Collaboration and Content Strategies Blog

Clay Shirkey on Information Overload as a Filter Problem

Blogger: Craig Roth

Jacob Ukelson of Actionbase recently had some good comments on my posting "Information Overload as Evolutionary Maladaptation":

Clay Shirky’s take on it is that the information overload problem (at least as it pertains to email) is an email filtering problem, not an information overload problem. His video can be seen here:

http://www.boingboing.net/2010/01/31/clay-shirky-on-infor.html

I hadn't seen that video before, so I watched it and think it's very good.  In particular, the parts that stuck with me from Clay's presentation were:

• We've lost our filter for quality.  It used to be book publishers.  Not anymore.  So how will we now design the filters (rather than thinking about how to control the flow of content from the source)?
• Solutions are temporary and need to be continually adapted
• He applied a great quote to information overload.  It's from Yitzak Rabin: "If you have the same problem for a long time, maybe it's not a problem - it's a fact."
• When you think about information overload, think instead about what changed - where the filter broke

I think he's half right with his thesis.  Defining information overload as a filter issue captures half the problem according to my Enterprise Attention Management model. It captures the “pushing information back” (attention shielding) part, but not the “pulling information forward” part. Unless he means the filter is applied in both directions, which didn’t come out in this speech.

Note: This is a cross-posting from the KnowledgeForward blog.

When I Say People Describe Info Overload In Evolutionary Maladaptation Terms, I Mean It

Blogger: Craig Roth

I'd like to lay claim to control over the Wall St. Journal's editorial page, remarkable prescience, or the luck of the Irish.  I'll take any of those 3 I can get.  My claim is based on my February 10th blog posting "Information Overload as Evolutionary Maladaptation" and a WSJ editorial just 2 days later by Daniel Akst's called "The iPad Could Drive Readers to Distraction".  His article pretty much falls for every canard I warned about two days earlier, including the use of the exact same humorous caveman example.

Well, in case anyone thought I was putting words into hypothetical mouths on the 10th, Mr. Akst kindly decided to blatantly state the points I was disputing:

• Roth: "I’ve noticed much that’s written about information overload starts from an assumption that a root cause of the problem is with humankind ..."
• Akst: "Distractibility, sad to say, is the human condition ..."

 

• Roth: "... the argument being used [is] that the response of information workers to the proliferation of information is an evolutionary maladaptation ..."
• Akst: "Distractibility ... probably evolved at a time when ... it was a survival adaptation. "

 

• Roth: "“Ugh, more information always good! May help me kill sabre tooth tiger or mate with woman!”
• Akst: "hey, is that a tiger?!"

My point was that I'd like to see more searching for creative solutions.  Arguing that sometimes we can't help checking email or browsing fun sites when we should be working is like shooting fish in a barrel.  Of course that happens.  But is that always or only the case?  The "steely self-discipline" bandwagon is already full of bright people doing what they can to make a difference.  Mr. Akst's article demonstrates the over-worn path his argument leads down.  I wrote that "If this is an example of humans being wired for self-destructive behavior, then it leads to lots of 'protect you from yourself' advice."  And sure enough, his article gives a quick survey of software to "bar yourself from the Internet" or programs to "prevent yourself from wasting half your work day surfing celebrity gossip blogs".

But isn't there more to this issue?  Can't questioning a few overly used assumptions yield some new avenues of exploration?  If one assumes that information overload is within the realm of consciousness and under rational control, different solutions can apply. Take a favorite culprit: e-mail.  Assuming e-mail overload is due to evolutionary maladaptation leads to half-jesting self-discipline solutions like Google's "Take a break" feature.  But if you get past that and consider that users can apply rational responses, you can find many tweaks that get beyond pop-psychology and have a chance of making a real difference (see my posting "E-mail Overload: No Cure, but Enterprise Attention Management Can Shed Some Light").

