The best possible intranet? We have it.

What are intranets actually used for?

1. Pushing authoritative content (and building an archive)

The main reason for adopting an intranet is to have a place to publish content instead of spamming people's inboxes. Intranets are typically curated by a team of knowledge management experts and corporate communications who fight a daily battle between the interesting and the necessary. When those battles are lost (usually due to pressure to publish content that somebody feels should have an audience), the newsletters come back. Only this time, the newsletters link to the intranet.

2. Finding authoritative content, link collections and searching the archive

After a while, all that authoritative content builds up into an authoritative corpus. Much of it should go the way of the dodo, but HR policies, best practices, useful links etc. form a helpful springboard into the maze that every company above a certain size becomes. So helpful, in fact, that this collection of links becomes the intranet - it may literally become "the place where the bookmarks are, and it also has some news".

3. Interactivity

In an ideal world, intranets would be places of interactivity. Everybody loves feedback, and when you publish something, likes and positive comments are helpful and keep you going (your's truly is not an exception).

In my opinion, interactivity is a pseudo-argument. As every instagram user will tell you, 10% of visitors like content, and 10% of likes are accompanied by a comment. The statistics I observe would call such numbers hopelessly optimistic. Intranets are not social media. Even like buttons, if unclicked, can quickly become a statement you would not want below your content. The quality of comments would be a different topic entirely. Not because something can be done, it must be done.

The intranet of the future

There's a lot of money to be made with intranets (commercial intranets just won't go away). But the market appears to stagnate at best - it's been a while since I heard somebody talk about the "intranet killer app", as compared to productivity suits or instant messaging. Same for corporate social media, by the way. And why is Google not adding an intranet product to G Suite? Because they already have.

Over the last year, it became clear that our G Suite installation already is the biggest intranet we have ever had. It's just different: It's a body of knowledge created by every single person at your company, growing by collaborating, becoming updated or obsolete or going into curated archives as the content requires, without central control. That's what intranet architects have always dreamed about.

It may just need you to give it a nudge, or two:

Organize a Site-based portal - well-structured and in plain sight

Get your strategy right. Is a portal right for you? Would you better be served by LOS portals? Should HR have its own portal? This is an opportunity to reorganize knowledge management and communications in your company, and to get it right by leveraging something people already know and use.

Consider what you have. I question the value of migrating content from portals - the benefit is small, old content will fit awkwardly (if at all) into the new environment and there can be so much manual rework that the few relevant bits of content could have been recreated faster by hand. If your HR policies and announcements are already on Drive, integrating them will take minutes, not months. Finally, consider that migration is often an excuse for inaction - it's hugely expensive and impossible to start small, so there's a risk of not ever getting started.

Empower a great team. Selecting a great team (that will stick around) and building a Site is the fun part. But that team needs to be empowered - by giving them authority and requiring essential communication to be available on the portal only (no newsletters!). Share responsibility for maintaining the site. Build feedback mechanisms. And include oddballs on the team who make sure the site doesn't become boring by listening to your community.

With all the money you saved from NOT buying yet another isolated intranet solution, you're bound to create something great.

I hope to have given you some ideas about what is possible when we string together all the technology at our disposal. There is so much value to be unlocked - amazing, engaging portals will be the next valuable addition to emerge out of our ecosystem. Thank you for reading!