The Workplace Blog

According to Sun president and COO Jonathan Schwartz that’s exactly what’s going to happen. In talking about the future of technology at the Syndicate Conference in San Francisco, he referred to intranets as an anachronism. You can find his comments at Ziff Davis. In an interesting parallel, take a look at Shel Holtz’s comments on the future of intranets.

An article on Intranet Trends by Shiv Singh, Director Enterprise Solutions appeared in CIO magazine yesterday. The article which discusses key intranet trends around user experience, ROI, AJAX, blogs and wikis can be found here. CIO magazine also has a podcast version of its key feature stories. They are one of the first major publications to do this.

BEA Systems recently unveiled their “Unified Portal Strategy“, which is builds on their acquisition of Plumtree earlier this year.

BEA System’s strategy for merging the product roadmaps is not as interesting as the three “products” they plan to introduce into their portal over the next few years. The first enables developers to deploy portal services to not portal applications, the second is a wiki engine that would integrate with the portal and allow interactive collaboration and the third is a search and knowledge management tool that allows users to tag content themselves. Now why does that sound strangely familiar?

According to an AFFIRM Survey, CIOs ranked internet, intranet and web applications as their leading critical technology area with security infrastructure, wireless technology, identity management and service-oriented architecture following. It shows how important web based applications have become and how organizations have moved their focus away from technology infrastucture to applications that deliver innovative value to the employees who use them.

Can you imagine a world in which a key communication channel to employees is podcasts available via mobile devices? That future is not too far away and IBM has been successfully experimenting with podcasts on their intranet. While podcast will not completely replace your intranet, it can certainly enable to reach your employees better. Read the article at Infoworld.

A blog for Google’s former employees talks about the Google intranet called MOMA. Before the company went public, MOMA included features that let employees see how much money the company was making via the adwords program in real time. It also included latency times, popular search terms, and traffic statistics for Google properties. Making realtime business critical information available to employees is one way to motivate them and keep them connected with the company.

Also interesting was their corporate directory which included employee names, email addresses, photographs (sometimes fakes), extensions and location. The names would also be linkd to a list of that person’s quarterly goals and objectives so you could understand exactly where your proposed project would fit in their priority list before you even spoke to them.

Paul Chin has written about Human Centered Intranet Design for the Intranet Journal. For those of us in the field, there aren’t too many surprises in his article. However, it’s worth reading just to better understand how developers are humanizing” IT systems. The Humanizing of IT is what will really make IT matter.

Businessweek believes that the workplace is changing dramatically for the better. In coining the phrase the “open-source workplace” Businessweek talks about wikis and blogs as disrupting command and control corporate structures. According to them, its one of the best ideas of 2005. If you’ve been reading this blog, just by the sheer number of posts related to blogging, wikis and other social software, you’ll know we tend to agree as well. Now if only someone would do some serious research into how exactly social software is changing the workplace.
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As the social software space matures, we’re starting to see some vendors focus only on the consumer side while others are starting to align themselves more with the enterprise. With security, viruses, administration and Sarbanes Oxley haunting every enterprise initiative, the social software players have needed to build in features to address those concerns. Companies aligned with the enterprise include Social Text, Traction Software and Leverage Software among others.

Avenue A | Razorfish Senior Technology Director, Ray Velez found this insightful Financial Times article that’s a must read. It discusses how internet innovations get stopped at the firewall. Bandwidth, security, virus and administration related issues prevent innovations that are becoming common place on the internet from making their way into the enterprise.

To quote from the article - Enlightened companies are starting to loosen the controls on their workers, claims Mr Girouard at Google (General Manager, Google Enterprise Division). “Gradually, organisations are waking up to the fact that they need to give their employees access to more productivity-enhancing technology – often that just means getting out of the way,” he says.

Here at Avenue A | Razorfish we embrace these challenges everyday and work to bring consumer innovations to the enterprise.