Letting Go on your Intranet
In a blog post, Charlene Li pointed out how media companies are terrified with the idea of losing control of their content. These companies derive their value from either their distribution channel or the content they create. Letting users create their own content, edit the existing content or distribute it themselves is a frightening concept for them.
Just as media companies of the future will generate value online by aggregating and serving audiences better than the competition, so too does your intranet have to play a role like that.
In the future, employees will have no shortage of information sources that helps them do their jobs more efficiently. Employees will only use their corporate intranet if it provides them with original, insightful content and also serves as a content aggregator allowing them to contribute, aggregate, edit and distribute content themselves. It won’t matter if your company creates the content or even controls it, as long as you provide it first and allow your employees to view it in a format that they want to.
Does your intranet do that today? For example, can an employee edit the news page so that unfiltered news from external sources are included? Are you letting your employees control the content? Or are you acting like a traditional media company? Have you asked yourself, who is your intranet’s competition?
