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Bigger does not always mean better...

Toby Ward has written a very interesting piece on the Prescient blog called "Bigger Intranets are not always better" from the introduction to the blog post.

"Most intranets are awful; they're chronically underfunded, mired in politics, lack any meaningful governance, and use poorly implemented technology"

A sweeping statement you might be thinking, but I've seen a few Intranets in my time and 90% of them are as described above. So what makes a big Intranet bad? well Toby outlines his top three reasons that big Intranets go bad, they are:

• Organisational complexity - who owns the Intranet, who is going to pay for it etc
• Technology complexity - the bigger an Intranet it the more requirements you're likely to have and the more complicated your CMS or WCMS will have to be!
• Politics - lets not go there!
• Funding - why invest in something that isn't being used and nobody wants to use?

At this point most Intranet managers look for the nearest window but it isn't all doom and gloom because Toby then briefly looks at how smaller Intranets can make bigger ones sit up take notice and get on with it!

[Photo from FlickR - apparently "Big Boy" is a restaurant chain in the US]

Full post as published by LI Issues on February 21, 2011 (boomark / email).