[Andrew McAfee] polled the audience about their Intranet.  NOBODY finds their own intranet easier to find information on, than the global unmanaged Internet.  The people trying to make intranets easy to use are failing at this job.  Bad situation and a deep puzzle.

Euan Semple, knowledge manager at BBS noted that managers talked mostly about “I can’t find anything”.  They have a big content management system.  Most of it was static documents stored in “knowledge coffins”.  One problem is that the structure was determined by someone else.  If user does not have the same mental model as the person who organized it, they can’t find anything.  If they do find something, the resulting document was usually terribly out of date.

Sharing his notes from a recent conference presentation by Andrew McAfee, Keith Swenson from Fujitsu shares this all too familiar anecdote about the failure of traditional intranets.

What's amazing is that we know this is true - we've know for years. But people are still desperately trying to fix these intranets and failing despite stronger governance, best practice information architecture, the latest software upgrades, etc etc...

Maybe its time to try something else?