About Paul Miller
Paul Miller is Chief Executive Officer and Founder of the Intranet Benchmarking Forum. IBF is a leading global intranet and portal benchmarking group with more than 60 major member organizations such as Nokia, BP, HSBC, BBC and ExxonMobil. Millerwrote best-selling handbook "Mobilising the Power of What You Know" and host of Intranets Live.
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Articles by Paul Miller
In her book Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other, MIT Professor Sherry Turkle reveals the dark side of our supposedly wonderful, "connected" lives. She writes about the increasing addiction people have to always being online and accessible. Turkle went on IBF 24, the Intranet Benchmarking Forum's 24-hour intranet and digital workplace marathon. She discussed the pitfalls of feeling more and more connected, while being more alone, with the IBF's members.Whether it's someone checking a friend's Facebook page instead of asking that person out to catch a movie or a busy parent working over the weekend thanks to the ever-present BlackBerry, there are problems associated with being permanently "connected." Turkle calls for a kind of "technology awareness" where people reclaim some of the power they have lost and take back control from the little blinking, beeping devices that have taken over their lives.Company intranets are in an unusual position to address this problem. Poorly designed intranets and portals can pose as models of efficiency while eating up valuable employee time and contributing to the feeling that employees need to be working around the clock. Good intranets, however, can truly offer value to employees -whether it's by streamlining and organizing workflows or by offering innovative, helpful tools to solve real problems.
One of the recessionary impacts on organizations is that employees feel neglected and less engaged. One way to remedy this is to exploit your intranet as a means of building sustainability and green practices in a "green intranet campaign."
As financial turmoil engulfs more and more organizations, intranets and related employee-facing technologies are experiencing a new injection of momentum. Intranets are being viewed by senior management as drivers of efficiency, productivity, and providers of “cultural glue” during turbulent times. (You can almost hear them thinking, “Let’s get rid of the people handling travel and automate the service via the intranet.”)
What is happening and where is the intranet industry heading? Here are the eight trends I'm currently seeing through my work at the Intranet Benchmarking Forum...
Intranets have been shaped to suit fixed conditions: an employee at a desk who logs on to a desktop machine every day. In practice, however, the range of scenarios where staff want to access such online services has gone through a revolution.
Each year, organizations invest ever-increasing sums in their intranet environments. They do so for good reasons: to drive internal efficiencies, to enable staff to collaborate better, to reduce face-to-face meeting and travel time, to enable remote/home working, or to foster innovation and knowledge sharing. From time to time—particularly when substantial injections of new funds are required—senior leaders posit a question: “So if we put the $2.5 million you want into the intranet, what will the return be?”
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