Three Hypotheses on Collaboration, Hypothesis 2: Email Inboxes are the Intranet
Over the course of my career, I’ve developed three foundational hypotheses about unaddressed needs in collaboration:
- Knowledge Evolves
- Email Inboxes are the Intranet (this post)
- Asynchronous Communication is Critically Important and Broken
In this series, I will explore each of these hypotheses and some of their implications.
Hypothesis 2: Email Inboxes are the Intranet
It follows from Hypothesis 1 that most organizational knowledge never actually evolves, it bumps around in conversational tools as tribal knowledge. So the best knowledgebase for most individuals isn’t the intranet, it’s their email inbox*.
It’s been a long time since I cared how big the archive of my emails was, but I remember the days of >10gb Outlook .pst files. It was job security, a war chest of proprietary information. I even experimented with third party tools for categorization and search.
But knowledgebases are only one part of an intranet, let’s look at what else they do:
- Company News
- Workflow (requests, alerting, and approvals)
- Project/Task Management
- Document Sharing
- Communication/Commenting (about the above)
- Company Directory
1. Company News
The thing that gets corp comms teams excited about the intranet is that they can post news that generally gets ignored in email. And, because there are tools on the intranet that employees have to use, people might actually read that news.
Messages that aren’t compelling in email aren’t more compelling on a website. If no one cares about your content in their email inbox, they don’t care about it anywhere. There is a need for increased serendipity in the enterprise, but neither email or the intranet fit the bill today.
2. Workflow
Intranet people will be mad at me for lumping 99% of intranet feature lists into this category. There are a lot of simple create, edit, approve flows in an intranet that accomplish a variety of tasks.
- Time-off approvals
- Expense reimbursement
- Project gates/checklists
- Content management (around knowledgebase and internal publishing or external content flows)
In the olden days, large companies would build all these tools themselves and the intranet was where they all convened. Then the last 17 years happened and SaaS companies have waged war on every corporate workflow.
In a big company, you’ll still see a lot of bespoke applications mingled in with SaaS. SaaS vendors, for their part, make peace offering of plug-ins and APIs for intranet developers. Why? Because SaaS vendors know their products are better and they’ll win in the long run.
But SaaS workflows are driven by email. Email notifies of state changes, has handy little buttons to approve/deny and take you back to the tool itself if you need to do more technical work. Even a lot of bespoke tools do this, making the intranet once again redundant.
Your email inbox is where most workflow happens.
3. Project Management
I’m not going to spend a lot of time here, as project management has the same dynamics as other workflow tools. SaaS products consumed product management and are better visible within email or within the tools themselves.
The one thing none of these tools do well is an executive-level view of status. This is often promised by intranet vendors, but the reality is that your intranet project management tool is such an antique that usage is infrequent and those report views don’t really get done. Then you hire a project manager and spend $60k a year for updated dashboards.
4. Document Sharing
The first and best use of an intranet is document sharing. Matching the early web, early intranets were just tools that made it possible to navigate the file structure of a web-connected-computer.
Document_sharing_via_email_sucks(v12)19102017(DREWS EDITS).docx and, ignoring the chasm, it’s genuinely better just to have a single copy of a document out there than emailing the same thing around forever.
BUT…
- then came Google Docs and we all learned how powerful realtime collaborative editing could be
- then came Dropbox and we realized going to an internally hosted site with a bunch of crazy permissions that you can only access via the VPN was annoying
Six years later, Microsoft got the memo and shipped OneDrive for Business and collaborative editing. It’s been four years since I’ve used either, suffice to say, they were built more to protect SharePoint revenue than be amazing consumer experiences.
Again the punchline is that single purpose SaaS stole the value (a single source for a document) and added significant value above and beyond. These products do all their alerting and workflow… in email.
5. Communication/Commenting
Communication and commenting within an intranet are largely about the objects within that intranet (documents and workflow). As more of the functionality of the intranet is replaced by SaaS tools, email again becomes the common denominator of communication.
Communication and commenting about workflows in SaaS products are largely garbage. All SaaS vendors eventually “put a feed on it” and neglect email as an important part of their system.
But Salesforce, Jira, Trello, etc. send emails to let me know that another user commented on something I care about. Employees can share Google Docs can with a link, keeping communication within that email thread.
Email remains the most comprehensive view of all commenting activity.
6. Company Directory
In the olden days, the employee directory was driven by Active Directory (AD). Active Directory was a revelation: totally free, store whatever kind of information you wanted. But AD is cumbersome, employees can’t or won’t update it directly, so it’s always out of date.
Intranets adapted by building their own profiles, often mapping them to the companies homegrown HRIS-thing (which was part of ERP back then). This was better because employees could edit them through a web form and at least HR cared enough to put the right information in upon hire.
I’m not sure anyone’s really worked this one out. The last time I saw an up-to-date employee directory, with pictures and everything, was 2003. My company got a best intranet award for it!
Like the knowledgebase, though, if there is a standard, it’s the contacts list associated with your email account. It’s as up to date as you care to keep it.
Lastly, the directory is one step in the flow of emailing, calling, or texting. A user is much more likely to initiate those steps within the tool they care about. That’s not a website, it’s an app.
Other: The App Problem
Speaking of apps, the intranet whiffed on mobile big time. All web portals did. It was clear early on that do-everything sites didn’t make sense in mobile. Users grab their phones for a specific purpose and the best apps have simple clear use cases.
So What?
It’s my belief that everything companies want from the intranet already exists, but is distributed across employees’ email inboxes. Workflow, documents, integration, critical conversations, they’re all there.
What knowledge workers need is not another tool for employees to recreate all of this information, but a simpler way to expose what they already have. To accomplish this, you must start with the email inbox and build up.
* A Silicon Valley bias might lead you to think, “email is dead.” And “Slack is the future.” I urge you to talk to your customer-facing team members or friends that work in larger and/or older companies. Email isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.
Read the rest of the series (linked as they’re posted):
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