Judith Meskill points to a great article on trends in intranets by Shiv Singh at Line56.com: Intranet Trends to Watch For. I had a lot of thoughts about this article as I read through, but my first pass got lost in the ether. Here are the list of trends, which are a good place to start.
- Intranets return to the domain of the departments
- The records management and the legal departments get involved
- All employees become intranet publishers
- The corporate telephone directory loses its luster
- The new killer app -- the knowledge management tool
- Real time information delivery becomes a priority
- Information retrieval remains unsolved but there's hope
- Employees demand a more aesthetic user experience
The main thing this combination of trends inspires in me is an appreciation for the complexity of business as looked at through the relatively simple lens of the corporate intranet. There are people underlying all of this, and those people need information, they need to interact, they need to get business done. They all participate and they all do it via different means and with different objectives in mind.