Remove the intranet!

I had a colleague who once said; remove the intranet why should we keep it? At that time I thought he was crazy but after time has passed I happen to agree to some extent. Even if I wouldn’t remove it I think he highlighted an important part to the intranet complexity. Let me mention a few misconceptions and inputs about the intranet:

1. People think that everything that is published on the net will be seen by everyone within the organization. Wrong, most likely only 10 percent of all content that is published will be seen by others.
2. Intranet is the place where you’ll find everything. Again wrong, one of the biggest issues today with intranet is that they try to solve all the problems one could imagine. They try to be an information portal, a news site, a tool, a social media platform or just a friend when you need one. What organizations need to do is to think about the overall purpose with the intranet and decide which way they should take their intranet.
3. Intranet could act as a sanctuary for criminals when they want to disappear, because no one would ever find them. In a lot of organizations the famous intranet gets many interesting nicknames all which tend to refer to, “things to be hidden”. Again this comes back to organizations lack of being able to decide on the overall purpose, but also it goes hand in hand with a narrow search functionality which sometimes or often makes it impossible to find the typical needle in the haystack.

So have I also put myself in the dark corner of outing intranets? No, I wouldn’t say so, though I have realized the importance on fine-tuning and using the intranet to what it should be used for and nothing else. I’m also well aware that intranet from a communicative perspective on sharing and giving information should preferably be combined with a face to face interaction.

 Henrik Axelsson Helping leaders and organizations strengthen their communicative skills