The concept of Connected Citizens is not new. It’s gone through multiple iterations over the years as to what it means. 

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Intranets since their inception have been through a number of iterations, which initially saw the launch of employee document repositories and gradually became a dumping ground for employee information, evolving into the self-service space around areas such as HR, among others. 

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This definitely defines the intranet of old which was a place where documents, thought important to staff, were uploaded. It was really about one-way communication more than anything. The days of the document storage type intranet are over. It’s critical for organisations to have interactive, collaborative and engaging intranets. Here are my top five reasons;

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Sustaining an innovation economy means evolving, adapting, re-imagining and reinventing to create and utilise new ideas and information into both existing and new products and services. 

[The innovation ecosystem is the term used to describe the large and diverse array of participants and resources that contribute to and are necessary for ongoing innovation in a modern economy.]

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Do you know the difference between CRM and SRM? AND do you know that there is SRM and then there’s other SRM!

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...and that planned, expensive team build is not going to build a collaborative ‘connected enterprise’

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Respected leading business publications have included articles on the evolution of leadership to a more collaborative style for the past few years. Forbes, HBR and others regularly include editorial around the requirement for open innovation, internal ‘crowd sourcing’ and the approach to relationship in addition to process. If we accept that our future is a collaborative one, we need to ask the question ‘Are our leaders ready for collaborative leadership’?

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If Eskom was busting its organisational silos and working more collaboratively with its entire ecosystem, perhaps both Eskom and South Africans would be a little more ‘enlightened’?

At Indigo New Media we build digital collaborative hubs – so now you’re probably asking – ‘have they gone completely bonkers? How can they talk about not building collaboration on technology?’

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The hardest challenge for anyone who wants to transform his or her institution in the networked age is to deepen and broaden the culture of collaboration.

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