How to make your intranet suck less

An intranet can be a powerful tool for learning in organisations. But, very often, the company intranet sucks. One way to overcome this is to make them more social. But this is easier said than done. Here's one suggestion to make intranets more social and less sucky.

Virtue of patience

This morning I visited a Tokyo primary school to see my seven-year-old nephew in concert and was amazed to see they'd laid on a whole orchestra. Why not stick to something simple like the recorder? An orchestra seemed like a bit of a song and a dance to me. I suppose I should have known better. Japanese teachers are just like the rest of us - they like an easy life. But, unlike the rest of us, they're not dumb enough to go for the 'easy' option.

The kids treated us to the theme from the Mickey Mouse Club with ten kids playing the 'call' of the first few notes on a melodian answered by another ten providing a 'response' on xylophones. Add in a bass drum, some tambourines, triangles, drums and, yes, some recorders and you have yourself a show. Each kid simply needs to learn about ten notes and the patience to wait till it's their bit. Guess which is harder for the average seven-year-old?

Virtual Learning

Learning organisations should take of this. Intranets are often used for mundane clerical tasks or as glorified filing systems. But they have the potential to be so much more. You only have to look at something like Facebook or Twitter to see this. This hasn't gone unnoticed by managers.

But success in launching an in-house version of Facebook is far from inevitable, especially if it's half-baked. One company I worked with included some simple (ie rubbish) games on their intranet so that staff had 'something to do at lunchtime'. You can guess how well that went down. It's an example of what's called the creepy treehouse effect in education. From this, the company concluded that further efforts weren't worth it. And guess what? Unless your company has the resources of, say, Facebook your intranet will always seem half-baked.

Here are some other facts which get in the way:

• Specially-designed 'enterprise' versions of social media are often ugly, sucky and buggy.
• Learning Management Systems and Virtual Learning Environments are as ugly, sucky and buggy as anything on the market.
• Managers want to make sure staff are 'on message' so moderate everything
• People don't compare their intranet to another intranet. They compare it to Amazon or the BBC website.
• Intranets are full of documents written by managers.
• Company documents are formal. They're rarely fun.
• Intranets tend to reflect the silos of their parent organisations. They often have bits for each department and the HR bit and the training bit. This makes them a Usability nightmare (and results in madness like email bulletins reminding people people not to use email for tasks that can be completed using the intranet - this does happen)
• Crappy Information Architecture. Sometimes no Information Architecture.
• For every Facebook there's a hundred iYomus which fail.

I don't have a magic cure for the problems above. But I do have an observation. Most organisations will struggle to get anything that feels half as intuitive or with anything like the lobster-trap power of Facebook. So it's silly to even try. But you can have something useful if you remember that intranets are like school concerts. They're easier with an orchestra.

It's at about this point in a typical blog post that my analogies begin to stretch and fray. So, I'll come straight to the point. An orchestra in this case means as many types of content options using as many types of media as you can think of.

What kind of stuff am I talking about?
Some people might make podcasts. If podcasts seem complicated, people might like to record a little interview or they might make Audioboos:

Or make a simple animation:
GoAnimate.com: Teaching Personas Scaffold Classroom Management by monica22284

Like it? Create your own at GoAnimate.com. It's free and fun!

Or slideuments:

Enterprise 2.0 Knowledge Management - People at the Center

View more documents from T-Systems Multimedia Solutions.

Or multimedia slideshows:

Introduction To Knowledge Management

View more presentations from nickmilton.

Or short films from Ignite days, Pecha Kucha breakfast sessions or Ted talks. Or they might just post semi-random comments on interesting work-related resources. Or semi-random resources on totally random oddities and weirdness. I'm sure I've missed out loads of stuff here. (Or maybe added in too much? Who knows? This is the kind of stuff you don't find out till you try it.)

Loading up shedloads of 'content' is pointless. The main point of the intranet should be social. It's about developing Subject Matter Networks. It's about making your experts more discoverable. It's about Permission Learning. The stuff you upload can be rough and ready around the edges. And it doesn't need to last forever.

Oh, please don't it last forever. How many intranets have I seen with a document with the footer reading something like, "Produced aeons ago, due for review an aeon ago"? If somebody visits an obviously dormant website on the internet, they leave and never come back. Your intranet is no different.

Next post - The naive guide on how to set up a brain-friendly Knowledge Management system to leverage the virality of workers' social graphs in your Small to Medium Enterprise.