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Articles by Mary Lee Kennedy
This April marked two important milestones: the 15th anniversary of the web and the 13th anniversary of the first published use of the word “intranet.” The term intranet first appeared in the April 19, 1995, issue (print-only) of Digital News & Review, following a few years after Cern put the web in the public domain on April 30, 1993.
The evolution of information and communication changes the very nature of the information professional’s work. Today it is more dynamic, and its various, loosely-coupled components are highly interdependent. We manage a relationship as experienced by our users. The experience is our focus and shared objective. How we get it done makes our lives interesting.
Many information managers tout the essential value of collaboration tools. At organizations today, there are internal races to create the best community space or social networking environment. This quest for collaboration is not just driven by information managers, it is central to organizational dynamics in the 21st century, and significantly influenced by internet capabilities. However, unless there is a shared purpose, most of us simply do not have the time to engage in sharing information just for the sake of it. And, somewhere along the race to the finish line (should there be one), organizations are going to question the value received from social networking and collaboration efforts. Smart ones will ask this up front.
"Web science...shifts the center of gravity in engineering research from how a single computer works to how huge decentralized web systems work.” It’s pretty exciting for the web to become a research program under preeminent scholars. What, if anything, does this portend for the intranet? While much is left to speculation at this point, it raises a couple of questions, specifically the degree to which information professionals and academics study the web (the internet) vs. the degree to which the intranet is studied, and the degree to which what is studied is relevant to the intranet.
Web 2.0 has to be one of the hottest buzzwords ever to hit the web. The basic principle is that the web is a platform, but more than that it is a service—with software, data, and people interacting. What really matters in a world enriched by Web 2.0 are the services available and the collective intelligence that can be brought to bear on any given problem.
Consider the impact of a catastrophic event such as Hurricane Katrina in the context of organizations that can no longer count on an historical or even a current record of business operations, intellectual assets, and customer relationships. In fact, the potential for knowledge and information to disappear is significant for many organizations due, among other reasons, to population shifts, disadvantages in infrastructure, culture, and surprise events.
It seems like just a matter of time before everyone will be blogging—or at least know someone who knows somebody who is. Considering how open most of us are these days to new technologies, the likelihood seems high. Blogs are open-source publishing for all. They cover topics ranging from the mundane to the technical. Beyond technology, blogs seem to be the liberating experience that humans desire in order to be heard.
It seems like just a matter of time before everyone will be blogging—or at least know someone who knows somebody who is. Considering how open most of us are these days to new technologies, the likelihood seems high. Blogs are open-source publishing for all. They cover topics ranging from the mundane to the technical and inside the firewall, blogs can provide a knowledge marketplace.
Anyone who has checked out the field of interactive design has seen the incredible results that user-centric design brings to products today. Alan Cooper really brought something important to the fore: It is users who will decide if something is useful or not. It was a novel concept in 1999. Since then, the principles have been successfully applied to the Web, portals, Web-based products like online movie systems, and a variety of devices. Today, the consensus is that customers rule.
Not long ago, information professionals were hampered by the limitations of information technology. This was especially so in fostering the creation of new knowledge and connecting people in meaningful, non-text-based ways. While technology considerations remain important ones, most info pros agree that now the really tough challenges in increasingly complex organizations are related to people and processes. The goal is to deliver content in context—in a convenient form and format for information and knowledge exchange, with as little disruption and as significant a performance boost as possible—to individuals, teams, and organizations. With this focus shift, there comes an opportunity to be creative, to reassess and increase the capabilities of the intranet, to determine the usefulness of adopting Internet trends (like the shift of “power” to the individual), and to consider ways to leverage emerging forms of information sharing and communication.
Intranets provide a great platform to share information—in portals, team sites, personal sites, and more. They offer a way to transport information too—through Web services, learning objects, and Web parts. More and more end-users demand, or imagine, that information should be available in their workflow at the point of learning or decision-making. It isn't just a question of finding information anymore, although that isn't a done deal yet. It isn't even about having it "pushed" to you. Right now, users literally wonder: Can I have all the information I need within my work application—be it authoring a document, checking a sales account, collaborating in a community, or participating in an online conference? The answer to the above question is yes. Achieving content integration, on the other hand, is not easy.
When Microsoft’s Knowledge Network Group (KNG) conducted a user needs assessment as part of product planning for a new library Web site, we discovered our users were hungry for authoritative, organized internal information in combination with third-party content. Previously, we had focused on external, publicly available content, but data gathered in surveys, focus groups, and in one-on-one research indicated that Microsoft’s employees needed seamlessly integrated internal and external business information. Today, the Library portal delivers integrated content on topic pages and through search. Soon we will also integrate content directly into the user’s workspace.
The editor's intro to the 2002 volume of Intranet Professional.
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