I was intrigued when I read an IT Business piece a few months back paraphrasing Accenture CTO Donald Rippert:

Rippert looked at YouTube and wondered why a teenager can find a an amateur video on the site quickly and easily, but finding a video of a corporate presentation in a business’s archives is next to impossible if you don’t know the exact title of the file.

Last week, BusinessWeek reported that Google is planning"a corporate version of YouTube to create videos for training and employee communications.” The article says no more on the matter, but it’s an idea I’ve been promoting for some time. Like Rippert, I’m dismayed that intranets have not embraced the concepts of social media, media-sharing sites like YouTube, Flickr, and SlideShare among them. A terrific video may reside on a page most employees never visit, but if it were available on a video sharing site, any employee would be able to copy the embed code and put that same video on his or her department/project/team page, making it available where other employees actually go.

With no additional information from Google on the nature of its corporate version of YouTube, it’s hard to tell whether it will reside on the web (where, due to security policies, a lot of businesses simply won’t house their internal videos) or be available for installation on protected networks; I would hope the latter, but expect the former. If, in fact, the idea is to establish a web-based YouTube for corporate videos, there are plenty of uses to which it could be put without compromising the company; after all, there are plenty of corporate videos already on YouTube, including recruiting videos (including some that take a deep look at an organization’s culture), introductions to corporate initiatives, and overviews of benefits programs. Garett Rogers speculates the service could also be used for training videos (let employees take the training programs at home, since so few intranets are available to employees via the web) and PR videos (“A customer facing YouTube could be an interesting way for companies to get information out the door; product announcements with video demos may be the new press release”). Rogers points to a dedicated Google channel as an example of what a company could do with a branded YouTube presence.

All good—even great—ideas. But I still think the real magic will happen when those proprietary internal videos are accessible on the intranet via an internal YouTube-like utility. Google could even add the utility to its enterprise search engine products, unlocking it when the client pays an additional fee. In any case, if Google doesn’t offer an enterprise video sharing utility, somebody else will…like, maybe, Accenture. Once they have the service Rippert is building up and running, it’s a small step to making it available to clients.