I did something a little silly at work yesterday. Well, perhaps not so much silly as risking colleagues thinking even more than they do now that I'm a wild nutter. Mmm, not sure about the structure of that sentence, but let us move on. What happened was that an email popped into my inbox. Digression: an email message is referred to as a "Note" where I work because we use Lotus Notes, a particularly awful, arse-backwards piece of software. My brother, a clever middleware dude, was first required to use it a little while back and sent me an unhappy, confused Note asking if Lotus Notes was for real, or simply an elaborate practical joke. I told him I wasn't sure. I'm still not.
Now, where was I? Oh yeah, this email pops up and it's from a handful of colleagues who have the task of improving departmental communications. Good stuff. So, natch, they're looking at our departmental intranet page which, I should explain, is hosted on the centrally-controlled, deodorised corporate intranet. Updates are effected, I think, by providing the intranet group with raw content once a week or so, which it then publishes on "our" page. Something like that. Anyway, they wrote, in part:
What do we do?
Our role is to improve Communications within the Department, in particular to review, monitor and increase use of the existing Department Intranet site.
The new Department web site
We will shortly launch a new Intranet site, containing more useful, relevant and up to date information. Whilst the existing site has been operating for some time now, the information on it is not updated regularly, and we believe it is not being used as well as it could be, by all members of the Department, for Communication purposes.
My brain, being what it is, instantly thinks of Cluetrain and a number of the 95 Theses in particular. I've been itching to put some of this stuff into practice, and this place is the most likely I know of to be receptive. So, I dashed off a scrambled response. I quoted the following of the 95 Theses: - As with networked markets, people are also talking to each other directly inside the company—and not just about rules and regulations, boardroom directives, bottom lines.
- Such conversations are taking place today on corporate intranets. But only when the conditions are right.
- Companies typically install intranets top-down to distribute HR policies and other corporate information that workers are doing their best to ignore.
- Intranets naturally tend to route around boredom. The best are built bottom-up by engaged individuals cooperating to construct something far more valuable: an intranetworked corporate conversation.
- A healthy intranet organizes workers in many meanings of the word. Its effect is more radical than the agenda of any union.
- While this scares companies witless, they also depend heavily on open intranets to generate and share critical knowledge. They need to resist the urge to "improve" or control these networked conversations.
And then I wrote: You can see where I'm going with this. If the Department site is going to be somewhere that people are keen to visit, it should have content generated by the people themselves, it should provide facilities for commenting, feedback, self-publishing. It should be a space where people can contribute to a discussion.The corollary is that if it's a once-a-week update via an approved channel, its appeal and usefulness and potential will be substantially compromised, evidenced I would suggest by the state of the current website. Well, I came in this morning to find the following wonderful response: Thanks for your feedback re the intranet site, the points made seem very valid to me. We are having a team meeting on Friday, and will discuss this concept further.
It may come to nothing, but who knows. One advantage of getting older is that people have begun to listen to what I say and sometimes don't burst out laughing. We shall see.
2:23:07 PM 
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