There was a delay of a few months between my writing this Intranet Trends article for UK agency Rufus Leonard and its publication. In the meantime, the final trend about the financial value of intranet services has risen in prominence. But that aside, you may find this article on Intranet 3.0, of interest.
Predicting the future is always a tricky subject so I started it off by tracking against my previous predictions to assess whether or not I had been successful. Let you be the final judge!
read your article. i think most of your predictions are going to be true, except maybe the “young people like what works!”. i think young people are rather hooked to web 2.0 style technologies – blogging, social profiles, commenting, wikis etc.
That is true James but “young people” are not a totally uninform group but who can argue that web 2.0 is not now “standard kit” for any intranet with any ambition.
perhaps both are true… the reason young people like web 2.0 stuff is because it’s easy and it works. eg Blogging is just a form of very simple content management.
But it’s not only young people who like things that work… the “older” generation appreciates simple, easy to use tools as much as anyone else, if not more than others because they’ve been through all the “unfriendly” tools before.
I think that the main difference is that the younger generation EXPECTS these tools.