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Conducted by Amárach Consulting, the study of some 218 workers “responsible for managing intranets in their organizations” also indicated that 86% of participants indicated that intranet will become more important in the near future.
Neither of this of course is news, but it of course it is important to once again stress why intranets are not being used to the extent they should. The onus however is not on employees to go use it – the onus is on the organization and intranet managers to deliver the value and inform and educate the masses.
Reason #1: No value, no use. Sadly, most corporate intranets are still woefully sub-par. Employees see little value, are confused by poor navigation schemas and unwieldy search results (normally because of poor content management and meta tagging – or the complete absence of it). If the intranet delivers little value and confuses and frustrates users, then use will be predictably low.
Reason #2: No marketing, no use. If you use it, they will not come. Some will, but like everything in life, if employees know little about the intranet other than the quick glimpses they get of the home page, then use will be correspondingly low. The intranet must be sold and promoted. (For more information, see Marketing the intranet).
Reason #3: Change management. Most employees are far less web savvy than you and me. Most staff are used to gaining information and collaborating through different channels – namely face-to-face, e-mail and phone communications. As such, making the intranet an important tool and system in the daily lives of workers is an exercise in change management which requires not only education, training and promotion, but systemic changes to internal business systems. For example, most organizations still allow employees to set their own default home page within their browser. It’s nice to have that freedom of course, but employees at work to work. I’m not an advocate of blocking Internet access to, for example, news and sports websites, but I’d make employees work for it.
Reason #4: Technology cart before the horse. Just about every organization has done it: selected the intranet platform or system, designed and launched the home page and then decided (sometimes years after the fact) that a plan is needed. There are thousands of content management systems, portal products and other emerging platforms out there… how does the standard organization know which is best for them without developing a comprehensive plan that itemizes and weights it’s business and functional requirements.
The Irish intranet study found that 61% of respondents indicated that they used Microsoft systems for their intranet. Why is that? I’ll tell you why: Microsoft have amazing marketing and sales. Most companies operate on Windows and MS-Office. Making the decision to buy MS-Sharepoint and MS-CMS are safe decisions. And these products work for some organizatons. However, what works for one organization will not necessarily work for another. Like people, they’re all different – with different needs, expectations and cultures. It’s good for Microsoft that many companies automatically defer to Microsoft products without a comprehensive plan, it’s bad for the intranet and employees.
OTHER SURVEY FINDINGS:
- 28% made Google the most popular proprietary search technology on intranet.
- 67% said there is no benchmarking of intranet against industry standards.
- 78% said they did not know of, or did not have any accessibility compliance.
- About 55% of intranets are controlled by IT.
- While a great variety of tools and features are available, document management, contact management and e-learning are consistently present.
- Both in-house and proprietary content management technologies are used in equal measure.
- Detailed tracking of staff or department use of intranet does not take place.
- Accessibility compliance is low at 20% but major improvements in this area planned.
- Almost 50% indicating that intranet had been revised and re-developed more than three times since inception; a significant number of organizations, 18% said they had developed and revised intranet deployments more than 5 times.
- Equal numbers of respondents 42% in both instances, indicated that they used in-house and proprietary Content Management Systems, with 16% saying they did not know the specifics of the CMS used.
- There was a three way split between respondents when asked to assess the level of importance of intranet compared to Internet. With 37% stating intranet was more important, 30% stating intranet and Internet were equally important and 33% stating intranet was less important.
ABOUT THE SAMPLE:
The survey was based on a representative sample of companies and organizations ranging in size from fewer that 50 employees to more that 250 and covering public and private sectors.
For the detailed report by the Irish Computer Society, please see Intranet Ireland 2006 Report.
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ON A PERSONAL NOTE: I’m splitting my time today between