In this paper Nigel Danson, Managing Director of Odyssey Interactive Ltd, discusses the emergence of the next generation in intranet technology - intelligent intranets.

It is generally accepted now that an intranet is far more than an internal phone book and document store, the portal approach has been adopted in many organisations with the intranet acting as a one stop shop for process specific business applications, management tools and links to business management systems. Increasingly, organisations are now adopting Enterprise 2.0 features which use collaborative and social technologies to improve business processes and bring increased efficiency to how organisations work. These tools make it easier for departments and teams to share information, develop documents and track progress on projects.

However, as more and more information is added to intranets valuable data can become locked away in separate silos, inaccessible by other employees. This can result in intranets acting more like information gatekeepers, limiting productivity and frustrating users, rather than achieving their intended goal of harnessing and sharing the collective intelligence of an organisation and providing a productive and collaborative platform for staff.

In my role as Intranet Consultant I come across many intranets that contain masses of fragmented information which is difficult to manage. Users find it increasingly difficult to locate what they are looking for, or are not even aware of its existence, leading to duplication of effort and frequently ‘re-inventing the wheel’. This is unproductive and inefficient and leads to frustration and a lack of trust in the intranet. I strongly believe that the future of successful intranets lies in their ability to eradicate these information silos in order for them to evolve into strategic, collaborative business tools providing better knowledge sharing, easier access to best practice and the ability for improved internal networking – ‘intelligent’ intranets.
But how will this be achieved? We are frequently guilty of expecting intranet users to fend for themselves when trying to find information and this needs to change. It isn’t just a simple case of getting the navigation right, intranets need to be proactive in getting the right information to the right people by understanding a user and promoting relevant content to them.

Typically, the onus lies with content providers to ensure the visibility of their content – this usually means manually linking content to other related content – not only can this result in highly subjective decisions, but it is not practical or reliable as it is time consuming and difficult (if not impossible) to find all other related content. My experience in working with companies to improve their intranets over the last five years led me to the conclusion that the best way to overcome this challenge was that intranets needed to liberate content providers from the constraints of author-generated links to other information. Intelligent intranets should automatically find and promote links between all aspects of content; between articles and authors, between authors and the content they are responsible for, between articles and similar articles, between comments and relevant blogs, between users and users.

Intranet content is an all-encompassing body of information and knowledge that has some very specific elements. It is a collection of information; of articles, best practice and events, a communication database for a who’s who, discussions and blogs. Whilst these are separate items they are not isolated. Connections exist between each and every one. These connections should be identified, created and promoted.

This happens every day on some very popular websites - consider a visit to Amazon, it welcomes you back

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