Mopsos

studio id | Blogging in Corporate America by Michael Angeles is a brilliant piece of work, which provides very good insights on the future of corporate intranets.

The storyboard of Lucent's intranet made laugh because it looks so much like our own. I passed it on to our e-business guys to give them something to chew on. They might hate me for that.

I have no doubt that this mechanism of publication, syndication and aggregation using a very diverse set of tools is the way to look at it. It does describe the next generation of "intranets" (I'm not sure that the word still makes sense, because more and more intranets are in fact extranets). IT departments will thus need to spend much more time defining communication interfaces and standards through communities of practice. They will have to leave more freedom to the users too chose the applications and tools they need and accept diversity. Indeed, the core problem of web-based knowledge management is finding out ways to make publication very easy and natural, and ways to add incremental value to published information through aggregation, classification, summaries and comments.

But if I were to criticize Michael's presentation in a constructive way, I would not focus too much on personal weblogs for intranet publications. In many companies, and in mine in particular, very few people actually write knowledge-intensive documents like weblogs, white papers, case studies, courseware and the like. Some people actually never write, and most people write e-mails, memos and ppt sales presentations, which are far less valuable from a knowledge perspective. Individuals need to regroup into communities of practice to reach the critical mass of interaction that will result in the publication of a "knowledge object" when one practice group of the community decides to write one. So I believe that in corporate settings, collaborative environments for small groups of people (10-100) tightly integrated with personal publishing tools like weblogs and e-mail will be more important than weblogs themselves.

Or, to put it another way, in the corporation of the future, the hero is the team, not the individual.

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