No career path for an intranet manager...? Not surprising given senior management attitudes

One evening during KMWorld & Intranets, I stood in the dark streets of San Jose, light rain falling, talking with a colleague discussing  career paths for intranet managers  and we ran into a conference attendee, an intranet manager in a very large organisation  I will leave un-named.

He feels strongly that an intranet manager cannot move up, nor sideways, only down.

It''s disturbing to realise how many intranet managers feel frustration and discouragement. I noticed this overall tone in many of the responses in my Global Intranet Strategy Survey.

I quote from a free text field in  the answers to the question "what obstacles do you perceive that prevent the intranet from achieving its full potential?"

* It has taken awhile for top management to see its worth.
* Most difficult task we face is getting people in the business to take responsibility for the content and to keep it up to date.
* New rollout has required employees to learn the new system and where to find things. Not everything has been migrated to the new portal yet. Disparate systems used for international offices in some cases. No strong mandate to use the portal versus other tools.
* Lack of ownership, poor alignment between individual goals and objectives and intranet capabilities
* Level of integration into employees' processes and into other systems is not high enough. Too little impact on personal productivity for many employees.
* Out-of-date infrastructure technology         
* Not a high priority for contributors
* No central department managing Intranet, not enough resources, budget. Intranet has a complex structure, no clear order and it's not easy to find information
* Network issues make it difficult to deliver on some of the functionality that we would like to implement. 
* Not well-conceived* not rich in content* no ownership* poor technology* no search* bad navigation* not seen as mission critical by anyone in senior management* etc.
* No governance and the infrastructure is not organized. Some folks use it as a file share. Some folks have no clue about what to publish and as a result we have PDFs posted that link to other PDFs on the site. Or Word docs - we don't have the resources for education* and again* no governance.
* Intranet is still largely at self-promotional stage, rather than productivity/collaboration/admin reduction. But getting better.
* Too many corporate (global) sites that don't matter. Is very confusing.
* Fragmented content and poor findability. Duplicate and contradicting contents.
* The intranet is not seen as a priority by senior management.
* Not enough senior buy-in.  Not enough knowledge at senior levels of its potential.
* Needs better awareness of how to optimize its use.
* Not enough support from top management and budget from IT for development of the next steps.

Yes, I DID focus here on the negative comments - but I invented nothing and left out a lot! All this from 101 intranet managers from around the world. (email me if you want a free copy of the report)

We have a lot of progress to make...

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Comments

[David Gammel]

I would flip the question with your nameless intranet manager. What next job does she/he want within the organization? What can they do to prepare themselves for that job and get the attention of whoever fills it? How can they leverage the power of the intranet to support that unit?

You may be waiting a long time if you rely on your employer to make opportunities for you.

[James McConnough]

No so far from the reality from my point of view, especially for :
- Not enough support from top management and budget from IT for development of the next steps.
- Intranet is still largely at self-promotional stage, rather than productivity/collaboration/admin reduction. But getting better
- Out-of-date infrastructure technology
- Not a high priority for contributors
- It has taken awhile for top management to see its worth
...and a lot of fear around the web2.0 topic because people could share their opinion at all levels of the organization ....