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In a smaller, more connected world intranets have to appeal to people from all over the world while also aiding business processes. Global organizations now have business units around the globe, some of which need to collaborate with each other; yet at the same time they operate in different time zones, different countries, and different cultures.

While regional divisions and management often control the local intranets, at some point everyone works for the same organization. We all know intranets differ from one enterprise to another, but what about from country to country? Given the sometimes vast cultural gap, is there a difference between European and American intranets?

Kevin Keohane is director of user experience for the Intranet Benchmarking Forum (IBF) in the U.K., an intranet and portal benchmarking group founded in 2002. He works with a number of global intranets and several American companies with local intranets for their employees in Europe. He's also an American expatriate living in the U.K.

The IBF has a saying, Keohane says: "Every company gets the intranet it deserves." Intranets are, above all, a product of corporate culture and business goals. If an intranet team sets out to fulfill a specific purpose, as long as it fulfills that purpose it doesn't matter where the team is or how it does its job. Intranets are as unique as companies themselves.

That being said, Keohane sees two areas that tend to distinguish American intranets from their European counterparts. First, American intranets and intranet managers have what Keohane calls a "cultural technological optimism." Simply put, they put a lot of faith in technology to build their intranets and solve their problems. While they have scaled back in recent years, Keohane sees more bells and whistles as part of American intranets.

Europeans seem to put a healthy distancing between platform and delivery. They rely less on convictions that Technology X is better than Technology Y, Keohane says. It's more important that the technology fit the budget.

One area where Keohane says American invest greatly and see few returns is content management. "I've seen a lot of organizations invest a huge amount of money in content management systems that can do everything. But, because of the complexity, the average content contributor can't figure it out."

Personalization and customization of intranets are also areas where intranet teams get carried away. "From what we've seen people don't use it all, or they customize themselves into oblivion," Keohane says. The IBF sees more success with role-centered navigation or pre-structured navigation.

The Nielsen Norman Group's Jakob Nielsen has reviewed countless intranets for his firm's Intranet Design Annual competition. He agrees there are definitely two schools of thought — technology-driven and content-driven intranets — but sees a small difference that isn't clearly pronounced along European/American lines.

One technology where Nielsen does see a difference is wireless. There is more mobile and wireless access to intranets in Europe, and Nielsen credits that to the more significant adoption of wireless technology, starting with mobile phones, in Europe. "In the U.S., we're just barely getting into it now."

The second area where Keohane says American intranets generally distinguish themselves relates to marketing, a practice that seems to have been perfected in the United States. When trying to drive usage, Americans take an internal marketing approach. The typical American campaign to market the intranet tells employees to use the intranet because it's a tool they are supposed to use.

Europeans prefer to put up good content that employees want or need to do their jobs, and expect adoption to follow. This could be a product of Americans' need to market and sell everything, or perhaps the Europeans' healthy degree of cynicism. It could be both.

Europeans reply on good old killer content, like a company directory or organizational chart. "What doesn't work is telling people how good the intranet is so go use it," Keohane says. Of course, you can always give users little choice but to use the intranet, like requiring the intranet be used to schedule vacation time.

"It takes nerves of steel, but if you shut off alternatives people don't have a choice," Keohane says.

Nielsen agrees that the concept of a marketing campaign for an intranet is largely an American idea, and he also warns it can backfire. "People can get carried away and make up silly names for different parts of the site. It's typically a bad idea," he says. "It's good to have a name, but one name."

Advice for Global Enterprises

Globalization has complicated corporate intranets because the right mix of common themes and local touches must be found. In Keohane's experience, global corporations tend to have an umbrella group in their home country that will update company news that impacts everyone involved. There are intranet groups in certain regions around the world that add their own personality for local employees.

The local intranet group can help with usability issues related to local culture, language, and lexicon. The role of local intranet groups has evolved over the last couple of years, Keohane says. Under the old way of thinking, there was a fear that too much control could stifle the intranet. But now that thinking has evolved to embrace consolidation of governance and the creation of standards and formats. It's more likely today that navigation, logos, and other common elements are centrally controlled.

Because of basic geography, Europeans are more accustomed to language differences and hold an advantage over Americans when it comes to making content available to local users. In general, Keohane says, the higher up in most corporate intranets you go, the more likely you are to find English.

"There's no doubt multilingual intranets are much more common in Europe," Nielsen says. He also agrees you are more likely to find English higher up the corporate intranet ladder, and thinks it's also related to the amount of education and experience employees at that level have and their function in their organization. "The classic example is this week's menu in the cafeteria. It only matters to those people."

Regardless of the language, a solid governance structure that is well-supported by corporate leadership can produce amazing results. Keohane says that one IBF member had U.K. employees who could find a specific IT document in Spanish on the Spanish intranet site because the company's navigation was so consistent.

"Every company gets the intranet it deserves," Keohane says. If a company is very siloed and the divisions tend not to play well with each other, it will show on the intranet. "The intranet is, warts and all, an expression of what the company is."