Five levels of intranet

From eg

See openpolitics.ca: five levels of intranet by Craig Hubley. The original 1996 paper has been withdrawn from circulation pending revision.

A short summary by the author listed the five levels as follows:

• Level 0: 'mailing' nets which provide the basics: external and internal email
• Level 1: 'interactive' nets which support e-commerce and web documents, where convenient, and integration of the business with the global Internet.
• Level 2: 'project' nets which fully implement privacy and access rules, and are considered safe for sensitive information. Still reactive with respect to governance, and not venturing into decision areas of privelege, secrecy or power, but applying reflective processes to technical areas, notably operations
• Level 3: 'mainstream' nets which require every employee to be competent in intranet skills - a reflective intranet that truly reflects the organization's issue/position/arguments and goals
• Level 4: 'mandatory' nets which perform knowledge management (early reflexive intranets with self-describing instructional capital) - and enable mobility
• Level 5: 'ubiquitous' nets which support very personal computers in a global secure network of easy task and decision delegation" - ultra-reflexive intranets

[edit] react/reflect/reflex analysis

The paper relates reflective processes and reflexive processes to intranets.

It mentions the reactive processes required to deal with simple email and static documents (level 0, not really an intranet). The paper ignores the low level provisioning, sysopping and how to prevent common problems at this level as these are covered well in other sources. Only a well run and reliable signal infrastructure can provide a foundation for the five levels:

1. Level 1 is still reactive: "'interactive' nets which support e-commerce and web documents, where convenient, and integration of the business with the global Internet." Any static document requiring feedback has become a form, like a blog.
2. Level 2 becomes reflective: "'project' nets which fully implement privacy and access rules, and are considered safe for sensitive information - intranets are normalized as part of operations in specific projects" typically relying on wikis.
3. level 3 gets more consistently reflective as best practices are applied consistently in every aspect of the organization: "'mainstream' nets which require every employee to be competent in intranet skills." See wiki best practice.
4. Level 4 becomes a reflexive intranet: "'mandatory' nets which perform knowledge management and enable mobility" which is dangerous unless information is consistently reliable - therefore extreme trust in feedback is required, and many social structure must change. Internal statistics on use drive most changes. Challenges to organizational power structures are initiated on intranets and may be carried out there without undue curtailment or harassment, just as they might be in person or on corporate phone lines. Organization protocols must rapidly evolve.
5. Level 5 follows through with "'ubiquitous' nets which support very personal computers in a global secure network of easy task and decision delegation"; command verbs evolve the same way other information does. This fully reflexive intranet intranet should redesign itself with the help of human designers and users.

Hypothetical levels 6 and up are described as a ultra-reflexive intranet. No such thing exists in the wild as of 2011. See project Laputa on how some may come together by 2012.