Organizational Leadership and Intranets

Many people will tell you that the key to a successful intranet is content, content and more and better content. It reminds one of the doctor's time-worn adage to "take two aspirin and call me in the morning." Just as in the good doctor's case, however, intranet content remedies over-simplify the situation.

The Trouble(s) With Intranet Content

Even the best intranet content merely wastes disk space when interested parties are never told about it. Findings from the XYZ customer visit could prove invaluable to the design engineers working on ABC, but do the engineers know when and where to look?

Intranet content also may exist in unusable forms. Raw digital material often comes poorly organized, unsorted and unfiltered with interesting tidbits buried in a mass of detail. Large sets of presentation foils, documents lacking an index or table of contents, and unedited transcripts of online chat sessions all can serve as examples of potentially interesting but unusable intranet content.

Time-critical information may arrive on the intranet too late to be of any value. Even minor deployment mistakes can prove costly. Jakob Nielsen has asserted that just one poorly written headline on an intranet home page will cost a large company almost $5,000!

These types of issues are so pervasive that the term emptynet has been coined as a catch-all for them.

"Talking to companies that have implemented intranets, the toughest issues are not the technology but the people issues."
--Steven L. Telleen

As intranets expand and multiply, the real danger exists that they will be viewed as a panacea for organizational leadership and communication problems. In Part 2 of this feature, we explore some specific approaches for addressing these problems. In general, however, we must not lose sight of the responsibility we all bear for sharing knowledge and communicating information within our organizations in a timely, organized, concise manner.

Next page > Strategies for Taking Charge > Page 1, 2