News

I just read a post by Gerry
McGovern suggesting that obstacles to Intranet success don’t lie with
oft-blamed senior management, but instead with intranet teams who aren’t
seeing, or seizing, the value of their mission.
Gerry refers to Jane McConnell’s Global
Intranet & Portal Strategies Survey, which reports on the top serious obstacles
for intranets:

1. Intranet not seen as a priority
2. Lack of awareness of the potential role of the intranet
3. Lack of ownership at a senior level
4. Lack of or insufficient
   search solution
5. Not aligned to processes, not essential for daily work

Here’s what
Gerry says:

The "top serious obstacles" do not lie with
senior management. They lie with the intranet teams themselves who see their
intranets as this vague way to "distribute information", rather than
make the organization more efficient and productive.

As I’ve been meeting intranet managers and management teams,
I am struck by the need for intranet leaders and their team members to evolve
their own thinking and skills in order to achieve more capabilities and value
for their intranet. Many teams, even in
large, global organizations, are still too tethered by their origins or the constraints
of  the corporate culture, to become a
function that elevates and enables work and business process.

But I’m not absolving “senior management” altogether: CIOs,
CTO’s and CEO’s should be joining with their intranet teams in broadening their
skills and thinking about intranets in order to let them reach their full potential.

Intranet managers and senior leaders must be big-picture
thinkers with the organizational experience, vision and knowledge to deliver work
processes, knowledge and tasks through the intranet. Intranet workers,
employees, and team members must also be able to understand and experience the
way individuals work across the organization, in order to translate that
experience correctly to the online environment.

In addition, intranet teams must be functionally agile, so
they can connect with organizations and processes in any corner of the
enterprise. Leaders must figure out a way to string together the architects and
database managers in IT, the knowledge management gurus, the communicators and
marketers across all business functions, and the designers, User Experience
professionals, and information managers in a typical intranet team. In order to
achieve this level of organizational agility, the culture of the organization
will have to shift also. Companies used to silos and rigid reporting lines must
adapt in order to allow the intranet’s full potential to be realized.

 
Even more important, though, is intranet managers and
workers must also see themselves in a new light. I recently had a conversation
with Mike Wing, VP of strategic communications at IBM and a former intranet
leader for that company. Mike made some great
statements about how intranet people (“Intranauts,” he used to say) need to be thinking
about their work:

"Your goal is not running the intranet, but rather
unleashing the capacity of the organization,” he said.

 Those of you in the trenches of daily intranet
management may be reading this and thinking that while this all sounds very
grand, there’s real work to be done. And there’s no doubt that the daily grind
of managing an intranet can be all-consuming.   For now, a few small but powerful activities
may get you and your leaders started down the path of evolving the intranet
thinking in your company:

1. Hold a roundtable to discuss this topic with other intranet site managers
   around the organization, and within your team.
2. Focus on organizational bottlenecks and roadblocks that prevent holistic approaches to intranet management, and hinder collaboration and communication across functions, geographies and organizational hierarchies.
3. Organize a “blue sky” session with senior leaders presenting some of the key challenges gathered from the previous steps. Allow participants the time and freedom to freely configure the organization to maximize intranet potential. (n.b. this shouldn’t result in an organizational land grab; let go of familiar arguments about ownership and power, if at all
     possible.)
4. Finally, go ahead and order yourself some new business cards: Congratulations, Chief Liberator of Organizational Capacity!