All it takes is to stop blaming our cavemen ancestors and start blaming ourselves.

Enough With the Information Overload Manifestos, OK?

Blogger/Curmudgeon: Craig Roth

"Not So Fast: Sending and receiving at breakneck speed can make life queasy; a manifesto for slow communication", By John Freeman (WSJ 8/22/09 p W3), is yet another "shake you to your senses" information overload 101 article.  I found it noteworthy because it explicitly defines itself as a manifesto, two years after I explicitly noted that getting away from manifestos is what is needed to make the best of the proliferation of information and content while minimizing its worst effects on businesses and workers. (Note: I avoided guru-tense and didn't word that as "while minimizing the disastrous impact this is having on us and our ability to think and reason ..."). 

I will read the book because it's my job to read these things, but there's no need to wait since a good book already exists on the need to slow down: “In Praise of Slowness”, by Carl Honore (my review is here).

Here is the comment I entered to the article on WSJ.com:

This is a very good information overload primer - particularly the parts about making conscious decisions about where the "finite well of our attention" is focused.  But what Mr. Freeman has done is provide a manifesto at precisely the time that the opposite is needed: for all the information overload pundits to put the evangelism aside and focus on a path to improvement that embraces both sides of this debate.

Getting heads nodding by describing what "we" are doing to "ourselves" (always in guru-tense) is easy.  Nomiki (who has commented a few times here) shows that not everyone should be included in that "we" as some have learned to adapt their expectations and tool usage to minimize their info-stress while not demonizing or sacrificing what the information age has to offer. 

After my first year of covering information overload I recognized that the evangelical aspect of the narrative that "Not So Fast" follows is counterproductive.  In fact, Mr. Freeman's manifesto was published two years (give or take a week) after I published my "Manifesto-free definition of attention management". 

An excerpt: "The debate is over whether we are at a tipping point that necessitates a radical change in approach – an 'information intervention' – or just seeing an incremental but manageable increase in information velocity. Those who argue it is an incremental increase often disregard the rest of attention management as the result of unwarranted alarmist thinking.

That’s unfortunate because this emerging field has a lot to offer regardless of whether one believes that we are at a hand-wringing crisis moment or not ... What is needed, then, is a manifesto-free definition of attention management. One that doesn’t require purchase of a belief system to understand."

For those interested in a manifesto-free approach to this situation:
http://knowledgeforward.wordpress.com/2007/08/17/a-manifesto-free-definition-of-attention-management/

What to Do The Day After Information Overload Awareness Day

Blogger: Craig Roth

So, you've survived Information Overload Awareness Day.  Your eyes were opened to the stress, poor decision making, and cold hard cash being sacrificed on the altar of our always-on, always-connected, go-go-go culture.  Now what do you do?

Well, first I'd recommend coming down off the mountain a little bit and taking a view of the issue from the ground.  Consider that the proliferation of information and communication channels should not be seen entirely in the negative (the "overload" problem).  The implication is that if you don't feel the problem, someone must not have shaken you hard enough with studies on stress, the difficulty of finding things, or put a big enough number on the cost. 

Some exaggeration (or, to be more accurate, exclusive focusing on the negative) may be useful to shake people awake and scare them straight.  But there's a risk they will become hysterical or stare into space.  After all, once one can see the information apocalypse is neigh, one has to figure out what to do about it. Those who do little gain only a sense of futility; they can see what is happening but do nothing about it.  While those who do too much risk vast unintended consequences.  Social bonds and efficiency suffer when people behave selfishly to shield themselves from interruptions that are unnecessary (to them).  Short lived attempts to change etiquette result in long-term feelings of bullying and reduce the effectiveness of future attempts.  Once-a-week time-outs (of e-mail, meetings) just shift the burden to other days while avoiding a root cause of the inefficiency: messages maintaining their channel without being pulled forward or pushed back as needed.  

