Reading about the internet of things is an interesting exercise in understanding our co-existence with technology and data. We want data to talk to data, chip to chip, thing to thing, so that we, as people, can focus on more value-added functions – creativity, thinking, relationships.

What about at work? Intranet vendors offer up all sorts of cure-all solutions: one box that that takes you and your organization from zero to successarama in 100 interconnecting processes and controls. I’m not biting.

The intranet of things is way off. It is outside the realm of a single box to do it all. What we need at work is a plug and play interface of neat apps – stand-alone but sweet as – that do their own thing beautifully; then add in a layer of common code that allows engineers to join two things together in a way that works perfectly for me / my org. Eventually, we may be able to let process talk to process.

However, for now, we have a bigger issue: to just get people sharing and socializing via an internal interface; reaching out people-to-people. Forget thing-to-thing.

We need to create a ton more shared data inside our orgs before we need that complexity.

←This Much We Know.→