Intranet visons benefit from implementation plans.
One of the greatest visionaries was Leonardo Da Vinci, but what has always impressed me about so many of his ideas was that he spent an enormous amount of time and energy trying to work out how they could actually be implemented. During this process he often created multiple and of course compellingly beautiful sketches and models - even though at the time sometimes the appropriate technology to underpin his remarkable ideas did not yet exist.
Sometimes I think we have a lot to learn from this approach - working out what the intranet is for, how it is going to accomplish that and then adding great design as an integral part of the work in progress. It is very tempting to concentrate on design at the beginning, and then ask an intranet vendor like Claromentis to make the design work. In my view this approach has two possible disadvantages:
1. You might miss out some relevant functionality that can make a real difference, because the designers were not intranet specialists and so were not familiar with available features or strong in previous intranet project experience.
2. It is focusing on design and leaving out the details of how it might work - it is often precisely in these details that not only possible problems but also additional value lie.
In my view the intranet and collaboration vision should be about
1. what the system is for
2. how it is going to change the organization
3. how it is going to increase innovation.
And it should absolutely include how we are actually going to get this done, as part of developing the vision itself.
Leonardo tried to the best of his ability to work the details out way in advance, even though the world was far from ready for some of his ideas. Just one example, in 1502 he designed a bridge for a project near Constantinople, 300 years before the basic engineering principals required to build it were accepted. In 2001 the bridge was finally built, in Norway – 500 years after the drawing was made. You can read about it here.
Good post. Thanks for sharing real experience.
We are just getting started developing intranets for SMB clients in the Tampa Bay area. Our approach is to give them the tools with basic instructions and they tend to build useful, if not always elegant, structures.
One goal of the vision thing is to find the right application of rules. Too many rules produce entropy: too few chaos. The difficulty in finding the balance increases with the size of the organization. I wonder how long Leonardo’s patience would have lasted in today’s corporate society? I wonder if he was actually in a meeting when he did all that sketching? Were others at the meeting doodling and bringing up ideas with no idea of how to get them done?
@Harry Chittenden
Thanks for your comment Harry - I have always had a vision of Leonardo dreaming away by himself - but who knows!