Intranet managers ‘little more than administrators’

By Graeme Burton

INTRANET MANAGERS are, too often, little more than mere administrators who willingly publish everyone’s work – and who do too little to prioritise the content that staff really need to see. That is the opinion of web design guru Gerry McGovern in his latest book, Killer Web Content, which is due for publication in mid-November.

The administrative attitude of ‘putteruppers’, as McGovern calls them, results in intranet sites that are overloaded with irrelevant content in which it is difficult for staff to find exactly what they need.

What organisations typically need – and this is equally true for many public-facing websites as it is for intranets – are ‘managing editors’ with the power to accept or reject content and to edit it as appropriate to ensure that intranets and websites retain their relevance to their users, believes McGovern.

“Most intranets are out of control – the quantity of crap on them vastly outweighs the good content because the concepts of editing and managing editing are alien to most companies,” says McGovern. “You get the dictatorship of the author – vanity and irrelevance – and for staff to find the stuff they need becomes increasingly difficult.”

Organisations therefore need to appoint a member of staff to rigorously vet and edit whatever goes onto their intranet, to ensure that the most important information is placed to the fore, and that articles are archived – and removed – accordingly when they cease to be useful.

The cost of appointing such a person will be mitigated by the accumulated efficiency savings from improving access to information, making it easier and less time-consuming for staff to find what they need, quickly and easily, believes McGovern.