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Holtz Communications + Technology

Shel Holtz
Communicating at the Intersection of Business and Technology
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Why are intranets stagnant?

The evolution of the World Wide Web over the last five years has been nothing short of astounding. Intranets, on the other hand, haven’t progressed an inch since, oh, say 2001. While the web has witnessed the wide-scale adoption of social networking and the early stages of true web-based applications (like Writely and AjaxWrite), the intranet of 2006 looks pretty much the same as it did five years ago.

I know because intranet audits are a staple of my consultancy. I see a lot of intranets, and have since…well, since before the word “intranet” was adopted. I’m working on three of these audits at this moment. And although there are plenty of fine features and functionality, there is little to suggest intranet teams are adopting the characteristics of the “read-write” web.

Sure, blogs and wikis are finding their way onto intranets, but the number of companies employing these social computing tools is a bare fraction of the total number of intranets functioning today. As for the other elements of Web 2.0, I’m aware of less than a handful of intranets that have embraced notions like social tagging (as exemplified by del.icio.us (although I have heard of two companies taking initial steps in this direction), audience ranking (along the lines of Digg and Memeorandum, social networks ( like LinkedIn, file sharing services like Flickr and YouTube or AJAXish tools like PageFlakes (which has become my default home page).

All of these utilities make perfect sense forintranets, and most of them would be simple to implement. Simple, in any case, compared to, say, getting an SAP portal up and running. Social tagging would let employees find intranet content based on bookmarks their colleagues have asigned. One cmpany, for instance, calls its mailroom “Document Delivery Services;” there is no reference to “mailroom” anywhere on the intranet. If one employee found the DDS site and tagged it “mailroom,” other employees would be able to find it by searching the bookmark site for the word that makes the most sense to them.

Digg-like ranking would let employees prioritize company news and information based on what is most important to them. (The company could continue to push news it believes is so important that every employee should see it.) Social networks that emulate the likes of LinkedIn would let employees in large organizations make contact with others who can help with a project or assignment through trusted intermediaries. And personzlied web start pages like PageFlakes and ProtoPage do exactly what web portals do (at a fraction of the cost and in a fraction of the time it takes companies to implement portals like the ones sold by Plumtree and Oracle.

Any of these kinds of services would make intranets infinitely more valuable, compelling, and usable for employees. So why aren’t intranet teams making the slightest move to keep up with developments on the web? There are several factors at play:

  • IT departments have invested too much time and effort into developing the infrastructure of the current iteration of the intranet and are in no hurry to move in a different direction.
  • Corporate IT staffs—some of them, anyway—are utterly clueless about what’s happening on the web. They don’t know online AJAX from the kitchen cleanser.
  • Communicators figure the intranet is working just fine the way it is; why fix what isn’t broken?
  • Corporate communicators—many of them—are utterly cluelessa bout what’s happening on the web. They wouldn’t know what Digg was even if they’d been dug.
  • Too much of an investment has been made in the existing portals that haven’t produced the kind of results most companies hoped for
  • The existing intranet hasn’t lived up to expectations in the first place; why invest time and effort in it now?
  • Most companies are struggling to retain a command-and-control structure for their intranets. Tools that put control into employees’ hands are antithetical to intranets where only authorized representatives of the company can contribute content.

There are, I’m sure, other obstacles standing in the way of intranet evolution. There are also, I’m sure, some intranets somewhere that have undertaken efforts to adopt some of these tools. I haven’t seen them; have you? Intranet teams should start taking a hard look at their stagnant intranets and how they can be improved—to the benefit of the organization through enhanced productivity—using the many elements that make up the read-write web.

12/31/69 | 8 Comments | Why are intranets stagnant?

Comments

  • 1.Shel Holtz (whom I consider a mentor) posted a great piece on what he thinks are the primary issues with evolving corporate intranets into legitimate business productivity tools. Although a link to the full post is here, below are some

    http://thememo.typepad.com/blog/2006/04/shelling_i | April 2006

  • 2.Shel,

    Great post. Sometimes I feel like us in the blogosphere are so busy shouting at each other from our soapboxes that we forget that not everyone has "seen the light."

    When I talk to people outside the office I am always shocked how few are familiar with any of the web tools that have become indispensable to me.

    So what do we do?:
    - It is our job to educate colleagues and clients about new media tools
    - It is our job to demonstrate the cost savings and increased efficiency these tools can provide
    - It is our job not to get caught up in names like Ajax, Digg and Flickr, and focus on finding the right solution for a company's situation

    Few things on earth have greater inertia than a corporation. It is our job to start the ball rolling down the hill.

