Following my quick summary of intranet best practice and the comments of Jane Mc Connell and people from Razorfish , I’d like to ask myself a few questions out loud.
One drawback that the authors themselves mention in their report is that it is totally derived from US culture. Not having had the chance to work with US businesses and management on this type of project, I have to ask myself a few questions.
– How does the difference in culture between our neighbours on the other side of the Atlantic and ourselves influence the perception and adoption of different intranet models? In my opinion, the Intranet Maturity Framework (despite a few comments I’ll make later) seems relatively relevant even in Europe, and the changes I would make to it would not, in my opinion, affect the cultural approach to the matter.
– When I say that the portal is an essential condition for the success of the collaborative 2.0 intranet, can we assume that this is a purely European or French vision? In other words, is the maturity of users in terms of collaborative uses so different between the US and France that it is not necessary to have an effective portal for users to understand the value of these new approaches and the associated tools on the other side of the Atlantic? Where, on the other hand, are they a priori more resistant than the French on this point?
– As long as we are talking about culture, and in my opinion this is precisely what is missing from the Intranet Maturity Framework, wouldn’t it be interesting to include a managerial and human component: key success factors, obstacles and social uses to be put in place to make the intranet effective and adopted. Particularly for collaborative intranets, but for all models in general. On this point, I find the Framework a little too techno-centric (even though it includes human factors such as internal sponsorship), whereas in my opinion, the further we advance in the models, the more social practices need to evolve in order to benefit from the quintessence of tools that will only be effective if everyone changes the way they operate in order to align social behaviour between individuals with the possibilities for sharing and ‘community practices’ that these tools encourage.
– And while we’re at it, can we make a link, a parallel, between the Intranet Maturity Framework and managerial analyses of the ‘Management Maturity Model’ type, highlighting that this type of tool requires a particular advance in this or that component of management?
Food for thought over the coming days…
