There are mistakes, and there are killer mistakes. A successful intranet needs a lot of work and careful thought; some mistakes will limit success, others will kill the intranet.

In his recent column Lessons Learned: How to Avoid the Top 10 Intranet Mistakes my colleague Carm Porco, VP, Prescient Digital Media, provides some advice to avoid 10 of the most common intranet mistakes. To build on his list of favorites I thought I’d publish a slightly different list, one that concentrates on the ‘killer’ mistakes.

Note: a killer mistake doesn’t mean that the intranet dies, and shuts down – that simply doesn’t (commonly) happen. A killer mistake is strategic in nature; a strategic error that prevents the intranet from moving forward, halted by inertia or a state of purgatory. This purgatorical state is a broken state where the intranet can no longer progress in its current form without a complete restructuring – which often includes a new governance, technology, information architecture and design.

#1 Killer – No plan

An intranet manager at a major communications company lamented about the phenomenal amount of wasted time, money and effort exhausted in evolving their enterprise intranet portal that serves tens of thousands of employees. In one year, the intranet was redesigned three times – sucking significant funds and patience from an organization that should be using the intranet to support rather than drain the bottom-line. Of an extended team of more than a dozen people working on the intranet, only one person remains.

If your intranet or portal has no plan, then it is wandering aimlessly; achieving no goals and serving no prescribed good. While an intranet or portal without a plan can still be of some good to the organization, its value is severely limited and understated – and its going nowhere without a complete overhaul. The intranet without a plan is designed and grown by the whim of one or a few individuals working in isolation of others.

These intranets are often protected by the sole owner(s) and are treated as a fiefdom within the organization. Disruptive politics between the owner(s) and other parties seeking to play a role often handicap the intranet beyond simple repair. The only solution is to reinvent the intranet with a broader ownership and governance model followed by a well defined plan.

Recommendations:

Nexus of Intranet Success

Is Your Intranet Headed for Extinction - Part II: Planning for Success

#2 Killer – Politics

Inexorably linked to the above, politics begets a slow death. What intranet manager or stakeholder has not been privy to intranet politics? It’s ubiquitous and goes hand-in-hand with any intranet’s evolution. However, while politics are naturally occurring with any intranet and can be expected, debilitating politics will kill your intranet.

Debilitating politics, where the evolution of the intranet is completely halted or hampered by a lack of consensus and the absence of any `decision-making’ that carries clout and ensures progress is made. The politics of course is the competing politics of different groups with differing visions and priorities – namely communications, IT, human resources, and key business units, etc.

I’ve been talking to one energy utility for four years. The utility approached me about helping them evolve their intranet into a high-value business system from the unproductive sloth it currently represents. Sadly, four years of bickering between various groups and business units has produced nothing. A terrible intranet four years ago is little better today and a massive leap from achieving its potential. This intranet is dying a slow death that will come one day when there is the clout to undertake a proper plan and restructuring; until then the utility’s intranet will flounder in intranet purgatory.

The best way to combat debilitating politics is by achieving consensus and cooperation through a well defined governance model. Should your intranet survive the politics of competing stakeholder priorities then the value the intranet or portal delivers will be severely limited unless a proper governance model is developed.

Recommendations:

Ruling by committee (with IBM case study)

The Politics of Intranet Ownership

Collaborative Governance (Intranet Politics Part II)

#3 – Technology driven business

One prominent financial services firm purchased a CMS for $1.5 million. The CMS limited the number of publishers, it limited the number of pages that could be stored and published, and it proved unstable. Worst of all, the company that supported the product went bankrupt, leaving the client with no support. A little more than one year after they implemented the CMS, they had to scrap it. One wonders if the outcome would be different had they properly addressed their business requirements and constructed a thorough plan.

Sadly, IT’s credibility, skill and intelligence is being undermined by being left to make business decisions in the absence of necessary intelligence and planning. More often than not – and likely the case in about 95% of organizations – the cart is being put before horse: the intranet or portal technology is chosen before any plan or business requirements analysis.

The worst proponents of technology driven intranets are the respective sales forces of Microsoft (SharePoint), IBM (Louts Notes, Domino and Websphere) and portal and content management vendors (the lines between the two are blurring) such as Plumtree and Vignette. It’s not really their fault per se though – they’re just doing their job. Most organizations that are buying, however, are not doing their job. I don’t know how many times I ‘ve talked to a company that tells me, “We’ve just installed a CMS and now we need a plan...” or, “we’re about to buy SharePoint and need some help.” You get what you deserve...

How do you know what technology you need if you don’t know what the business needs? Simple: you cannot know. Do your homework: build a plan and then choose the technology.

Continued with... Killer intranet mistakes #4 and #5

OTHER RELATED READING:

Cadillac vs. Hyundai CMSs

Pssst, wanna buy a CMS?

Content Management Proves Costly Without Planning

AUCKLAND, NZ – Denham Grey poses an interesting question in his mot recent blog, “What exactly is the role of podcasting in knowledge work?”

“To be honest - I'm not sure - the place, value and importance of podcasting is still emerging within PKM and corporate KM.

Here are some areas where podcasting can contribute to businesses

eBriefings - from policy announcements to strategy changes - an easy way to keep employees and customers informed while on-the-go. eBusiness can profit from this genre too.

The opportunities for podcasting appear to be quite wide in the business and personal world but all applications and practices are still very new (post september 2004).”

I’ve been wondering myself… do employees want to listen to podcasts? I can see employees listening to the odd message from the CEO – certainly webcasts have become popular for those that can’t see the CEO in-person. But I doubt too many would download a podcast so that they could listen to it later on an iPod.

There is no doubt inherent value for those that are willing to listen. Some practical uses for corporate employee podcasting include:

Ø       Executive briefings

Ø       Training

Ø       Employee bios

Paul Chin has written an interesting overview look (The Evolution of Corporate Communications) at the evolution of corporate communications and with it the use of technology including the more recent use of RSS, podcasting and vodcasting:

"Communication mediums can be classified into two methods: the sender pushes the message to the receiver (e.g., sending an e-mail) or the receiver pulls the message from a source (e.g., reading an intranet post). In the '90s, the IT industry was abuzz with the concept of push technology, a method of delivering content to users' desktop without requiring them to actively seek it out. The technology, however, never lived up to its hype and communications fell back to old stalwarts: the intranet and e-mail.

But they have their problems too. Posting corporate communications on an intranet requires employees to access the system repeatedly because they won't know when new information will be posted."

One thing that can’t be stressed enough: as valuable as technology is, and despite the intranet’s pivotal and crucial role and value to the organization, face-to-face communications rules above all other media. Ask employees in almost any organization and in-person meetings – formal or informal with one’s manager – continues to be the single most important communications channel (non-leading question).

Therefore, with all of the focus and energy being spent on technology (which I fully support for good reason) a sound employee communications plan must also account for valuable manager communications in the form of team and one-on-one staff meetings.

Hey, I may be an intranet wonk, but I’d like to think of myself as pragmatic.