The New Computing Archipelago: Intranet Islands of Practice

In this paper, we examine the growth of grass roots intranets as an extension of end-user computing. This perspective helps to characterize the nature of intranet development and use as " islands of practice, " and provides a background against which the rapid proliferation of organizational intranets in the 1990's can be compared and contrasted with the explosion of personal computers and " islands of end-user computing " in the 1980's. Our retrospective analysis of end-user computing is based on academic and business journal literature. Our contemporary analysis of intranet development and use is based upon preliminary results from an ongoing qualitative study of mid-west U.S. firms in various industries. These analyses highlight two phenomena that are likely to define the shape of intranets and future computing movements: 1) the integration of " intranet islands " not only within the firm but also across organizational boundaries, and 2) the role changes among IS and business area professionals as they work with intranet technologies. Our discussion of these phenomena examines the ways in which intranets present unique opportunities for understanding the initiation and widespread uses of a new technology, while at the same time illuminating the changes in organizational roles that so often attend technological interventions.