INTRANET HAS CREATED A NEW CLASS OF
WORKER : THE DIGITAL PARIAH Inforpress teams up with Capital Humano to carry out research into
Internal
New digital media is changing internal communications among Spain's 500 largest
companies, according to a joint research project by Inforpress, a communications,
e-communications and public relations consultancy, and Capital Humano,
a Spanish human resources magazine.
The web, while more popular as a vehicle to communicate than print mediums,
has not replaced personal contact as the preferred form of communication. The
introduction of intranets, used by 63% of the companies responding, is, however,
producing a radical change in the communication methods used by businesses.
The use of "digital" communication is creating a new class of worker
- employees who are inexperienced in digital forms of communication and who
could become the new pariahs if a quick and effective solution is not found.
Digital communication is also bringing about the extinction of other forms of
communication, with 56% of businesses admitting that intranets have affected
other forms of internal communication causing them be seriously underused (42%),
or to disappear all together (29%).
The digitally uninitiated
If Intranets are going to be the basis for the construction of a new business
culture, there will be the need to resolve the problem of factory workers and
all those who do not have access to computers in their workplace. The concept
of providing communal computing facilities for this type of worker has met with
little success, with only 7% of companies having installed such facilities.
Traditional methods of communication are still preferred to the more technically
advanced ones such as intranet.
Presentation is everything
Once the technical structure and framework of an intranet has been defined,
its content must be created, using language especially suited for the medium,
and the information must continually be updated. An analysis of information
available in existing company intranets indicates that much of the information
is obsolete or written for mediums other than intranets.
According to the research conducted, 25% of the companies responding indicated
that it can take a week or more to make changes to its intranet, and 16% of
those surveyed updated their intranets at three month intervals or even as infrequent
as twice a year.
Even though intranets are interactive, very few employees have the authority
to make online changes. Only 22% of responding companies have internal correspondents,
a number which needs to be increased to make Intranets more credible and to
increase the number of people who participate in their use. In most cases the
control of intranet content is centralised and is the responsibility of those
employees in charge of internal communications.
Intranets are currently seen as relatively secure mediums; they are not the
focus of attention for hackers, and the research did not find one company which
had experienced security problems. This situation will have to be monitored
for changes, as, in the future, intranets may increasingly be used to communicate
important strategic information.
