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Controllable Factors

You have a paddle for a reason: To steer your boat through the rapids. It's there, not to battle the currents like two butting heads, but to allow you and the boat to maneuver within it.

You have the ability to guide your intranet to a desirable destination by gaining an understanding of your corporate culture and the users within it. And in order to minimize any negative influences of culture on your intranet, you need to be aware of your user community's requirements, professional background, and work habits. Otherwise, you'll be paddling your boat with a pool cue.

Among some of the foreseeable and controllable impacts of corporate culture on an intranet, none are so obvious as:

• Functionality: Corporate culture will dictate what your intranet has to offer its users. If your culture relies heavily on team collaboration, you may consider including features such as online meetings and conferences, instant messaging, discussion groups, and shared calendars and scheduling. But if your culture is based more on independent and self-reliant users, you may wish to offer online tools that allow them to query databases and search for, or create, information on their own without the need to go through a third party.

• Design: A corporate culture ingrained in technology will gain more from a no-nonsense intranet based more on strict functionality and less on flash; while a culture less technically inclined may prefer one that's simpler and more user-friendly.

Uncontrollable Factors

Unfortunately, there are times when, regardless of how hard you paddle, the current just refuses to allow you to pass. It fights you every inch of the way and you'll find yourself horribly off course.

Corporate culture is, and will always be, an X-factor. Like the ebb and flow of the tides, it can push away just as easily as it can draw in. You can interview core groups of prospective users and shadow workgroups to gain an understanding of how they operate, and carefully plan out every stage of development and implementation, but there are uncontrollable forces at work that can doom your intranet despite all this preparation:

• An open resistance to change
• The lack of a cooperative team atmosphere
• Individuals or groups who hoard information

Open Resistance to Change

Habits are always difficult to break. Trying to change the way someone has worked for years has little to do with the efficiency of the new method. You can tell users that an intranet will cut their old process time in half but if they're resistant to change, all the statistics in the world won't convince them. They will spend that extra time doing it the old way because that's what they know and they don't want to bother with what they believe will be a far greater effort in learning a new system.

There's an inherent risk in introducing a new system into a culture that has shown open resistance to change in the past. And you need to make sure that your intranet doesn't suffer the same fate as previous failed attempts by figuring out a different approach. Remember: It's pure folly to do the same thing twice and expect different results.

Lack of Team Atmosphere

So much of an intranet's success relies on the cooperation of all those involved in development and maintenance. This is because an intranet is more than just an application, it's a knowledge community. And if there's chaos in the community, there's chaos in the system.

A culture that's conducive to a cooperative team atmosphere will be more likely to produce a higher level of developmental participation and content contribution than one that's based on the self-imposed isolation of corporate cliques.

Information Hoarding

Intranets allow corporate knowledge communities to manage and access large stores of information from a unified source. But in order for this to work properly, all the knowledge sources must be willing to share and manage their information — and we know that this is not always the case.

There are those who hoard information and guard it like a squirrel guards its nuts for the winter. They do this for various reasons: self-promotion, job security or advancement, or to elevate their status as someone "in the know." An intranet will never survive in a culture that's rife with information hoarders simply because no one is willing to share what they know or have.

Conclusion

Simply knowing that there's a need for an intranet in your company is no guarantee that it will succeed. Regardless of how well-planned your intranet is, it won't stand a chance in a culture that's unwilling or unable to sustain it.

You need to understand that planning and development take place in a controlled environment and is not a real indicator of success. It's going to be a whole different world once an intranet is introduced into the community and all the unpredictability that comes with it.

And while it's easier to change an intranet than a culture, resist the temptation to allow negative cultural habits to redirect the path of your original plans. There's a difference between going with the flow and conceding to the will of the current.

But corporate culture should not be viewed as some kind of unstoppable force because you do have options. By gaining an understanding of the flow of your culture, you can adjust your intranet approach and reinforce positive cultural habits — to work with, rather than against, the current.

This knowledge of culture falls within the responsibility of the developers and content owners and needs to be actively sought out. You should never sit idly by, watching an unmanned vessel being tossed into oblivion because while it's the current that propels a boat forward, it's the paddler who directs it to its proper destination.