Whoever wrote the rule that intranets are for internal people? Not me! Yet many have settled into the notion that he or she is doing something ‘purely internal.’ How can that be? “Internal” only exists by the grace that there is something “external”. Internal alone has no existence.
Intranets and Online Communities run on the same principles and tactics and are complementary systems. The sole purpose of the Intranet is to improve customer value experience.
Who doesn’t learn from experiences?
One of the benefits of experience is drawing upon concepts from a different world and applying those concepts and associated logic to other areas. I grew up as a child of a small enterprise. We had a fish shop. Open 6 days a week. 8.00 AM to 18.00. Friday was the fish day in the catholic area I lived in. The big sales day. Customers were the king.
After graduating I got to work in large FMCG manufacturing sites where I finally found my passion in the movement of goods: Logistics and value chains. In the late 90-ies I had the good fortune to switch to IT. The automation of manufacturing (ERP) was booming and I wanted to know about it.
Faced with scaling problems of the organization I volunteered to solve it as I had commented to our senior management at the time that our information and knowledge sharing was highly unproductive. I ended up with an intranet that was opened up to customers and partners: my first community.
Fast forward to today where I am a founding partner of a Community- and KM consulting agency called 3sides, I still apply basic concepts in making sense of complex customer situations.
The value of knowledge
One of the first paradigms shifts that intranets achieve is the concept of ‘sharing knowledge is power, and keeping it to yourself is a threat’. It is not in the interest of any organization that individuals (or teams) are not capturing and sharing knowledge. This is in contrast to the previous working generation where ‘having knowledge was power’ to solidify their position in the organization.
The main axes of knowledge are usually departmental, product/service, and projects. Next to that, there is a communication layer that allows for the leadership to broadcast important information and for employees to engage with each other efficiently.
The production of knowledge has some uncanny resemblances to the production of goods. In the '70s the world was waking up to the reality that there were more products than there was demand. There was an abundance not seen since WWII. Lots of stock was efficiently produced and then written off as it was not being sold. It just sat in a warehouse until it was scrapped.
While the ERP era did solve some of the early production planning issues the real innovation came from Toyota who invented the lean manufacturing system. If you had sold 1 car, you needed to produce only 4 wheels and not 5. The rigorous reduction of wasteful activities leads to agility, a higher focus on quality, and better business performance.
The final mental jump
Making the jump back to intranets. Intranets are designed for effective and efficient communication and collaboration. It is achieved by producing the right content and making sure the next person who needs that content has access to it and does ‘something’ with it.
Similar to factory workers, it has to be lean and structured. Equally similar to factory workers, it needs Customers! Customers are king! Always! While a lot of intranet projects seem to have an internal objective of communication and collaboration, we feel that the final objective of an intranet must be something valuable experience that a customer is willing to pay for.
I have ideas of what that should be but I also know from experience that we should talk to the experts, meaning you. So, do you agree? How would you do it? Let me know!
