The “Rencontres Internationales des ResponsablesIntranet” took place in Parislast week. It was the event for intranet managers from several bigmulti-national firms and public administrations from all over France and Europe.
For an event that boasts a focus on technology – there were no bloggers presentin the audience!! There were no tools to facilitate blogging – no plugs!! Nowifi!! In fact, the handout was a giant heavy binder – it was not even asimple URL.
No one present was really surprised by this format though.
The presentations featured good projects, but projects that should have gonelive 5 years ago, not today! All presenters were talking about collaborationand personalization, but were confusing (1) collaboration and document sharingand (2) personalization and profiling or look-and-feel customization. There wasno trace of social computing. No trace of rich-featured people -don’t understand this! and topic centricity. No trace of Flow. Just theold plain email and document centric world. The result is that we assisted toold school presentations (PowerPoint) of old school projects.
Back to the future, live.
The project that emerged (and really kicked ass – excuse my French!) was theproject created and developed by Dassault Systemes: DS InterAction 2.0(disclaimer: it’s one of our clients). This project set the bar very highand the audience was extremely enthusiastic.
Tarik Lebtahi and Nicolas Cerisier, the project creators, presented a projectdone internally with Guillaume Couste and Philippe Guillaume: DS InterAction2.0. This corporate intranet, a unique technological platform, is internallycreated and developed and makes good use of the technologies and social logicof personalized pages, blogs, wikis, rich-media and social bookmarks. Itencompasses also a more classical online document manager as well as a seriesof widgets and portlets that surface ERP, CRM and other enterprise-wideapplications. Information flows easily thanks to features that enable in oneclick the transfer of data between blogs, wikis and other integrated bases. Itis both user and topic centric, with rich profiles and full-featuredcommunities. It is meant to sustain communication, participation andcollaboration. The vision behind it is that the Intranet is to be the hub ofcollective intelligence and a principal place for collaboration (i.e. theintranet as a platform).
What is outstanding in this project is:
- The clear and up-to-date vision that sustains the roadmap;
- The perpetual beta approach;
- The focus on design and interconnected features that attracts people, favorsand sustains knowledge sharing;
- The attention to details and implied logic while designingmicro-functionalities;
- The hand-in-hand collaboration between people from Internal Communication andIT Teams;
- The project management approach that favors the motivation of project members(a good deal of live features come from personal initiatives of DS developers);
- The knowledge of business and the will to sustain locally contextualizedneeds (possible by a flexible and custom articulation of features).
- The comprehension that real new technology contributes to making the office abetter place and boosts innovation and performance.
What a real pleasure to work with this enlightened team and a true honor tocontribute to such a KA!! project.