I believe that an organization-wide, systemic, balanced approach that aims to improve efficiency for all workers is preferable to defining the situation in negative terms which start a war in response that can have vast unintended consequences. You can do take a balanced view by starting to think about:

• A model (enterprise attention management) to organize, elicit (as an intuition pump), and communicate potential improvements that can increase the efficiency of a large number of workers (a systemic fix) rather than just personal tips on how any one person interested can help themselves
• Who are the couple of people in your organization that can have a positive impact on the attention management abilities of everyone in the company?  What can executives and owners of communication systems do that is more than what any one individual worker can do?  
• “Closed loop” rather than selfish view of interruptions.  Consider each interruption as an interaction between the interrupter and those interrupted and determining, as a whole, if it was useful to the organization. So what is a real interruption in your business?  What is "interrupted" versus "distracted" and what is an “unnecessary” interruption (does the person doing the interruption ever think their interruption is unnecessary and if not, who gets to judge)?
• How social contracts and organizational structure influence interruptions and information flows in ways that aren’t captured in overload calculations and may result in unintended consequences if disrupted
• How technology can help.  Technology is not the answer, but it’s certainly a lot of the problem and, accordingly, can be a participant in an improvement approach.  With a model in place, attentional capabilities of tools can be enumerated and used to their fullest extent to address known problems
• Teachable moments.  Much of the information overload is due to etiquette and culture, but browbeating people to change their ways has little effect.  It’s been said that you can’t force changes in culture, but yet there are certainly cases where culture has been drastically changed.  Part of the answer lies in exploiting teachable moments to make positive changes in counterproductive communication and information management behaviors
• Pacing.  Try to get a realistic idea of how much improvement you can actually target.  Even if 28% of workers’ days are wasted, 0% isn’t the proper target.  Step back and think about what the real target should be to get a realistic picture of potential cost savings. By all means, use the Basex number as an example of one extreme way of estimating it, but follow up by talking about the importance of determining a realistic goal for improvement.  Once you get executives to buy into a strategy based upon dollar savings rather than quality and speed of decision making and employee retention, you’ll be expected to prove how much you’ve saved in hard dollars later. Don't use a sum of personal observations (rather than closed-loop), depend on colloquial and self-determined definitions, or build overall angst into your number

So, it's a good thing if IOAD created an awareness that wasn't there.  But the real value comes now - the day after - when organizations struggle with how to approach something described as such an enormous problem with tendrils in sociology, psychology, physiology, technology, and business.  My recommendation is to leave the negative framing ("overload", "problem") and self-helpy, guru-talk aside.  Now is the time to recast the issue in terms of systemic efficiency that can be analyzed with a conceptual model and target improvements that are both reasonable and achievable.

E-mail: A Primary Culprit in Information Overload

Blogger: Bill Pray

E-mail is often fingered as the main culprit in contributing to information overload. The previous post by Craig Roth explains that most of the material produced on information overload “overstates the problem while understating the solution.” More importantly, Craig makes a call-to-action to consider what to actually do about information overload. An article from Computerworld yesterday highlights one CIO’s efforts to do something about information overload by tackling e-mail first.

In the article, CIO Tony Murabito of Cubist Pharmaceuticals Inc. explains how the investment of $50,000 in “training employees how to better use one of the basic tools of the modern office” is paying off. I applaud the effort and would like to add the following observations:

