The intranet is not dead

Last week I presented at the annual Online Information conference in London in a session titled “Death of the Intranet”. Speaking after me in the same session was senior Forrester analyst Tim Walters and we both agreed that intranets are not dead. However it may be practical in some organisations to avoid the term intranet as it carries too much negative baggage.

I covered 5 main challenges that intranet professionals face and shared some experiences on how to solve them gathered by members of our community of practice. The challenges were:

1. lack of management support
2. usability
3. collaboration
4. governance
5. vendors

I promised to share my slides and have done so at the bottom of this posting.

To gather input for my slides, I asked our members and also posted a blog called Great intranets still have a long way to go in advance of my presentation. The discussion has since continued on this blog, with a particularly great comment arriving yesterday from Damian Webber:

Organisations can only learn from another organisation’s intranet if they first learn how that intranet relates to the ‘personality’ of the organisation. This is why cut and paste functionality from one intranet manager to another most ends in #FAIL.

I tend to agree with this, in particular with specific functionality, although obviously intranet managers can learn a great deal from meeting face to face.

The challenge that received the most questions in London was concerning vendors, where I took a few questions specifically about SharePoint. One asked if the introduction of SharePoint meant that IT departments were taking back ownership of the intranet. I don’t think that is the case, but as Walters said, many organisations now have a somewhat illogical division between SharePoint as one internal application and then intranet as another. Our session moderator Martin White from Intranet Focus commented that SharePoint might in fact be good intranet news for many organisations, as it has forced many to think more about governance and the untapped potential of intranets.

Thank you to the many members and other peers who contributed with helpful feedback.

Download slides: Great Intranets (PDF, 1 Mb)

If you’d like to learn from other organisations where the intranet is truly business critical, I’d encourage you to join our international intranet conference in Copenhagen on March 22 2011.