Intranets Slowly Adopting Web 2.0 Tools

Shel Holtz has an excellent post on why many intranets remain stagnant with slow adoption of Web 2.0 tools. Although blogs and wikis are slowly catching on, Shel has seen only a handful of intranets using social tagging, social networking, AJAX and other promising new developments.

Among the possible explanations cited by Shel:

• Substantial IT investments in current intranets
• Lack of awareness about social networking tools among IT departments and communicators
• The “it’s good enough” syndrome
• Top-down intranet management with a command-and-control structure

The command-and-control structure is an especially sizeable obstacle. For most management teams, allowing an open system with employee-driven content, contributions and discussion remains well outside their comfort zone. And many of the same organizational concerns that prevented or delayed the creation of an intranet are still present today.

Although they are better-known than most of the new tools, blogs and wikis suffer from low awareness levels – and because they are so new, the business value isn’t yet understood by many senior executives. As Shel often advocates, one approach for communicators is touting the features and benefits of the tools without mentioning them by name. If a senior manager sees the collaborative, knowledge-building benefits of a wiki (without feeling intimidated by the word “wiki”), they will likely view it with a more open mind.