Resources - Don't blame the technology. Intranets fail because of the people who manage them, not the technology. Jonathan Gordon-Till reviews this practical guide on ways to make them work.(Book Review)

The emphasis of this handy volume is not on technological solutions, but on addressing the human and organisational framework within which intranets exist. According to this practical guide, "Intranets are not IT applications. They rely on technology, but they are not driven by technology".

The underlying problems of intranets are relatively simple, but are often overlooked due to some common misconceptions - for example, intranets are not always the most effective communication tools. Just because all the staff in an organisation might have an intranet portal on their desktops, it does not mean that they consider it anything more than wallpaper. How many ostensibly important corporate messages have hijacked the homepage only to be ignored by the majority?

Intranets can also create their own limitations, in that those which are organised around departments or groups of people tend to reinforce the silo culture and the sense that responsibility and interest is departmentally aligned.

Instead, as the inventor of the world wide web Tim Berners-Lee would have intended, intranets should be based around semantic connections. As the author Luke Tredinnick highlights, the more developed the inter-departmental semantic hyperlinks, the more effective the intranet.

In practice, we find a growing sense ...