Concepts for Intranet Innovation - Part 7

Employees have been building their own personalized business applications for years. If we look into any organization, we see these tools exist in their most basic form as Excel spreadsheets that are emailed around the office, through to simple Access databases. Crudely designed interactive forms and web pages constructed with inexpensive tools like Microsoft FrontPage and FileMaker Pro are prevalent across the enterprise.

So what drives individuals to invest days, weeks, even months of their own time in constructing these often poorly designed tools that solve only a few business problems?
Pure frustration. Usually the individual is forced to use more expensive enterprise-wide applications that are implemented to manage obvious business processes, but do nothing to account for the individual process usually experienced within the Long Tail of the enterprise.

If we consider the Long Tail, we can see the proliferation of individual applications developed and managed by individuals to solve perhaps one or two business specific problems. To the individual, solving one or two of their own business problems are more important than working collectively to solve larger and often more complex business problems that are across the organization.

So what is the net effect of hundreds of these individual applications floating around the enterprise network, hidden on the G drive, out of view from the Sys Admin? The effect is that hundreds of people are solving business problems in perhaps minutes, and not in days or weeks. The downside is disconnectivity. These efforts are designed and orchestrated in isolation. In any medium sized organization there are perhaps twenty applications that are duplications of each other. Only they are designed and constructed differently by the individual.

App2you (www.app2you.com) is a good example of individuals seeking a platform for designing and building out their own unique business applications.

Another is Long Jump (www.longjump.com). The statement from Long Jump’s website is that ‘Businesses face unique challenges around working better with their teams, as well as just organizing fast-changing information. But the tools of the day haven't made life simpler.’ We agree. The ability to develop more sophisticated information management solutions, and data modeling processes that give individuals the results they want from their own corporate data, is weak and in most cases non-existent.

So how do personalized business applications within the Long Tail of the enterprise application space affect the humble corporate Intranet? Perhaps like taking a hot knife to butter.