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...look like the World Wide Web--circa 1998.
While the Web itself has undergone unprecedented and dramatic change, intranets have stagnated from inattention and lack of funding. Sure, company resources are committed to maintaining the servers and adding content. A staggering number of companies abandoned print in their rush to embrace intranets, leaving the medium one of the few mass-distribution communication tools available. Yet employees who see what the Web has become--and have taken advantage of it both for personal and work purposes--can only roll their eyes and shake their heads at the static, one-way relic that passes for online content inside their organizations.
How we have found ourselves in this sad state is a subject for speculation (although it's not too much of a stretch to imagine executives, underwhelmed by what the intranet has produced against its original promise, rejecting the idea of sinking any more money into it). Of greater concern are the consequences: The company moves slowly, unable to react to competitive pressures. Employees are increasingly frustrated (and less engaged) as it becomes more difficult to find the resources and information they need to do their jobs. Topflight job candidates accept competing offers from companies whose intranets more closely mirror what they have come to expect from an online experience.
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Bringing your intranet into the 21st century will pay huge dividends, but it is no small task. While the investment required to upgrade the intranet doesn't have to be huge (much of the software is open source and free, or at least very inexpensive), a commitment by the organization's most senior leaders to a new way of working is required, along with a high degree of trust in employees to use the resources in the company's best interests. In other words, a cosmetic face-lift won't do the job. Putting lipstick on a digital pig is a far cry from making some fundamental shifts in the role employees play in the internal online world. Companies have to stop looking at employees as consumers of information and view them instead as content producers.
A growing number of companies recognize that there is value in rejuvenating their intranets in the Web 2.0 mold, and they're not all the high-tech suspects you might imagine. Financial institutions, accounting firms and electronics companies are joining...
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