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Jane McConnell recently shared 4 questions about intranet (aka the web workplace) that she is going to ask several panelist at an upcoming conference. Big and good questions, in my opinion. Her questions are: Are we reaching the end of the intranet as we know it? How do you imagine intranets to be in the future? Enterprise search seems to be essential in today’s world of masses of content in the managed intranet, in collaborative spaces and in enterprise social networks. Some people see “search’ as the logical point of convergence and the ideal user interface for the “digital workplace”. What is your vision of search and its role in the digital enterprise? How do you see the evolution of “governance’ in a world where managed content and user-generated, spontaneous content are blended? If you were to give one piece of advice to organizations just starting the social (or 2.0) journey, what would it be? Jane wondered what her blog readers would answer. Here are my answers (also p...

Jane McConnell was just as surprised as many in the audience. The number of participants in the breakout about governance was huge! Jane’s breakout continued on the theme of her keynote: how do we govern the intranet in the social era? What are governance principles and models? Her post about the breakout can be found here . As Jane said in her keynote, a holistic approach to intranet governance is essential. As is its embeddedness in the organization. This breakout explained more deeply what she meant with this means. Governance in general is very complex. There are 3 reasons why this is so: Different groups make conflicting decisions The right people are not looped in from the beginning when decisions are made Decisions that are made have no relatedness with reality and are theoretic Jane proposes a holistic approach to governance through 1. organization and 2. 'technology'. Governance relates to ownership of the intranet platform, the principles of the intranet and...

Next keynote at the Intranet Conference ( Congres Intranet ) was Jane McConnell . Her interesting talk was about how the social intranet should be governed. Or shouldn't it be managed at all? Jane's central statement was: Lead, don't manage your new intranet ! But she started out by asking the audience to raise their hands when asked who owned the intranet. HR is clearly the missing player in the intranet. Hardly any of the audience could say HR is the owner or one of the owners of the intranet. In most cases (76%) Communications is the owner (with IT in second place). But a surprisingly large number could says the have a holistic team (10%). Meaning the intranet is owner by at least Business, IT and Comms. But these departments are losing control due to social tool deployment. How boring most people think governance is, it is the key to a successful intranet and also to successful change of the intranet. Governance does not imply control, but leadership. Without gov...