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Holtz Communications + Technology

Shel Holtz
Communicating at the Intersection of Business and Technology
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Intranets in trouble

Intranets are in trouble. These internal versions of the World Wide Web have held huge promise. After all, if people can simplify their lives using the Web, why shouldn’t the same technology simplify work? But typical corporate activities have conspired the make the intranet just one more mismanaghed resource in many organizations. Lack of funding, restrictions on who can post content, clutter, poor navigation, the absence of useful content, bad search engines, outdated material, inaccurate information—all if it leads employees to find alternative sources for the information and tools they need.

The situation was driven home by the results of a study from the Irish Computer Society. The 2007 Intranet research report found that significant percentages of employees find their companies’ intranets inneffective and not useful for their regular work efforts. The study’s results may be limited to Irish workers, but based on my experience with intranets in a number of companies, I’m certain the results would be mirrored elsewhere if the same questions were asked.

The study—which questioned 180 participants from Irish companies with intranets—produced the following results, according to a report from PublicTechnology.net:

  • Nearly half say they don’t use the intranet to support their everyday work

  • Nearly one in three say the intranet does not help with daily work

  • Half find their intranets’ search engines to be ineffective and 80% think both navigation and search need to be improved

  • 35% of respondents cannot access the information they need on their company intranet

    The study also finds that accessing staff and personal contact deteails like phone diretories is the most common and useful activity on intranets. However (again, based on my own experience), these directories are often woefully out of date. I worked with one company where an underground paper version of the directory could be had by those who sought it, since it was more accurate than the online directory.

    Intranets can still transform the way work gets done in an organization, but only with appropriate care and feeding. Most, sadly, are neglected.

    • 11/11/07 | 3 Comments | Intranets in trouble

    Comments

    • 1.Now I don't feel so lonely! Knowing that the wheels are falling off most other intranets is kinda re-assuring in a personal way, but also valuable information when trying to work out why it's happening.

      I suspect the main culprit is the wave of consolidation that swept through intranets in the last 5 years. As you know the intranet in medium to large organizations started off as a grass-roots affair and was usually highly splintered. Every project/dept/location had their own intranet and while it was a beast to find something from the project/dept/location you didn't belong to, there was a degree of personal relationship to your site. You learnt how it worked and the editors/owners had a fair connection with the audience.

      The trouble with this is that it started to cost visible money. And it certainly wasn't efficient. So there was a wave of consolidation. Bring all these little sites under one corp/central umbrella. And one search engine to unite them all.

      It seems now that this consolidation wasn't very well done in most cases. The search engines don't work well enough and most importantly, that relationship between readers and editors/owners has been lost.

      Most home pages are filled with distant corporate stuff that makes little sense and has little effect on the average employee. And of course it is more top-down than ever, which is the opposite direction of the intranet.

      It looks like the third generation intranet is the one to hope for, should they last long enough to get past this current slump.

      Mark | November 2007 | Sweden

    • 2.I was a bit worried when I heard this death knell sound for intranets. A good part of my living is tied to our company's intranet and I have many years to go before retirement.

      I downloaded the complete report from the Irish Computer Society to take a look behind the headlines and attempt to understand where our intranet had gone wrong. I was pleasantly surprised at what I found.

      Looking at just the Very Good/Good ratings for many of the questions I find that most of the scores are in the 70% or higher ranges. Seventy percent was a passing grade in school and I think that it should be a passing grade in communications also. After all, do you think that 70% of employees read the company magazine or most of the company announcements. I don't think so. Its by using combination of vehicles gives us the confidence that we are successfully communicating. Most of us have multiple work priorities which pull us back and forth until we can leave to visit, for a short time, with our families. And most of us get our company news/information from a variety of sources.

      So I don't see that all/most intranets are in trouble. They do need constant care, feeding and promotion. But don't we all?

      Don Ronlund | November 2007

    • 3.Thanks for your note, Don. That was actually kinda my point: Most intranets don't get the care and feeding they need, rendering them all but useless to the employees they are meant to serve. I'm a huge advocate of intranets and I didn't mean this post to sound like a death knell; instead, I was hoping to reiterate the need to manage intranets well so they provide value rather than throw up a bunch of web pages and let them stagnate.

      Shel Holtz | November 2007 | Concord, CA

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