Why communicators should love IT—and vice versa

To build an intranet employees will use, it takes two to tango

Everywhere I go, no matter what kind of organization I’m working with, I hear the same two gripes:

This battle for tech supremacy has been around longer than intranets themselves, but I’ve always thought it was a silly fight.

Why? Because without the combined expertise of IT and communications, your intranet will never do what you want it to do, at the very moment it should be the centerpiece of your internal communications.

And that, my friends, is why most intranets suck.

The squabble between IT and communications usually comes down to turf. Who owns the intranet? Who gets to decide what happens there? Who calls the shots?

IT people run the hardware and software that allow the intranet to exist, so naturally they think they own it.

Communicators are responsible for most of the words and images that make up what goes on the intranet, so they feel it belongs to them.

And let’s not forget all the other departments who lay claim to some piece of the internal Web. What about HR? They think they own everything.