• While the goal of cutting e-mail traffic by 25% gives the organization a target, it could be a problem in that it is a number and numbers don’t take into account the content and importance. Perhaps a better goal would be to focus on the efficient use of e-mail that eliminates unnecessary traffic as defined by business use cases. While this is harder to measure than 25%, it does change the focus from a number to efficiency.
• Some of the e-mail regime bullets are “menial” (as Craig describes in his post): Putting non-business related messages on the corporate intranet, limiting send to all capability, stopping acknowledgment of CCs, and stopping the sending e-mails that say “Thanks” may be helpful - but the impact is limited.
• The other e-mail regime bullets are good: Effective use of the subject line, adopting the ABC format (action, background, close) for e-mails, increasing the in-box refresh interval, and routing e-mails to folders other than the in-box.
• The productivity and ROI numbers are interesting, but one has to be careful. These are soft ROI numbers in that they are nearly impossible to actually measure. The estimated recovery of 15 to 20 days per employee annually is just that – an estimate – and there is no guarantee that the employee will use that time to be “more productive.”
• The increased performance of e-mail system is something that can be measured and provides solid justification for the business case for the $50,000 spend.
• It is very important to have someone like Tony Murabito to champion the cause in the organization in order to make real change happen. Having the CIO involved in creating and backing the business case to tackle information overload is a key to success.
• Deleting e-mail is problematic. Archiving with tiered storage is better. Over time, best practices from the e-mail regime will help eliminate the need for the e-mail deletion policies as described in the article.
• Learning from the effort is fantastic – Tony’s takeaway that better document management tools are needed show that the information overload problem extends beyond just e-mail.

Overall, Cubist Pharmaceuticals is good example of tackling the information overload problem head-on and actually doing something about it - and a good place to start is e-mail.

Why I'm Dreading Information Overload Awareness Day

Blogger: Craig Roth

The inaugural Information Overload Awareness Day is being held on Wednesday (8/12/09).  And I'm dreading it.  That may seem odd since I cover this topic as an industry analyst and any additional attention on my space is a good thing.  Also, I agree that too many people aren't aware of how far down the slippery slope they've gone in terms of being interruptible at all times and trying to follow ever more information sources and communication channels.

The reason I'm dreading this is that most of the material I've seen from the folks putting this on overstates the problem while understating the solution.  So on one hand the problem is inflated to encompass insidious damage to our (worded in first-person guru tense) psyche, attention spans, and well-being, not to mention about $1 trillion per year (I dispute this).  And on the other hand the solutions offered up are menial: don't use "reply all", try e-mail-free Fridays (yuk), and a smattering of time management and e-etiquette tips.  That's all fine for individuals (I offer my own personal attention management tips here, and Lifehack.org and 43 folders are full of tips).  But a systemic problem requires a systemic solution.

To their defense, I'm not the target audience for this information.  As it says in the title, the point of the day is "awareness".  To make people aware it helps to shake people awake with a narrative tying the rise of communication technology to ADD to the broad arc of information work.  I've given that presentation myself and, I'll be honest, it's rewarding to do!  I got a very good response too, but after seeing many others do the same thing I realized it's like shooting fish in a barrel.

So I'm already aware.  In fact, I've become a connoisseur of info overload articles, books, and presentations.  I feel like a movie critic who has seen every fish-out-of-water, buddy cop movie, making him disgruntled when a new release rehashes the cliche without offering anything new (even though the audience consists of people who are seeing the cliche for the first time and like it). 

The tough part is not putting on a day where you raise awareness of information overload, but figuring out what to do the day after.  That's the day when the evangelical zeal wears off and you try describing this to your co-workers, many of whom honestly don't feel that overloaded most of the time.  You can make a few personal behavioral changes and convince some others to do the same, but they have little impact and wear off soon.  And then you catch yourself interrupting people because you actually need to and they "tsk tsk" you saying it was unnecessary to them.  Then you find that of the 28% of your day that is supposedly wasted, really only a few percent of it can truly be recovered without treating every day like a nine hour sprint. Without any real solutions to survive the information deluge you come off like someone complaining about the weather.  "Bring an umbrella" as the morning show weatherman says over and over ad nauseam.

Enjoy Information Overload Awareness Day if you're new to the subject, but the next day think about real actions that can be taken.  Think about a systemic solution, like Enterprise Attention Management which describes how to pull important information forward and push less important information back.  EAM avoids the moralizing about what you're doing to yourself and others and doesn't require adherents to be converts.  It shifts the focus to enterprise-wide efficiency rather than individual struggle.

