Almost every organisation I have worked for has terrible information management, most of the time people have no clear idea how to find the information they need within the organisation or who is best placed to help them. Most intranets are static, badly designed and divorced from what users need with the result that nobody uses them.
Part of the reason is the general unwillingness of corporate IT departments to try anything new. To them, the convenience of the IT department is paramount and if that means forcing everyone else to work around bad systems then so be it. The result is that people are trying to use Excel to project manage and Word to collaborate without anyone actually asking what the user wants to achieve. We are still chained to Outlook despite the existence of far better solutions such as corporate Gmail. Even Google occasionally participates in this lack of imagination by simply porting old solutions onto the web: A limited functionality online word processor that is slow and hard to use? Fantastic!
Enterprise networks are the future of office applications, not dragging MS Office onto the web. They allow users to really see what is going on with an organisation and get a much clearer idea of who can help them. The two best applications I have seen are from Connectbeam and Trampoline Systems. There are differences between the two with Connectbeam incorporating tagging and search whereas Trampoline focuses on the flow of information around the organisation.
Neither is perfect at the moment and for my money would have to incorporate other features along the way such as wikis, discussion forums and email. If either puts it all together in a neat package I see them as the next generation office suite, Microsoft itself is in on the act with the underwhelming Sharepoint – especially when put alongside Connectbeam and Trampoline who are both streets ahead of MS. Google could do worse than acquiring one or both of these start-ups, rebuilding Google apps around them and relegating Google docs to the sideshow it should be.
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