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I have been actively researching on what “Social” means to organizations when they are trying to socialize their intranet or as it is fashionable to be called nowadays , adopting “Intranet 2.0”. I did a quick Internet Search and not surprisingly I was inundated with information. What I found very surprising was most of the information talk about nothing more than adding Blogs, Forums into the intranet as part of socializing the Intranet and the Enterprise.

Can one claim that they have Socialized their intranet just by adding a MicroBlogging capability to all users logging into the intranet and allowing them to leave behind a comment on any content in the intranet?. I don’t think so. The reason being there is evidence that internal employees have a strong resistance to participate and collaborate if they are presented with a simple blog capability around contents in a intranet . I believe this is due to the fact they view the content as somebody else's and do not feel ownership of the information, even though it is needed for their job. Due to this lack of ownership they have strong resistance to collaborate around it and the “Social” never happens.

Though the existing content from intranets and the social tools will be critical elements for socializing the intranet, what is really important to socialize the intranet is a fundamental change in the way the intranet is positioned, packaged and presented to its Employee. Instead of intranet being a content centric website , it has to be designed as a online personalized workspace where employees can go and get the information that is most relevant to them and also network with their work colleagues around these information. The employees for example should have the ability to subscribe to relevant feeds from existing published content into their workspace and also be able to subscribe to updates that are relevant to them for their jobs from existing IT systems such as CRM, ERP , CMS within the enterprise and be able to stay on top of what is happening within the Enterprise . If we now add the social tool such as microblogging around this within this personalized Workspace for the employee we believe the intranet will become truly social. The employees will participate more freely as the same content is positioned and presented to them as their own personal workspace getting access to the content they want in their own personal Corporate Wall. This approach for socializing the intranet along with tying it to any existing Enterprise IT systems is what we at Platform46 call “Social Business Integration” and with our “Social Business Integrator” product we aim to truly “Socialize the Intranet.”