Four Key Points About Enterprise Attention Management

Blogger: Craig Roth

I'm just putting the finishing touches on a new document on Enterprise Attention Management.  This one will be a short primer on our view of the subject.  It's been over two years since my main document on EAM was published and my thinking has evolved as I've hit questions from people at presentations and in private conversations.  It's also been shaped by the press coverage of information overload and e-mail overload - often by encouraging me to put warning signs in front of some slippery slopes that they wander into: Counting all distractions as interruptions?  Lumping interruptions into information overload?  Using 100% focus and efficiency as the benchmark to compare "cost of overload" to?  Assuming only tips and tricks for individuals can chip away at it?  Yeesh!

After a brief description of what enterprise attention management is and its business context, I describe 4 points that are key for my position on EAM:

1. Not Everyone Feels Overloaded

As strongly as you and a few like-minded people may feel about the impacts of information overload, a lot more people just don't notice or care.  But improving efficiency and reaction time: that's something everyone can get behind.  Get away from having to shake everyone awake about the "problem" and its a lot easier for others to get on board with your efficiency argument.

2. Key People in an Organization Can Take Action to Improve Efficiency of Information Workers

You can try to organize your little information garden and give tips to your teammates to do the same and one small portion of your company will breathe a little easier.  But there are a few people who select the gardening tools and set expectations for everyone's gardens - they have a different set of things they can do to help everyone in the organization.

3. Use EAM as a Lens to Understand Impacts of New Information-based Technologies

Enterprise attention management can be used as a lens to analyze how various technologies and programs will impact the attention of information workers.  One recent example of applying this architecture is the "EAM for e-mail" posting I did here.

4. Influence Process and Culture Selectively

An evangelical approach to "information overload" starts with declaring it "bad" and then figuring out how to force people not to overload each other.  A more practical approach does not see lots of information as good or bad, but rather focuses on efficiency and looks for key moments when processes and culture can be influenced.  These include teachable moments, such as new hire training or rolling out a new technology.  They do not include an e-mail blast or interoffice memo out of nowhere telling everyone how they should now behave.

This is a cross-posting from the KnowlegeForward blog

How to Improve E-Mail Client Software: 15 Ideas Based On Enterprise Attention Management

Blogger: Craig Roth

The most popular "overload" topic in offices today is e-mail.  But after all these years of incremental improvement to IBM Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange, surely there can't be any low-hanging fruit left to pick to help people manage inbox overload.  Or is there?

The Enterprise Attention Management Conceptual Architecture to the rescue!  Rather than relying on a set of personal pet peeves or specific annoyances that have happened in recent memory, a model such as the EAM conceptual architecture provides a systematic approach for analyzing the attentional characteristics of a system.

The EAM architecture is intended for use by organizations to examine individual technologies or whole systems (such as the information worker desktop) that are suspected of causing explicit (information stress) or implicit (poor decision making, slow reaction to new information) information handling problems.  With systems it can be used for gap analysis.  Here I use it as an intuition pump to reveal a set of potential enhancements to e-mail software that would improve its attentional characteristics.

Click on the thumbnail below and scroll around to see the ideas that came out of my informal analysis of e-mail. Also, here is a quick summary of the recommended improvements (going clockwise from the upper-left of the diagram):

• Scheduled delivery
• Maintain whitelists to bypass blocks and delays
• “Move to discussion” greys out “reply”
• Automated routing and prioritizing? Not yet
• Un-bury turning off or freezing of “toasts” (alerts)
• Enable e-mail hyperlinking
• Enable role-based profiles
• Enable sender tagged e-mails
• Stop attachment abuse
• Presence-enable recipient lists
• Enable group-based rules
• Turn e-mail into generic small-content tool
• Manage multiple inboxes
• Provide inbox analytics
• Token systems
• Remind sender if no reply

Caveat: I'm not an e-mail expert.  It's possible that some e-mail systems can already do these things outright, with some configuration, or with simple coding.  If so, great, although they should be no more than one click away.  In the meantime, my inbox is filling up as I wait for these capabilities in the next version of e-mail programs.

