Boo! Okay, really, that’s about as scary as I’m going to get here. After all I am talking about intranets... dull, boring, uneventful intranets. Hell, I may be passionate about them but I’m also a realist...

On the eve of Halloween, and having seen so many hundreds of intranets, I thought it would be fun to relate my top 5 scariest moments in my intranet years. Of course, intranets can’t really be scary in the literal sense so when I say ‘scary’ I’m really meaning ‘stupid’.

Warning: the following contains scenes with little or no graphic violence, some suggestive language and only hints of nudity and explicit conduct. Caution: Stupid managers and executives who can relate to these should hide under a blanket or shiver with embarrassment. (Some of these stories I’ve related over the years but are too amusing not to relate again...)

·    A COO who berated me for making her intranet manager cry when I gave their intranet an evaluation score of 3.5 our of 10 (when asked to rate the intranet themselves, her senior management rated the intranet even worse: 3 out of 10). Man, I’m a cruel bastard!

·    A CEO of a major financial services company with a horribly pathetic intranet with a a zero-dollar budget and was looking to cut funding further... “I think we’ve invested too much in technology already.” Blood from a stone anyone?

·    An intranet manager who put an animated cartoon caricature of a jogging Bill Clinton on the intranet HR home page. Said the intranet manager when asked the value to the business of an animated U.S. President, “... he’s sooo cute!” I guess Dick Cheney wasn’t sexy enough...

·    A Director of Human Resources: “I don’t understand why we need an intranet... I mean we have a pretty good phone system that cost us a lot!” Forget the phones; I think ‘telegrams’ are due for a comeback.

·    Any company, at any time, that chooses an intranet consultant based on a blindly designed mock-up. Forget about a plan, employee productivity, or ROI, what kind of colors and stock images will you use?!?!?!

Any scary or stupid tales to relate? Let me know and I’ll give it ink!

RELATED READING:

The Thirteen Scariest Things in IT

(PARIS, FRA) Clearly I don’t have enough free time on my hands that I should spend any time thinking of this, but since this particular trip is completely subsumed by everything intranet (on behalf of clients and conferences), here is a randomly generated metaphor that springs to mind as I sit in a brasserie downing a quick and unremarkable verre de Merlot before my harried return to London on the Eurostar….

Paris is like a corporate intranet:

• Large and sprawling;
• Busy and bewildering;
• Noisy and vibrant;
• Culturally rich;
• Confusing and inconsistent navigation schemas (signs);
• Highly political; and
• Its citizens are highly demanding and passionate with extraordinarily diverse needs and interests.

There really is no other city like Paris (of course, Nice has always struck me as just a smaller, richer, sunnier version…) but the same could be said of some of the other great cities I’ve spent time in the past week: New York, London and Vancouver.

Landmark spectacles that Paris has that should be present on the average intranet:

• Fine museums (detailed historical and photographical archives);
• Large pointy towers that serve no particular purpose but to attract flocks of cash wielding people;
• Brasseries avec Kronenburg et Bordeaux;
• Sprawling artistic cemeteries with rotting, famous musicians, poets and actors; and
• A massively ornate, excessively expensive shrine to a formerly disgraced megalomaniac and war mongering dictator.

Oh wait, actually the intranet could do without the last two… but the Bordeaux would be nice.