Intranets are still in their infancy, and they require more involvement from senior management. These are two of the major bang-on conclusions of Jane McConnell’s superb study on intranets ("Intranet Strategies Today & Tomorrow").
“Senior management perception of the intranet is out of sync with reality on the ground,” says Jane, a France-based intranet consultant (who works internationally) and author of the NetJMC Blog blog. “They are largely unaware of the usefulness of the intranet for employees for their work. 55% of the respondents say that if the intranet were unavailable for 1 to 2 hours, employees would be disturbed in their work, yet only 13% of the respondents say that senior management perceives the intranet to be “business critical.”
No surprise there. The weakest intranets have the lowest level of involvement and active support from senior support. The best intranets have incredible senior management support.
Is it any surprise then that decision-making is an issue for most organisations? “Lack of awareness of the potential role of the intranet” is cited as the top obstacle for decision-making. Of course, there would be no problems with decision-making if there was in fact a senior management champion at the same organizations.
Money begets executive support. The study also found that, intranets lack sufficient funding and resources (though that almost half of the respondents expect their budgets to rise in 2007.
Jane’s study found that “almost 40% of the respondents have or plan to have internal blogs, significantly higher than the current or planned external blogs (around 15%).”
I still find it surprising then that given the current state of the intranet – what I referred to as ‘piss poor” and James Robertson referred to as “sh-te” (at this year’s IBF Live 2006) – that so many managers are obsessed about blogs, wikis and podcasting. They should be concerned about planning and governance and the role of executive management as part of that governance. But hey, blogs are certainly more sexy than governance models!!
Study participants represented 101 organisations headquartered in Europe,