Note: This is a cross-post of an entry from the KnowledgeForward blog, where it was named "E-mail Overload: No Cure, but Enterprise Attention Management Can Shed Some Light"

Beating Up the News for $650bn

Blogger: Craig Roth

Over at the KnowledgeForward blog I wrote that I predict that in 2009 there will be an announcement that information overload or unnecessary interruptions cost U.S. workers $1 trillion.  Basex has already released estimates of the cost of information overload being $900 billion and unnecessary interruptions being $650 billion.  The figure is soft to me to begin with, but becomes even softer when it becomes a Rorsch test for info-stress.  To the New York Times, it's the cost of unnecessary interruptions (well, the recovery time mostly) that are mostly of a mundane nature. To BusinessWeek it's the annual toll on U.S. productivity from interruptions.To Henry Blodget, it's the cost of checking email too often. To Read Write Web it's the cost to the nation of inbox overload and task switching.

Now, I strongly believe organizations can and should take concrete steps to help improve the efficiency of information workers by providing attentional technologies and capabilities that can pull important messages forward and push less important messages back from the worker's focus (see A Manifesto-free Definition of Attention Management).  But I don't want to fall into the same trap as Knowledge Management which collapsed in on itself due to overstated estimates of its cost with the implication it could be recovered.  I listed 5 reasons I find these estimates dubious (check out the blog entry for more detail on each):

1. Lumping in social interactions and distractions with interruptions

2. By counting all costs and no benefits (quote “total cost” instead of “net cost”)

3. By ignoring closed-loop analysis

4. By playing loose with the definition of “unnecessary”

5. By comparing against perfect short-term productivity instead of long-term sustainable productivity

But if there's a good cause at stake, what's the harm in crafting numbers that help to shock readers awake and spur action on a problem?  The Economist ran an interesting story about how AIDS researchers at the World Health Organization and UNAIDS are being accused of using poor statistical methods that "distorted priorities for the treatment and prevention of the disease."

... the agencies spent many years overcounting the number of cases ... Dr Pisani cheerfully admits to being a doctor of the spin variety herself—she refers to the process as “beating up the news”. She absolves UNAIDS's researchers of any blame. They did their best to collect true numbers in difficult circumstances and with little money. But so as to rack the world's conscience, she wrote reports that put the worst possible complexion on those numbers.

As Joel Best, author of Stat-Spotting: A Field Guide to Identifying Dubious Data, said on NPR's Bob Edwards show on 1/10/09, a lot of statistical abuse is introduced by researchers in the social sciences who truly believe in their causes and want to draw attention to them.  He questions statistics that support worthy causes, but are nevertheless misleading, overstated, or wrong. 

Mr. Best is a sociology professor and takes special notice when statistics involve social causes.  Regarding measurements on lost productivity, Mr. Best writes (Stat Spotting, p52-54)

In recent years, it has become very common to hear that this or that social problem costs America so much each year in lost productivity.  These estimates ... typically involve billions of dollars.

The basic idea behind these claims is that social problems interfere with people's ability to do productive work.  Lost productivity is the value of the work that could have been done if the employees had been able to concentrate on their jobs.

Now, fiddling with any of those numbers [that get multiplied by time and value to obtain the estimates] can lead to wildly different estimates of productivity losses.  The particular choices made have everything to do with the resulting statistic.

