Stumbled across Dick Stenmark, from Göteborg (Dick Stenmark, from Göteborg (t d f), these days, my entry point was “How Intranet (t d f)s differ from the Web: Organisational (t d f) culture (t d f)’s effect on technology” (PDF). This a a brief outline for a research proposal as well as a practical advice on the different world of the organization and it’s use of web-technology for internal purposes be it knowledge-management or just information-diffusion. His theoretical lense is the concept of organisational culture as the determining factor for intranet deployment, usage, and shortcomings compared to the adoption in the open web. Stenmarks grounds his concept on James Slevin, Tim Berners-Lee, and especially E. Eisenberg’s and P. Riley’s article on Organizational Culture. The first 2 pages are available via Amazon, think you need to be logged in. This concept
focuses on organization as a symbolic and linguistic place where meaning is constructed and used to make sense or experiences. (Matthew Seeger). A culture consists of symbols, narratives, documents, interactions, cognitions, actions, etc.
Cultural transmission is Slevins metaphor to understand what he terms the reorganisation of the social relations the media is facilitating. This means not only to look at the online culture but the real culture the users are situated in. And since organizational culture traditionally describes a rather rigid set of command-and-control practices information is not understood as a communicative act but a as a tool for control.
In this corporate world work needs to be measured and controlled and especially information management and IT are the strongholds of this vision of organizational hygiene. Therefore an intranet needs to be managed and not provided. Since this contradicts - not only how Tim Berners-Lee but we all understand - the Web it’s obvious that an organization’s intranet is a different animal - at least as long as corporate culture is rooted in a mechanistic world-view.
- It’s about general information not about niche-information or communication thus definitely not about a long-tail of knowledge and experience
- It’s top down
- It’s standardized, hyperlinks are excluded as navigational tools.
- It’s about dissemination not about communication
Information - managers conceive of the intranet as a library - assets are neatly categorized - quite the opposite of what we call the Two-Way-Web or more recently Web 2.0
Well not very surprisingly that leads to Stemark’s conclusion: What employees are likely to need in their operational work is information more closely related to what they are actually paid to do. Such job-specific, highly situated information includes solutions to technical problems, help on budget calculations and cost estimations, or project set-ups. This information is far from general, and that is what makes it useful on an operational level – employees may act upon it. Today’s intranets often contain very little such information.
This is a pity if organizational creativity is the goal. Especially if you conceive of it as unpredictable process over time.
Since the intent and task of the information department is to inform and not to engage in dialogue it is quite clear why intranets fail to return productivity gains and efficiency. Those findings fit to organizations and their traditional views in information management and intranets that are based on mechanistic and industrial views; not only corporations but schools, hospitals act alike. Thus their mindsets wont change overnight. What is needed in case of designing new intranets is a clear vision and commitment of the management what it expects from implementing an intranet. If it’s about more than broadcasting telephone directories than it must be clear that a stony road lies ahead.
Management must adopt a new view of how to model and design their internal process in order to be competitive and to attract employees after all.
This chart shows Stenmarks crossing of creativity enabling factors and what a web-based intranet could offer.
Well according to that it seems quite clear what to do: get everything on a (be it internal) web server and make it find- and reuseable, sounds like Chris Anderson’s long-tail advice.
Related posts
Tags: Business, Innovation, IT, Research, Social Software
Comments are closed | Permalink • 
• 
