Digital Media Buzz > Intranets: From Catalogs to Collaboration

Intranets: From Catalogs to Collaboration

By Lee Simmons

By their nature, intranets are primarily internal mechanisms. They are the traditional proprietary repositories for all things corporate, from HR policies to customer information to sales strategies.

As social media tools come of age, however, intranets are quickly transitioning from their traditional roles - closed and inflexible to collaboration and innovation - to something remarkably different.

To be sure, intranets aren’t exactly going away, but leading companies are taking a closer look at how their internal systems most effectively utilize available talent. Social networking, remote networks, cloud computing and other “out of the box” technologies are further prompting executives to innovate new ways of getting an internal dialogue started.

Since the 1990s, Joe Schueller has seen Procter & Gamble’s (P&G) intranet shift from a simple information catalog to more of a broadcast tool. As manager of P&G’s global business services and IT innovation unit, Schueller is well acquainted with how a company intranet can impact development. “There has been a shift in our intranet. In the mid to late ’90s the intranet was designed for an information catalog. It was a less user-centric approach,” Schueller says. “The amount of change in our business made taxonomy management a real challenge. So our intranet has since shifted to more of a broadcast tool with more transactional uses.”

The big shift in P&G’s intranet occurred about two years ago when social technologies were introduced into the system. The idea, Schueller says, was to connect P&G employees in a spirit of development. The push was branded PeopleConnect.

“With 138,000 employees, how do you capture and leverage the knowledge that you have?” Schueller says. “There were smaller communities that existed informally that were now raising their voices.”

P&G utilized Telligent, a commercial software tool, to help create the new platform. Once built, Schueller’s team promoted PeopleConnect across the company virally. So far, only 18,000 employees have registered, but as Schueller says, they are passionate users.

Intranets came up in the late 1980s as a tool for conserving proprietary company information. While that central goal remains vital, more and more companies are seeking ways to make their intranets more collaborative. P&G and Dell are two such companies that have enhanced their intranets with crowdsourcing tools that promote conversations within the companies’ development communities.

Dell’s EmployeeStorm exemplifies this ideal, giving employees a direct voice in determining future product development. EmployeeStorm was launched in 2007 a few months after IdeaStorm’s unveiling. The drive behind IdeaStorm was to give customers - literally anyone outside the walls of Dell - an opportunity to post ideas for new products and services at the company. People can vote ideas up or down and comment on ideas to their heart’s content. Since its launch, IdeaStorm has garnered 50,000 registered users, generated 12,000 ideas, and implemented close to 400 of those ideas.

“It was completely new,” says Vida Killian, IdeaStorm manager. “Dell has a lot of places for customer feedback, but we didn’t have a single online place for people to post ideas.”

IdeaStorm’s success right out of the gate convinced the company to develop a similar tool for internal use. Like IdeaStorm, EmployeeStorm utilizes a blogging technology with the ability for employees to vote up or down certain ideas for new products or services. The tool, says Killian, has succeeded in promoting idea exchange. “Our entire internal Internet, if you will, has evolved with the adding of ideas, and that has made the company a lot more conversational,” she says. “There was slight hesitation at first because your name is attached to everything you do within the system, but we’ve really encouraged people to have that conversation.”

How company intranets will continue to evolve with the advent of social media depends on the company. Killian says Dell will likely continue developing IdeaStorm and EmployeeStorm separately, each with increased capabilities that further promote collaboration internally and externally. At P&G, Schueller foresees a tool that does not restrict collaborators by what company they work for or what platforms they utilize.

“We understand the value of an extended enterprise and getting our partners, customers, and vendors more involved,” Schueller says.

Just how will the company get all parties more involved? Improved technology infrastructure, security and innovative technical abilities all play a role. In the end, though, Schueller says the success of an innovative intranet will depend directly on the “findability” of communities.

“It’s been a remarkable journey, especially without central control,” Schueller says of the new communities of practice that have arisen as a result of P&G’s PeopleConnect. “We want to make the success of this visible to everyone.”