    Jeffrey Treem | April 2006

  • 3.Excellent list of reasons for the (very) slow move to adopt more interactive intranet technologies. I recognize many of them from my own company. I would offer however one slightly more optimistic reason; I think in the last 2 years there has been a notable swing in internal comms back face to face and other non-electronic channels.

    Most people now understand that putting something on the intranet does not equal communication. The answer to this problem has been to use the intranet less however rather than to improve it. I don't think that's all bad.

    With the greater understanding leaders play in effective internal comms, it has been easier, cheaper and faster to prioritize supporting them to do the communicating rather than beef up the intranet. Moreover, leaders sign the cheques for this stuff and it obviously is easier for them to see ROI if it is supports them personally rather than an intranet that most leaders never use anyway.

    Your fifth reason (about low value portals) is also a hugely important for organizations that have gone that route. They're are exhausted and impoverished from feeding these black holes. The technology is amazingly immature, our IT departments lack the skills required to trim these new tools, and people continue to treat portals as if they were a collection of web sites. No wonder that an effective Town Hall becomes a compelling alternative!

    Mark | April 2006 | Sweden

  • 4.My erstwhile colleague, Shel ???the handsome one??? Holtz, has reflected on the stagnation of corporate intranets and the putrid smell they are starting to give off in the contributory atmosphere of Web 2.0.
    Listing several reasons why this might be so...

    http://leehopkins.net/2006/04/06/on-intranets& | April 2006

  • 5.Hi Shel,

    Thanks for this piece of clarity. It is a subject that has been keeping me busy for quite some time now.

    Like the first commenter Jeffrey, I feel that we need to educate and demonstrate and wait, wait and let people figure it out.

    As for the demonstration part, I personally found out the value of having people in the IT department that have the possibilities to do some experimentation ("a playground", separated from heavily secured core systems), like installing Mediawiki for example or some blogging software or a home-made RSS reader.

    Still, I too ("although seen the light"), sometimes stuggle when thinking about whether a read/write web solution would fit in a certain situation and how to "prove" the value of such an alternative to more conservative approaches.

    As an example, I (at "head office") recently overheard a manager of a local business unit, in a company with many geographically dispersed business units, complain about how little we new of each others projects, challenges etc., thereby risking that we create opposing solutions and risking too much cost and too little progress. I immediately started analysing the situation (knowledge gap etc..) and already envisioned learning from each other with e.g. team weblogs or project wiki's. However, the solution introduced by my senior manager was a temporary one: "let's just go to the local unit and have a workshop". I really thought about introducing my idea, but, did not. Why? All people involved have shown (at least not at work) no feeling for this and also it would involve a hell of a lot of convincing, especially in the foreign business units (other cultures?) and I did have other things to do...

    As Jeffrey already said, there is a lot of inertia in companies, but I also find that thinking about effective communication is often just at the bottom of the list in terms of project priorities.

    Or could the apparent inertia in excepting read/write web solutions on Intranets, just be relative, i.e. on the WWW the acceptance is just "too fast", for various reasons (no real business case to make; people in spare time)?

    Marcel de Ruiter | April 2006

  • 6.Shel,
    Thanks for addressing this issue, it's been bugging me for a while. I think until there is more hard data to support the value of new technologies, intranets aren't going to impliment them...not at the "enterprise" level, anyway.

    Don't get me wrong, I'm a big proponent of new communication technology, but I'm struggling with it from a cost vs. value perspective. At my current job, we have over 20,000 employees across the globe, so we can't just tell everyone to go to some website and download a free version of an RSS reader. Our IT HelpDesks need to support it. And IT security needs to approve it. And then we need to explain to people what the hell it is and why they should use it. All this costs money.

    So how do I justify that money? We need to either increase revenue, or pay for ourselves within 6 months with cost savings. Right now, I don't think we can...not without hard numbers. Maybe some Sales forces will crack the nut, and turn around with a major sale as a result of their blog networks. Then we can point to them and say "There! That's why we should go ahead with an RSS Reader, etc."

    Until then, I'm afraid we're folks with a vision, waiting for the masses to catch up.

    Dante Ragazzo | April 2006

  • 7.Shel Holtz has an excellent post on why many intranets remain stagnant with slow adoption of Web 2.0 tools. Although blogs and wikis are slowly catching on, Shel has seen only a handful of intranets using social tagging, social networking, AJAX and other promising new developments. Shel cites a number of possible explanations.

    http://www.sundog.net/index.php/sunblog/trackback/ | April 2006

  • 8.I really enjoyed reading your note and couldn't agree more with you. Adoption of web 2.0 innovations is slow but I think its only a matter of time before they gain more tractions. As employees become more familiar with these innovations in the web space, they're going to demand them on their intranet.

    Shiv Singh | April 2006 | Boston

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