Intranet Trends to Watch for in 2006
Posted by Patrick on July 11th, 2006
Following up on yesterday’s post regarding blogging and intranets, CIO has an interesting article that talks about 2006 intranet trends (thanks Jeremiah for pointing me to this). One of the trends they mention is blogging and RSS. This is what they have to say:
Blogs come and go but RSS will remain
Arguably blogs are the most significant Web phenomena of 2005. Everybody from presidential nominees to the local postman is blogging these days. Companies like Sun Microsystems, Google and Maytag have been caught in the hype and have enthusiastically set up both customer facing blogs and internal facing ones too. But will the employee blogs last? Will there be even more blogs in the next year?Some employee blogs will last but unfortunately most won?Äôt. Many companies that enthusiastically set up employee blogs ignored the two most important ingredients for blogging success. The first is that the blogger needs to have something important and unique to say. According to a recent survey by America Online, the most popular blogs are the most personal and opinionated ones too. Most organizations have cultures that subconsciously encourage information hoarding and group think. These organizations will find that their employees are reluctant to share their knowledge and personal insights unless they see tangible benefits in doing so. As a result most employee blogs will be superficial and boring unless, of course, they are anonymous.The other ingredient that drives blogging success is independence. The most successful bloggers are also those who don’t feel censored by anyone else around them. Company cultures often force employees to be extremely self aware and reluctant to say or do anything that may put them at odds with the official order. This too will limit the success of blogs in the enterprise workplace. The people who have something really important to say will be the ones most reluctant to say it.
The related technology to continue to keep an eye on is Real Simple Syndication (RSS). Companies that embrace RSS as a content format and use it to publish information to employees will have far greater success than with blogging alone. Enabling employees to subscribe to subject and department specific RSS feeds and then view them via readers will enable more targeted, community focused conversations in the workplace. And the ease with which postings can be viewed in an RSS reader will encourage more employees to participate. For RSS to be adopted however, companies will have to let their employees subscribe to both internal and external RSS feeds. If this happens, then I believe that in some companies blogging combined with wide adoption of RSS readers will become even more relevant than the company intranet.
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on July 12th, 2006 at 2:08 pm
[...] I made a post yesterday about Intranet Trends to watch for in 2006 from a CIO article – basically I cut and pasted only the information that pertained to blogs. Today, a fellow blogger and knowledge management Guru, Louis Suarez, did the article justice by really commenting on the meat of the article. I highly recommend reading the post – actually, his entire blog is a treasure trove of knowledge management information. [...]