Realizing the significance of a decentralized approach to sharing, accessing and updating organizational information, many companies have integrated intranets into their businesses.
Successful intranets not only have an outstanding track record of increasing employee collaboration and engagement, they have also emerged as major contributors for effective knowledge management within the organization.
However, there are two sides to every coin. If there is no proper maintenance and continuous upgradation of the intranet, adoption rates fall drastically and employees slowly start to lose interest in its usage.
“The intranet is becoming stale, there is no fresh content to share and accessing information takes a lot of time” – This is the most often heard complaint from employees about intranets. Their concern is valid. Typically, it takes about three years for any organization to see any kind of value from the usage of an intranet.
During this time, if the content on the intranet is not updated on an ongoing basis or the intranet lacks essential features such as social networking, gamification etc., employees lose interest quickly and eventually stop using it. Consequently, the intranet becomes a glorified shared folder or a central repository.
Abhishek Shanbhag