Two interesting mirror discussions on the future of the intranet from the IBF’s Intranet Life blog and over at LinkedIn in the Melcrum group section. Both about the future of the intranet. Melcrum as whether social media will kill the intranet. The IBF about will the Intranet destroy the .com.
All in all I think both sets of discussions point out how much the .com, the intranet and social media, will all be impacted by changes in their own technology and usage and by wider market/political changes.
On the latter, one of the areas I’ve started to ponder about is this – if new more socially enabled intranets or ‘Social Intranet’ allow collaboration across enterprises they will in also allow them between enterprise opening up the way for cross-company collaborations of an unplanned form. As most businesses have a very definite set of their own boundaries, this might either transform (positive) or undermine (negative) this sense of uniformity.
Whither the intranet in this world if collaboration is taking place between 2 separate intranets, connected by social, media? Could this create a tension on the nature of the enterprise itself, a new social mode of production?