Enterprise 2.0 and Intranet 1.0: How two problem children can benefit from each other

As promised the slides from my Intranet 2.0 workshop at the Enterprise 2.0 Summit in Frankfurt last week. Talking about classical intranets at an Enterprise 2.0 conference means for me talking about two “problem children”. Enterprise 2.0 is promising a lot and still struggles to prove its inevitableness for companies to survive in quickly changing environments. There had been many discussions and questions at the summit about measurable and intangible benefits and the right use cases for social applications within the enterprise.  Classical intranets on the other hand are in many cases a real disappointment for their promoters, because the substantial investments in the application and an (mostly central) editing infrastructure did often not create a vibrant information and communication platform but a rather static electronic newspaper.

An Intranet 2.0 means that both join forces and put their strengths together – the intranet as an existing, accepted and budgeted (!) information platform and Enterprise 2.0 as very compelling approach to move from a one2many communication to a highly interactive conversation and collaboration platform. Four good reasons to join forces:

• Web 2.0 features are on every intranet managers agenda
• “Cost of Doing Business” vs. ROI
• Many “given” use cases to start with
• Smooth way to Enterprise 2.0

This sounds promising but is just a start – open points remain:

• CMS or a Social Business Suite or an integration of both as technical platform? (see the last slides for a first approach)
• Is structure still required (I think yes) or are search and tagging sufficient?
• Is there still a need for complex editing work-flows within companies? (most of the participants said “No”)
• Do intranets still require multiple design templates to achieve a newspaper-like layout or is a blog-like design sufficient?

Looks like we are not running out of topics to cover here at besser20

Thanks to all participants for their active participation and the interesting discussion!