10 ways to make your intranet fail!
LONDON, September 9th, 2010
There are ten easy ways for every organisation to make sure its intranet is a failure. That is what Sam Marshall, director of ClearBox Consulting, will tell delegates attending Melcrum’s Mastering Intranet Management training course, to be held at University of Warwick on 21-22 September.
According to Marshall, ‘Users are demanding even more from their intranets. However, responding to the challenge is not simply a matter of installing the right tool. Formulating the right strategy and governance is essential, and this means recognising where to be firm and where a lighter touch is needed.’
Marshall’s 10 ways to make sure an intranet fails are:-
- Promoting silence. A desire to control what is said can lead to an intranet that is too locked-down. It becomes seen as a corporate mouthpiece rather than a place where people can share views and feed back to the company.
- Making it all talk. The communications department is often seen as the ‘owner’ of an intranet. However, a site that has nothing but news is unlikely to attract much usage, and therefore ceases to be viable even as a communication channel.
- Runaway experiments. Without a clear strategy, users can find themselves with wikis, social networks, SharePoint sites and content management systems all appearing to cover the same thing.
- Hiding all the good stuff. It is essential to work out what really matters to people, and ensure that it is most prominent. Intranet search, deceptively, is harder than web search, especially when content can be spread across multiple tools.
- Making your intranet all global or corporate. Organisations often want to give employees the same homepage. This means that content has to be relevant to everyone. Unfortunately what this actually means is that the content is not particularly relevant to anyone. As a result, employees soon dismiss it as “nice to know”.
- Creating information overload. A lack of clear channel strategy means that communication can feel like information “feast and famine”.
- Excluding half your workforce. Few intranets are accessible to people who work outside an office, meaning that processes have to be duplicated.
- Ignoring generations – how do you meet the needs of both technophobes and the ‘Net Generation’? Intranets need to keep pace with expectations set by the internet, but employees will need varying degrees of support and coaxing to adopt.
- Making your intranet unreliable. A surprising number of organisations tolerate systems that are slow, unstable or appear to randomly lose people’s work. Getting this wrong can undermine any attempts to establish an intranet as a new way of working.
- Gizmo interfaces – loading the intranet with the latest fashions such as coverflow, geo-tagging and word clouds will distract from its goals to communicate and collaborate effectively.
Marshall says, ‘Of course, this list is very much tongue-in-cheek. The real point of the training course is to tell users what is the best practice and how they can make sure their intranets succeed.’
Melcrum’s Mastering Intranet Management training course will be held at University of Warwick on 21-22 September. Cost for Melcrum members is £1,435 per person, and for non-members: £1,595. More information at http://www.melcrum.com/products/training_courses/skills/subjects/intranet_masterclass.shtml
About Melcrum
Melcrum, a privately held research and training business, is the leading authority on best practice, emerging trends and strategy in internal communication.
Melcrum advises internal communication leaders at 69 per cent of the Global Fortune 100 largest organizations and 84 per cent of the FTSE 100. Through independent research and executive education, Melcrum helps internal communicators achieve the rewards and recognition they deserve.
With global networks and offices in the UK, USA and Australia, Melcrum researchers and editors spend their time meeting and talking to practitioners to find out where the best work gets done. Melcrum makes these tools, techniques, and case studies available to its members through publications, research, events, forums and web sites.
For further information visit www.melcrum.com or contact:
Robin Crumby, Managing director, Melcrum T: +44 (0) 20 8600 4670 E: robin.crumby@melcrum.com
or
Jacqui Green, JGMpr M: 07885 270 349 E: jacqui@jgmpr.com
