Who needs an intranet when you can shout?
I was at a meeting today with some key staff from one of the UKs largest companies, kicking off the deployment of Claromentis for the holding company.
The deployment is for 10-20,000 staff, and during the meeting the CIO made an interesting side comment about smaller collaboration systems, saying “who needs an intranet when you only have 200 users – you can just shout”.
This is something we have often discussed internally as very small companies deploy intranets and collaboration software – in fact the smallest Claromentis license is for just 25 users – at which level you would think you wouldn’t even need to raise your voice.
But of course some very small companies in terms of staff numbers – such as consultancy practices we have worked with – might have onsite and global staff in almost as many locations as they have people – as teams are deployed to various client offices to provide professional services. These individuals, by the nature of their job, absolutely do need secure web based access to version controlled best practice guidelines, white papers, templates and collateral from the company intranet.
Using out of date information can adversely impact their ability to provide advice that represents the current view of their organization – and conversely not being able to write results back to the intranet will constrain the growth in IP of the company as consultants gain expertise in their relevant sectors. So in these, and many other similar cases, intranets for very small companies become very meaningful and material to the company’s ability to deliver results.
As we have engaged with companies to provide social networking portals we have of course come across the theoretical limit of Dunbar’s number – the supposedly cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain a meaningful and stable social relationship.
These are relationships in which an individual knows who each person is, and how each person relates to every other person. A commonly referenced limit for Dunbar’s number is 150.
On that basis maybe the CIO today had it just about right – in the hopefully unlikely event that you have no other friends outside work then once you get over a couple of hundred staff you absolutely do need some technical help to remember who they all are, how they relate to each other and what they all do.
Standing by the water cooler and shouting is officially no longer an option.
