Productivity in the Service Economy (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)
Jakob Neilsen's new Alertbox is about how usable information technology can increase productivity.
I don't agreee with Jakob on everything, but I do agree this final point:
Through methods such as field studies, task analysis, and user testing, organizations can discover new ways of working and better ways of supporting work with information technology. In particular, immense gains are possible through better collaboration interfaces, better knowledge management, and better decision support. Most existing systems are unworthy of their names: they don't help people collaborate better, they don't increase knowledge utilization, and they don't support better or faster decisions. But they could. That's the next frontier for enterprise usability.
I think we're going to see intranets move from being static pages for reference to fully-fledged communication channels that are capable of accomplishing some of the goals of knowledge management and enterprise collaboration.
As you'll see in an upcoming post, another way to look at this transition is in terms of "stocks" and "flows". Intranets are becoming less stock and more flow. More on this soon...