It is these choices that can distort the information overload and unnecessary interruption cost figures, causing organizations to focus on the wrong problems.  Do I choose a definition of "cost" that is net of benefits, or just all the costs alone? Who defines interruption (does it include social interactions and self-imposed interruptions such as distractions)? Who gets to determine whether an interruption is "unnecessary"?  As most interruptions only benefit one party involved, do you find the net cost to the organization for the interruption or just total the costs for the person who was put out by the interruption?  To make a statement on aggregate costs (e.g., to the U.S. economy, to an entire company), you need to make aggregate judgements about which interruptions count as "unnecessary", not aggregate individual, one-sided judgements.

I encourage any company that suspects info-stress may be occurring or that  poor decisions may be made based on information overload to step back and consider their enterprise attention management environment.  But be very careful about making a numerical estimate of the actual cost because it is interpreted as a judgement on potential savings and risks distorting the view of what should be done to address it.

Is an Intranet Infrastructure or Application?

Blogger: Larry Cannell

While keeping the driveway clear of snow and battling slippery roads to finish some last minute holiday shopping I’ve also been thinking about a report I am working on (to be published in the February/March time frame). The topic is intranets and the role they play in an enterprise. It seems to me the intranet is something many of us take for granted but its importance has changed dramatically over the 10-15 years they have been around.

Most definitions of intranets describe intranets in terms of technology. For example, the Wikipedia entry for intranet starts out this way:

An intranet is a private computer network….

In my opinion, saying intranets are just technology is similar to Henry Ford saying “Any customer can have a car painted any colour he wants so long as it is black.” At the time Ford said this he was only looking at cars as technology, but they mean so much more to us. Perhaps our prevailing view of intranets is as mature as cars were in 1909 (when Ford said this).

We discount the importance of intranets because, at one time, they were simply a bunch of technologies. They were pieces of infrastructure. Just deploy a few intranet technologies (like maybe a portal, a web content management system, or even collaborative workspaces), similar to how we might install a router, and they will simply pay for themselves.

This is where we got it wrong. In my opinion, intranets should not be treated as infrastructure. They should be treated like a suite of applications which support the most important processes used within the enterprises. Intranets support how we work online, and this is something we all should feel strongly about since it impacts our personal and organizational effectiveness more than any other set of tools we use.

When NCSA launched Mosaic browser in 1993 it was a rudimentary client, just good enough to get us thinking about the potential of an interconnected web. A couple of years later the Apache web server project was born out of another NCSA project and we were off making websites and demonstrating how easy it is to connect everyone to the same information.

Also taking place in the late 1990s was the rise in use of client/server e-mail systems, like Microsoft Exchange (version 5.0 was released in 1997). In many cases, Microsoft Exchange or Lotus Notes became the standard e-mail system providing the first reliable peer to peer enterprise communication system.

Deploying these e-mail systems was fairly straightforward and success soon followed since most everyone already knew, or were quickly learning, how to send and receive e-mail. The first experiments in using the web were similarly, although more narrowly, successful. These private applications of popular Internet technologies demonstrated to us that this stuff worked.

However, for many enterprises these early successes came from the IT infrastructure group. This may be the source of the problems we have today, with intranets that don’t seem to add any value (other than being technologies which connect our office computers to the Internet). Since these efforts grew out of IT infrastructure groups many of our intranet efforts stayed within them and were also considered IT infrastructure.

I’m not blaming IT infrastructure groups (I worked in one for ten years). But, intranets should no longer be treated as infrastructure. Infrastructure is technology that is well understood and could be considered a commodity (paint it black, who cares?). Intranet technologies are far from commodities. E-mail, yes, might be considered a commodity. But, for example, the use of collaborative workspaces is still quite immature and not at all close to being commoditized.

Rather, intranets should be treated as a portfolio of applications that are owned and funded by an organization and has a roadmap for improvements based on real, documented needs. Intranet technologies are used by people and understanding how people work is a touchy-feely sort of thing that infrastructure groups aren’t good at doing (for that matter, it’s one reason why some people work in an infrastructure group, to get away from the touchy-feely).

What do you think? Are intranets infrastructure or applications?