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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, I can only concur with all of the points he raises.
My own experience with intranets, having designed and built a few over the years, is that the three main causes of intranet stagnation are
1) management who are unwilling to spend any more money on a cost dog because of
2) the massive over-selling of ludicrously expensive CMS tools to naïve, inexperienced and scared management, and
3) the lack of awareness by IT decision-makers of what else is out there (especially these days).
The ‘command-and-control’ aspect is, I think, slowly becoming less prevalent — if only because the poor sucker put in charge of the corporate intranet invariably has a dozen other ‘more important’ duties in their job description/ KPIs and they would welcome the opportunity to let end-users have some sort of control over the content most relevant to them.
Only the Legal minds are still engaged in wanting to ensure that nothing gets posted that is defamatory, potentially damaging or not in line with the current value- and mind-set of the company. Heaven help that customers — those annoying interruptions to our day that pay our bills — might actually hear a ‘natural’ voice rather than one smoothed out by Legal and Marketing constraints.
I would love to see more companies embrace the new technology available to make their intranets more ‘inclusive’, yet I fear that, despite the fantastic advances in office building technology, there will be a lot more old, clunky and ugly office blocks than new, environmentally friendly, light and airy buildings filling our city eyescapes.
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