Are intranet teams feeling the pinch?
Categorised under: Intranets
The “managing an intranet during a recession” topic seems to be popping up all over the globe, and we covered it at last week’s Intranet Leadership Forum workshop in Melbourne.
Interesting, when we asked for a show of hands from those feeling the pinch due to the economic conditions, only one hand went up (and they were from a bank, so no big surprise). No problem for the session, still plenty to discuss on how to demonstrate value and on achieving sustainability for the intranet team.
But it raises the question: are intranet teams feeling the pinch?
I see a few possibilities:
- There’s a time lag, and the impact of the worsening economic conditions will hit intranet teams soon.
- Intranet are so buried in organisations that they will be shielded from macro-economic issues.
- Intranet teams are already poorly resourced, and this won’t change much regardless of what’s happening outside.
- Intranet teams are naively oblivious of what’s happening in the real world, and the coming storm.
Your thoughts?
James Robertson is the Managing Director of 
5 Comments:
In my own experience, the third answer is the most coorect (sigh!)
Intranet teams who are part of larger communications teams might feel the pinch. But I think this might come as job losses rather than the withdrawal of budget (they often have little of budget anyway).
Communications teams in large organisations tend to grow if not checked and need to be trimmed every so often. I think a few will be getting trimmed soon.
Your pick list omits the (unthinkable?) possibility that some intranet teams are, in fact, not getting pinched. I’m working with two large enterprise intranet/portal teams that are growing despite budget cuts going on in their larger organizations. Why? They’ve gained the faith of management at a high level. It’s all about having an influential advocate and delivering a solution whose value is patently apparent. I’m not oblivious enough to suggest this is the general trend; I just want to inject some positive energy into this discussion — some teams are, in fact, bucking economics.
I DID feel the pinch. I was the main Intranet person in the Communications dept. for a North American-wide company. The problem was not that the team needed downsizing (it was still very lean considering the size of the organization), but the IT folks decided that the new continental intranet we wanted to build was not mission critical and so tabled the project for the coming year to reduce capex. Since that was about 45% of my job, when headquarters wanted to reduce headcount, I was the obvious choice in our group. The Communications people knew the importance of the intranet, and we were lucky to have a boss (Marketing Veep) who knew it as well. IT, however, exists in their own world, and generally act outside of concerns from the rest of the group (unless there’s a CEO name attached).
P.S. One month later, I’m still have no day job.
Hi Roger, great story, exactly what we want to hear! This our consistent message: if we can demonstrate business value then the business will support us…
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[...] Intranet Benchmarking Forum (IBF) has already commented on the recession-proof intranet, while James Robertson in Australia recently asked whether intranet teams are feeling the pinch? [...]