Enterprise 2.0 (Part1) - Build people centric intranet

It is largely known that enterprise IT lags behind internet IT by a generation or two. Internet is the battleground where innovations happen before they slowly find their way behind firewall. Adoption of web2.0 within an enterprise is also not exception to this rule. Web2.0 like SOA is a classical story of blind man and elephant, but by now there is a general consensus that web2.0 is about taking web to next evolutionary level in terms of tools, standards and user participation. Web2.0 has made web applications more people centric rather than content centric. In web1.0 world, web applications were more about content and its organisation and less about people and users who consumed the content. Web2.0 has chnaged this. Take a look at flicker, orkut, twitter, wikipedia to name a few, all of them place people at the center. Collaboration on content and community sharing is hallmark of these applications. The whole being more than the parts.

This naturally is a fine example for any enterprise to transition its old intranet into an intranet 2.0. Intranets for long have been content and document centric. They served their purpose but they need to retire and be replaced by people centric intranets to make them more effective. After all, intranet is meant for people so that they can use IT to do their core business more efficiently. The focus has to move from mere document management and storage to creation of people network within an enterprise. This is typically true for traditional Knowledge Management systems , which are central part of an intranet. Most KM systems have put heavy focus on document management, whereas knowledge is less about documents and more about how it is created, used and shared by group of people within the organisation. And this is where web2.0 and its social nature come in picture. Intranet and Knowledge Management systems within enterprise have to evolve into people centric networks, somewhat similar to what we see on Facebook or so many other group sharing applications on internet these days. The benefits of people centric intranet are just too huge to be ignored for any organisation and they need not look beyond internet for a business case. Web 2.0 applications have shown that community collboration and facilitation works more than central control and vetting. Many enterprises have realised this and that is the reason that we have started seeing many variants of corporate Facebook and twitter like applications meant to be deployed behind firewall. But most organisations , I could safely presume have not really got the point yet and they are still waiting for a business case.......