Intranet Overload: The answer is in embracing constraints, not AI

We all know what it’s like to spend more time searching for a film on a streaming service like Netflix than actually watching a film. Sifting through an enormous amount of information, only to find very little value, feels awful. Now imagine that your intranet workspace was designed to feel like Netflix. This is exactly what CIO Prakash Kota is doing at AutoDesk. Kota wants the transition from work to play to “feel less drastic,” as he stated in the WSJ article “Autodesk CIO Wants to Create ‘Netflix’ Experienced for Employees,” written by Sara Castellanos. The goal of this AI-embedded intranet project is to improve the user experience for employees. But is “the lack of AI” and a “Netflix” experience for the intranet the right problem to solve? 

Before we add AI to any intranet in order to manage all the features, information, policies, etc. an organization has piled onto that intranet, it may be time to ask whether, perhaps, the problem is the amount of information, not the “feel” of trying to sift through it.

Seemingly sophisticated solutions, like AI, usually create and reinforce needless complexity rather than minimize it. Technology tools can be configured to effectively have no boundaries. We can store enormous amounts of information. While this sounds good, it has created a big problem. Management now has no real limits on the amount of information it can produce, share, and store.

When I ran a large agency years ago, I visited one of our offices. It was a chance for those managers and program directors to meet with me and share their ideas and feedback. One of their big ideas was to create a search engine on our intranet. The goal was to make it easier to navigate the volumes of policies and procedures. While search engines are not a bad thing, they weren’t the solution in this case. Rather, the organization first needed to reframe the goal. Access to policies and procedures is a means to an end; in this case, the end is more accurate and timely decisions. With this goal in mind, management should ask themselves, if we couldn’t use a search engine or AI, what would we do to simplify information to make better decisions? 

AI is often a useful part of our daily lives and will shape our future. Spotify, for example, provides a tailored experience for the customer with its focus on machine learning. Spotify’s environment and core problems are different from AutoDesk’s. Spotify works in a rapidly  changing environment, with endless musicians in endless genres, creating endless music. Sorting through and selecting music in an environment like that is almost impossible for the customer without assistance from technology. Spotify needs to answer the question: what specific music, of all the music that is available, does the customer prefer? Artificial intelligence does this efficiently and effectively.

AutoDesk must ask different questions, because they have a different environment and a different goal. The information necessary for their employees to succeed can be determined and controlled. The problem is figuring out what is essential. The right questions to ask are: how can we protect our employees’ time and effort by changing the work itself? If we really want to help our employees, what can we stop doing? Instead of trying to find a program we can add, which will make the whole thing more complex, what can we remove? What information is absolutely essential and may not be available? To support an employee’s experience, we must weed out the information that prevents them from doing the job they were hired to do while including the information they do need.  This may require a gatekeeper and hurdles to ensure these important questions are answered prior to flooding employees with more and more information.  Once AutoDesk answers these questions and acts on them, AI may be a helpful tool. Using the tool without first understanding why is decorating the fish— giving us only the illusion of progress. 

G.K. Chesterton stated it perfectly: “The essence of every picture is the frame.” Constraints are what force us to innovate, prioritize, and determine what is truly essential. Because technology removes information constraints from management, management needs to impose these constraints on itself. If they don’t, management will find themselves trying to manage the new complexity rather than achieving their goals.