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Intranet Case Study: Using OpenRoad's Social Software

4/4/2007

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For many years, there have been calls for companies to listen to their employees, to empower their people, to become a learning organization. Millions of consulting dollars have been spent, thousands of leadership seminars concocted, and countless mission statements have been rewritten.

Despite this, it has proven difficult for most firms to move beyond a traditional, hierarchical, command-and-control corporate culture. A company's theory may be, "We're sincerely interested in learning, improvement, and empowerment. We want to give our people all the tools they need to interact." But in everyday use, their theory is more likely to be driven by a need to remain in control and a desire to suppress negative opinions. This theory-in-use usually wins out, explaining why many employee empowerment initiatives fail.

In April 2006, Intrawest Placemaking -- a real estate development concern with regional offices in North America and Europe -- undertook a technical initiative focused on driving espoused theories into theories-in-use. Using OpenRoad Communication's ThoughtFarmer social software, they built a democratic, collaborative communication platform that could capture the company's intellectual capital and strengthen the workplace community. The result was a read/write, employee-maintained internal web site that has permanently changed the way the company interacts.

Intranet innovation

Employee web sites, or intranets, have been around for more than a decade. Most follow a one-to-many publishing model: a small group of editors publishes pages and documents that are viewable to a large group of users.

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OpenRoad's primary goal with ThoughtFarmer is simple: turn all users into authors. All employees at Placemaking can add, edit, and annotate content on the ThoughtFarmer-powered intranet. With the exception of a few policy documents, Placemaking's intranet is a completely open and malleable collection of current thoughts, processes, and learnings.

By turning every user into a contributor, OpenRoad envisioned several benefits for Intrawest Placemaking:

Fewer barriers to knowledge sharing. By letting users publish their own content with only a few clicks, they would be less likely to hoard knowledge and more likely to share it.

No distortion in knowledge transfer. Ideas would be exchanged person-to-person, in one step, eliminating distortion and filtering.

An increase in employee engagement. Users that could add and edit content would feel a sense of ownership over their intranet. Because the leadership of Placemaking would be putting considerable trust in employees, employees would, in turn, be more likely to trust the company.

Self-healing content. If a user saw an error, he or she would be able to fix it immediately.

No excessive burden on a couple of administrators. The users would be the editors. Content maintenance would no longer require a dedicated team.