t that lead to chaos? Yes, and that’s not such a bad thing.
• Can we trust our people to edit the intranet? You already trust them to write emails and to handle your clients.

Read the entire post for more.

In Wikinomics, Don Tapscott describes the “perfect storm” that is ushering in a new era of mass collaboration: the Web as a computing platform; a global economy; and a demographic tidal wave he refers to as the Net Generation.

Born between 1977 and 1996, the Net Generation grew up immersed in a digital world. The internet dominates their personal and social lives, from instant messaging to peer-to-peer filesharing to virtual communities. They publish and participate in online social networks and swap ideas as easily as they swap songs and videos.

So what happens when one of these fresh college graduates joins a firm and finds a staid, traditional intranet with a tightly controlled publishing model?

They hate it.

This is a very real problem for companies trying to attract and retain new talent. These twentysomethings operate on principles of openness, participation and interactivity. If a company’s technology infrastructure, including the intranet, does not encourage free communication and collaboration, it misses a big opportunity. Worse, it alienates these younger, internet-savvy employees.

This issue is obviously bigger than just the IT department. It involves the culture of the entire organization. That notwithstanding, what can we as intranet managers do to attract and harness the talents of the Net Generation?

Turn users into authors. Help your employees edit, create, annotate, rate and comment on the intranet. By trusting them in this way, they’ll trust you back. You’ll create honest, satisfied, engaged employees. You’ll also create an environment where knowledge flows freely and breakthrough ideas can emerge.

Turn authors into friends. Expose your company’s social network online. Allow employees to associate, connect and form relationships with one another through the intranet. This isn’t touchy-feely hogwash. One of Gallup’s 12 questions to gauge employee engagement is “Do I have a best friend at work?” Intranets that turn authors into friends improve employee engagement and strengthen workplace community, especially with Net-Geners.

Skeptical? Then consider some of the world’s most heavily-trafficked web sites: MySpace (#3), YouTube (#6), Facebook (#10), Blogger (#12), Flickr (#20). They are dominated by the Net Generation, and they operate on the two principles listed above: they turn users into authors, and authors into friends. To create an intranet that “clicks” with N-Geners, we would all do well to imitate these sites.

I’ll leave you with a quote from Wikinomics: “Companies able to adapt to the new demands of N-Gen now will gain a tremendous source of competitive advantage and innovation. Those that don’t will be left on the sidelines, unable to refresh their workforces as the N-Geners flow to other opportunities.”

Sounds ominous. But I think he’s right.

It’s been a busy week for ThoughtFarmer as we had a great presentation at CIO Vancouver on Wednesday and quite a few meetings. Chris McGrath (One Intranets) and Tracy Hutton (Director of Learning, Intrawest Placemaking) did a great job in presenting what social software for the enterprise can look like, what some of the challenges can be, and ultimately the benefits of these systems. The topic was well received and the audience appeared to really enjoy listening to Tracy’s real-world stories of implementing ThoughtFarmer at Intrawest.
Whenever we speak with people who are new to the concept of wiki-based systems or social software, we often hear some fairly similar question and concerns. One such question is, “What happens if you have an employee that posts something to the Intranet that’s inappropriate?” — our question back is, “What happens right now if an employee sends an inappropriate email or behaves inappropriately at a meeting?”

This issue is more about communication and trust than it is about technology. Sure the wiki-based concepts behind ThoughtFarmer lower the barrier for users to publish material to their intranet. But the management of your people isn’t magically automated by installing the software. If you have people posting something that is deemed overly critical of another employee or is simply inappropriate, you have a management / HR issue on your hands. You will probably need to deal with that using some face-to-face or over-the-phone conversations. You will need to manage the people, get to the core of the issue, address it, and move on, with hopefully both parties learning something along the way. As an HR or communications manager, you can set the policy ahead of time and save yourself some work down the road, having to deal with employees who have crossed the line, but that’s much the same as any other internal corporate communications policy. Recognize too, some organizations have different standards for what’s acceptable (pictures of pets, chocolate almond fundraiser emails, political messages, etc) than others.

What’s somewhat disappointing about this question is the very real sense of fear and dread that lurks behind it. As people start to understand the potential of the software, you can see them take a deep breath and wonder, “Are we really willing to listen to everything that our employees have to say?” Organizations that fear what their employees have to say ultimately don’t trust their employees.

And if you don’t trust your employees, what does that say about your company?

Rod Boothby runs an interesting blog about innovation, knowledge workers, and enterprise blogging over at Innovation Creators. His most recent post includes a poll of “break out read/write intranet systems for 2007″ — of which, ThoughtFarmer made the list.

These software companies all make tools that could be used by a large company to create a readable and writeable Intranet. Please indicate how likely you think it is that each of these companies will hit a home run in 2007. 1 is not likely. 5 is guaranteed success.

We’re in some good company there. It’s a pretty diverse list of major platforms, some of which are new to me. In general, I think everyone on the list shares the desire to redefine how intranets work and create value for organizations. I’m not sure how entirely scientific the poll is, but Rod’s done a good job in capturing many of the Enterprise 2.0 type platforms out there today.

So go check it out and be sure to give us a few stars…