Wednesday, September 06, 2006

Intranets killing the art of corporate communication

When you've built the monster, you've got to feed it. Nothing going on today? Tough, the intranet needs feeding.

More than any other electronic communication tool, intranets are becoming the Frankenstein's Monsters of corporate communication.

We spend £ thousands building the darned things - too often as apanaceaa for every communication woe. We employ specialist editorial and technical staff to make the things run and we measure our success on how many hits each page gains.

Yet they take away our ability to managecorporatee communication as they all too often become the consuming black hole, sucking in far too much communication resource and delivering too little in return. Intranets are just one tool in our communication kit - but how many organisations are making them the sole employee communication tool (or worse still, consider the fact that they have an intranet to equate with them being a communicating organisation).

There's an interesting debate going on over at the IABC's communication commons on this.
Check out http://commons.iabc.com/employee/2006/08/28/the-death-of-employee-comms-not-yet/. I've had my say of course.

I'm sufficiently old-school to see corporate communication as an art. Played delicately and with panache, it involves and engages - and enables the right business outcomes. The professional communicator is the coach and motivator as well as deliverer of a mix of media.

We've spent 30 years stating that one size does not fit all - but isn't that what creeping intranetism delivers?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

More of a sciences man, I can but agree. These monsters are just too inflexible and the firewall culture is, these days, damaging.

Intranets were good a decade ago. Now we have better tools and they cost less.