Perhaps you also remember the confidence crisis in 2002? I had just started working for a UK-based VC-backed software company that needed to prove themselves to the investors every 3 months. It was an interesting experience to say the least. Going into 2009, many information managers are faced with similar challenges. Confidence is low and you need to focus on short-term potential.
While many fellow industry pundits convincingly make the case to invest even more resources in your intranet, my recommendation is that you should not be too negative about email. Here my humble observations for the critical information manager:
- Risk: Is storing information on your intranet really always better than email? What happens when your intranet is down or upgraded to a new system?
- Sharing: Information stored in emails can just as easily be shared than on an intranet. I’ll claim that more colleagues are familiar with forwarding an email than publishing some HTML.
- Searching: Show me a large, global and complex intranet where search works! I can show you many similar organisations that are able to easily search across email archives.
Interestingly email is with few exceptions always run and owned by IT. This is also the case for many intranets, even though quite a few intranet managers are actively trying to be adopted by almost any other department.
When you plan your information initiatives for 2009, don’t automatically disregard email. It may be old and not sexy, but it works and more importantly, many of your managers probably already spend 90 % of their working time in Outlook, Notes, Gmail or whatever. I would even go one step further and say that if you arranged some brief email training sessions or email best practice sessions, you would get more value than if you did the same for your intranet. You would probably also have an easier time signing people up.
I recognise that email is not perfect, but must confess to being a happy email user myself. Is there a big problem with email that I’m unaware of? What’s your view?
Happy New Year!
Join our full day seminar, the International Intranet Day, on March 24 in Copenhagen, to learn from case studies from several organisations and network with other intranet professionals.
