Look how far intranets have come.....

It was in 1995 that I sat in a meeting room in a major pharmaceutical company and showed a primitive demo of what the phone book could be like if it was rendered in this new system called HTML. Goodness how the executives in the room loved what they saw! Give it to us now, this could be great etc........

Like most demos, there was a good distance still to go between the practical capabilities of the technology externally - particularly in terms of what the company could tolerate internally - but the intranet journey (for that global organisation) had at least begun.

At the start of 2008 we have already seen a good deal of trends and predictions from the intranet industry (myself included) but it strikes me that before the year gets into full swing, this is a good time to reflect on just how far intranets have come in the past 10 or so years.

Intranets (probably because they are used by so many people) seem to attract high levels of generalised criticism. What we do less frequently is reflect on just how far they have progressed and how deeply they have become immersed in the fabric of organisational life. Imagine a medium or large scale organisation without an intranet? They are everywhere.........for goodness sake, even my children use them at school!

It has been quite a slow passage from that demo in 1995 to the scale of presence and penetration that intranets have today. But we appear to be entering a new maturity stage where the initial intranet chaos has been tamed and the value generation from the ever more usable online assets behind the firewall is rising at a steady pace.

Intranets will and are changing the shape of how we work. What else can we point to that can say that with confidence?  Did all the "change management" of the past decade deliver a fraction of the substantial re-structuring of where and how work is done, that intranets bring?

I can hear the cries of protest from those in organisations still trying to manage the chaos. Certainly, when you see hundreds of major intranets a year as I (for better or worse) do, then you inevitably extract and focus on those that are further ahead than others but we are all at different stages on what are fairly similar intranet journeys.......spring forward to 2018 and imagine where we will be then!