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Subject:Re: Intranets - Don't go there? From:Elna Tymes <Etymes -at- LTS -dot- COM> Date:Fri, 18 Oct 1996 11:33:32 -0700
Arlen -dot- P -dot- Walker -at- JCI -dot- COM wrote:
> You need to do more than publicize it. "If you build it and show it, they
> will come?" Yeah, right. You need to make sure that the various departments
> are *willing* to have stuff put on it. Internal politics will kill an
> intranet quickly. A corporate cilture made up of fiefdoms will sabotage it
> every chance they get.
No question. Imposition of something of the "I'm doing this for your
own good" school probably won't get you anywhere. As you suggest, making
an intranet successful requires buy-in from many players, from
management on down. It should be testament to the buy-in process that
so many successful intranets are growing BECAUSE people are finding
they're useful.
> Is its maintenance a high prioirty, or simply a task that gets done when
> someone gets around to it? Let it languish even a little, and once again
> people will stop using it.
Again, I agree with you. When we do intranets for our clients, one of
the selling points is the fact that we can teach anyone HTML in two
hours, and that there are a lot of word-processor-to-HTML solutions
available that make actually knowing HTML coding mostly unnecessary. So
anyone with the right passwords can load new information. When we leave
an intranet behind, we also train people in the need to keep it
updated. Thus far, all of them are doing so.
> You know, we've had email here for a decade or more. It never got much use
> until recently. For most of the time it's been present here, few would have
> missed it had it been taken away.
Granted, again. However, if you were to take it away TODAY, you'd hear
howls of protest from people who have discovered its utility. I, too,
know of a number of people who are not using email - and in fact, are
reluctant to use a computer for much of anything. However, I suspect
that most of these folks are 45 or older, and in most cases don't have
long life expectancies in the business world. What new information
technologies provide is improved access to and use of information, and
increasingly that's where business in general is headed. Intranets are
simply one of the information tools.
