The Need to Know

I didn’t do a formal survey. But to use an expression borrowed from my adolescent children:

Our Intranet sucks.

I am an avid user of the Intranet. I strongly believe that, if it is not on the Intranet, it is not UNICEF policy, procedure, or experience. But I begin to sympathize with those colleagues who don’t even know how to log into the system. Or who forgot their password, because it is several years since they used it last. There are a lot of them. They vote with their mouse. They don’t find the Intranet to be a place of importance, enlightenment and inspiration.

Entire branches of the Intranet lead the unsuspecting UNICEF researcher into dead water. Many pieces of information on the Intranet are hopelessly redundant. The ambitiously titled Programme Knowledge Network opens long-lost and outdated worlds to the intrepid reader. The Need to Know category, under the heading Finance Policy/Instructions merely contains the 2004 DFAM divisional annual report. In contrast, the heading Programme turns up a collection that happily co-mingles, on one web-page, every latest country office annual report, a 1991 instruction on HIV and Breastfeeding, and guidelines on how to prepare programme submissions for the 1994 Executive Board.

Not all is misery. Some compartments of the Intranet are very good, but within an anarchic assemblage they remain being used by insiders and subject specialists only.

Someone must have realized all this, and gave us the Google search engine for the Intranet. Alas, it doesn’t help. Titles are displayed, quite intolerably, up to four times. And any search engine let loose onto a heap of largely obsolete information is likely to bring out obsolete information. The last time I tried “human rights” on the UNICEF search box, I got an un-sourced paper that resembled a UNDP instruction on how to build a Human Rights website.

Why getting worked up? Because I can’t go back to not-using the Intranet. Because the issue cannot be resolved over a cup of tea. It is a communication issue, an IT issue, a user issue, a content provider issue, a management issue.

Having an archiving policy and removing outdated stuff from our sights can’t cost the world, but would make a huge difference. To create a user-friendly architecture will take some more effort.

I don’t want to overplay the importance of a well-built Intranet. But without it, we are not going to get kudus for knowledge management.

(4 February 2005)

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