“Wikis often grow out of hand very quickly and consequently many employees simply ignore them. Enterprises also face the risk of an explosive information growth far beyond their capacity to manage that information”, said analyst and MD, Janus Boye, author of a report, Wiki in the Enterprise.

“If you don’t create guidelines and processes for managing the wiki, the gap between information and capacity is a risk to the enterprise as it translates into the right information not being found and the potential creation of redundant information.”

The Intranet wiki, WikiEnt, of Prescient Digital Media - © 2008

Most corporations do not have a wiki. And most aren’t planning to have them either (just yet). A recent Forrester study found that only 51% of Global 2000 companies plan to invest in Web 2.0 in the coming year. But only between 20% of small companies, and only about 30% of medium corporations plan on buying Web 2.0 tools (for a summary, see Intranet portal solutions die, evolve & move to Web 2.0).

But almost no one had a wiki three years ago. So in truth, wikis have exploded and are multiplying like rabbits. Boye, an independent analyst focusing on online media and an expert on enterprise portal solutions, has found that wikis are increasingly gaining foothold in the enterprise due to it promises of simplicity. Yet, wikis introduce complex challenges for organisations, on a strategic level as well as on the level of actual content creation.

At Cisco, the first wiki appeared a few years ago, when an engineer installed one on the server under his desk. “He told a PM, who then told other PMs and it spread like wildfire,” says Michael Lenz, Senior Manager, User Experience, at Cisco Corporate Communications. “Literally, day over day, the increase is amazing… any number I gave you today would be useless tomorrow or next week. There are tens-of-thousands of wikis… and the number of wikis about equals the number of employees (65,000).”

Read my complete article Enterprise intranet wikis.

Your portal solution is dying… or evolving into a Web 2.0 platform.

As I predicted at the start of the year (Enterprise intranet predictions for 2008), Oracle bought BEA, and has already moved to kill one of the BEA portal products: WebLogic Portal. Now BEA has three portal solutions, and will no doubt move to one or two….

According to research firm IDC, the Enterprise Portal Software market will expand by 50% in the next 3-4 years to a killer $1.4 billion in total sales.

"Web 2.0 collaboration features are finding a welcome home within the portal as business users want to take advantage of these new egalitarian methods that offer easy ways for end users to customize content, while IT can take comfort in the portal's ability to deliver them within a secure deployment environment," states an IDC report.

Read my complete article Intranet portal solutions die, evolve & move to Intranet 2.0.

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Facebook is not an alternative to the intranet. The intranet is a business system, one to support the entire organization, not just a social networking tool.

Now Facebook is becoming more than a social networking site, and shows great potential as a platform for intranet services, but there’s much to be overcome. Facebook is being used by some businesses, including Prescient Digital Media (feel free to join us on the Intranet Global Forum), but it is not a substitute for the intranet which must feature among other things, federated search, application integration, robust security, etc.

As Phil Wainewright writes in Is Facebook a PaaS contender?, Facebook provides us food for thought, but it’s not really a legitimate intranet platform.

"After all, many individuals and some organizations do use Facebook for business purposes. Most famously, Serena Software, which last year adopted Facebook as its intranet. I was somewhat skeptical when I first heard this but the company’s SVP Rene Bonvanie assured me when we met a few weeks ago that 740 out of 820 employees are active users, which is a lot better participation than Serena’s former intranet ever managed.

 

The Facebook platform of course constrains applications into a social networking framework, but that’s no different from the functional constraints imposed by a lot of other PaaS (platform-as-a-service) application builders (the topmost of my five-layer categorization of PaaS).

 

The problem for any business considering Facebook is that it’s a determinedly consumer play, to the extent that I don’t think it can ever seriously fly in the enterprise. Facebook trades free functionality in return for attention and relationship data — and users give up a lot of their control over that data. Businesses aren’t willing to make that trade-off.

 

Bonvanie shrugged when I put this point to him, saying that very little of what Serena’s employees post to the Facebook intranet is proprietary to the company, but at the same time he admitted that Serena stores its company confidential documents elsewhere than Facebook, so its role as an intranet platform is more limited than you would typically look for in an enterprise setting."

Skepticism on Facebook’s value as a platform aside, it could still continue to evolve and become a platform-as-a-service (a hosted intranet platform for business). There is great value in implementing the social networking approach within the enterprise.

IBM understands the value of Facebook, and is testing an employee social networking tool on their intranet called Beehive.

“Beehive truly is an experiment in our own version of an internal 'Facebook.',” says Liam J. Cleaver, Program Director, IBM Jam Program Office. “The research goal of Beehive is to aid IBMers with various people-centric challenges within the workplace. We broadly categorize these challenges into "relationship building" and "people-sensemaking”.

Relationship-building challenges include, for example, new employees struggling with making connections that are important for their current project and professional growth, remote workers having difficulties with team building and staying in touch with their team members, or employees moving on to new assignments who are not easily able to stay touch with former colleges. 

People-sensemaking includes, for example, the difficulties of discovering people with the right skills and common interests, or learning more about someone personally as well as professionally to facilitate making contact, or getting to know about ongoing projects and activities beyond your immediate team.”

IBM’s Beehive will be only one of the tools examined and showcased in the next Intranet Insider World Tour webinar on June 12th at 2pmEDT, produced by Communitelligence.com. Hosted by Liam and myself, the 90 minute webinar will look at the latest and greatest from the world’s best intranet, W3, with a close look at all its Intranet 2.0 functionality which boasts 30,000 bloggers, and thousands more podcasts (audio & video) and wikis – and an “employee directory that puts Facebook to shame.”

Honestly, you are an absolute fool if you work on an intranet and don’t attend this webinar. IBM is doing some groundbreaking stuff that you simply must know.

It’s only $199 to attend this webinar, and you can register online at Communitelligence.com.

Web 2.0 and Intranet 2.0 will be the subject of several hours of instruction and discussion in my upcoming workshops Deploying First-Class Web Content Management For World-Class Websites (Ad Astra) in Hanoi, Vietnam (Interncontinental Hotel) from April 23 – 25. I’ll be repeating the workshop April 28 – 30 in Bali (Hard Rock Hotel).

These workshops will be three full-days and promise a lot of learning, examples and hands-on work. To register for either please phone (65) 6334-9828 or email sales@adastra.com.sg

If you'd like to learn more about Facebook and its potential value to the business, then please do join us on the Intranet Global Forum.

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