Intranets not working

Photo adapted from Magnus_d

For those of you who know Gerry McGovern you'll be used to his "shock and awe" tactics. I was glad to see that he knows about Jame's little get together in Sydney next week and as such shot a broadside across the bows of this upcoming soirée.

Gerry's article was titled THE REAL REASON WHY INTRANETS AREN’T WORKING ! Just about enough to get some goats going.

I agree with Gerry that most intranets, would you believe even the ones I've worked on, are indeed "a swamp of gross inefficiencies".

I'm picking that the great and good of the Intranet world in Asia Pacific, present at Intranets 2012 will provide some insights into how to begin draining the swamp and providing "digital workplaces" where the staff are moved out of the "suck zone" faster and more quickly become "minimum badass users" [as per Kathy Sierra's presentation at Webstock 2012].

Several of the responses to Gerry's post I've seen have pointed out that teaching users to use the tools they have, before providing new ones would be a great help. I agree. So much so that I've been looking, unsuccessfully so far, for

• an intranet based typing tutor that has some pedagogical basis, so we can move folks from 2 finger pokers to both hand typists.
  At a guess the productivity gain would be about 30%.
• really great "how do I" training modules for Outlook / Word / Excel and an introduction to code scripting.
  Any one of these would provide a 10 - 50% increase in productivity.

Oh and both of them would give your staff a real value proposition for visiting your intranet.

so if you know of any solutions to these two issues, or have a kick ass intranet please let me know in the comments section.

Dorje