Concepts for Intranet Innovation - Part 6

Let’s go back five years (2002). RSS didn’t have the reach that it has today. In fact a whole eco-system has evolved around feeds being the mechanism that enables discovery and proliferation. RSS has become an integral ingredient of many Web 2.0 business models. Today all of us can develop a respectful enterprise mashup very quickly and at no cost. We can make calls to a range of API’s and develop a very simple page that presents an integrated view across a number of internal and external services.

In addition to this, we can employ OpenID for managing authentication, instead of investing the time to develop our own security model for Web 2.0 offering. OpenID allows our audience to quickly gain access and define how they’d like to make use of our embedded mashup. Once inside, users could begin building out a quick social network based on configurable widgets all accessible from a toolbar tray. They could add their favorite feeds and tags, and the mashup would quickly start retrieving and building out a real-time display containing relevant and related content.

Where are these tools for the common Intranet? Why can’t we provide a suite of rich enterprise mashup tools for use within the organization? Consider the possibilities of accessing corporate content locked in silos, encumbered by poor query and analysis software (or lack thereof), and the ability to leverage this into a real-time content dashboard.

The assumption is this frustration is an everyday experience for any knowledge worker. Many go to great lengths in achieving the content visibility they desire. So how agile is the average enterprise in allowing this democratization of knowledge?

We sell our time. We sell products that involve our time to produce. We sell our knowledge to others who take this ‘know-how’ and turn it into solutions of their own. Knowledge has no value until it affects a decision that results in an outcome. So how do organizations build knowledge aggregation and visibility tools for its employees? Employees are already building these tools for themselves. Let’s consider the Long Tail employee application phenomenon.

Part 7 >