Preface to 2012 report

A year of expansion for intranets

2012 will be the year of expansion for the intranet. There has been a lot of discussion online and at conferences about positioning the intranet, what to call it and how it fits in the big enterprise picture. A lot of vocabulary is in the air these days including “social intranet”, “intranet 2.0”, “enterprise 2.0” and the “digital workplace”. These discussions are healthy and illustrate how intranet issues are moving up the radar in many organizations. What’s even more important, these conversations raise questions about scope and purpose.

My personal vocabulary preference is for “digital workplace” as I have said in many blog posts, confer­ence talks and conversations over the past 18 months. The main reason is that this term communi­cates the concept of “work” combined with the digital environment most of us live in today.

A broader scope for the report

This year’s report is entitled “Digital Workplace Trends 2012” and addresses a much broader scope than the inaugural survey and report produced six years ago in 2006. Those were the “good old days” when many people still had the word “intranet” as part of their job titles.

The survey scope began to creep as early as 2007, when I started including questions about social media. Each year the survey expanded a bit more as did the role of the practitioners themselves who steered and managed the intranet. This year, 77 percent of the survey respondents reported that their job scope and responsibilities have increased over the last 12 months and 42 percent reported that their access to executives and senior decision-makers has also increased. Another change is that the word “intranet” is rarely included in job titles nowadays.

Raising visibility

There are no right and wrong answers to the vocabulary question. Every organization has to decide for itself what terms and definitions are the most meaningful and appropriate.

Raising visibility of the intranet and digital workplace in the eyes of senior managers and decision-makers is a fundamental professional goal I have had over the last 14 years of intranet consulting, and especially over the last 6 years of conducting the survey and writing the annual report.

Intranets and business value

I want to thank the 456 practitioners who participated this year, providing data and commentary that are shared with the larger community via this report. This year participants provided more spontane­ous examples of business value brought by the intranet or digital workplace than in any previous year. There were far too many to include in this report, but you will find a selection. For me, this change was a key sign that we are all moving in the right direction.

 

Jane McConnell