Jane McConnell has a sad story of how one organisation killed their intranet in four quick steps:
- Remove or redeploy the intranet team, and put external communications in charge.
- Stop training authors.
- Turn the home page into a flashy news tool with lots of fancy widgets.
- Remove all user feedback mechanisms from the home page.
"This is real - I did not invent it!" says Jane. Unfortunately I can absolutely believe it. I've heard recently of organisations that think they've done it all and dissolve their very successful intranet team, and where internal communications has been handed to IT as Comms is cut altogether (and IT really didn't want the job).
It's clear to me that if there's a sound and clear business strategy that's working, it's usually supported by effective internal information management, internal communication, a "can do" IT team working with you and a well-utilised intranet (or intranets) and more.
But you can have a great intranet and all of those things without there being a great business strategy up top, and this is a dangerous situation for an intranet team to be in. One where senior management, or those going through a spreadsheet looking for assets and teams to cut and save money, have no idea of the value of a good intranet and thus cut the team and destroy the site, or render it completely impotent.
Months or years later the pendulum swings back and someone says, "We really need to fix the intranet you know, it could be very useful!"
