Compared to consumer and smaller product lines, the current Enterprise communication system used by large organizations sucks. That is the appropriate technical term. Sharing, syncing and personalizing is so much simpler and more enjoyable in other products that scale from single users to large corproations.

The standard love affair with enterprise communication platforms bites a big one here’s why:

1. Everything is shoved through email.

Email is viewed as a perfectly suitable place to send you event reminders and it is abused accordingly. The volume of email has increased dramatically over the years, and this contributes to information overload- and quickly goes on the list of things that are ignored. And when we’re talking about information overload, you have to remember your teams have lives and inboxes outside of work that are contributing to their perception of what is too much. So the experience and perception outside the organization is very relevant to the perception, experience, motivation and performance inside the organization. The unconscious mind does not categorize or discriminate in terms at work vs. not at work. So it all piles on.

2. Shared calendars = being sent things you don’t want or need to see.

Sharing calendars is an arrogant affair. Think of it like a blind dinner date. Someone orders for you without knowing your preferences, allergies, or favorites. You don’t even get to look on the menu. They may order you everything, or nothing you can eat. The point is, you weren’t given an opportunity to opt-in or speak up.

3. Systems are designed to appease gatekeepers not end users.

Designed with the manager and technical team in mind, the uber god-complex power user, the 1% of user base. Ideologicially they are designed for the shepherd but ultimately used by the flock). This is often done out of necessity for software developers to win the approval of the stakeholders and gatekeepers. Stakeholders need to be mindful of their strategic goals and who they ultimately want to be successful using the tools. This would cause a shift in focus at least to enough to consider if it will engage, delight and drive performance of the majority of users.

4. Local Intranets are not integrated into the regular workflow.

Local Intranets – there’s the good, the bad, and the ugly. Most of them fall into the latter 2 buckets. If the organization’s event calendar lives there, it’s probably covered in cob-webs and dust.  Here’s the bad news; even for the “good” or well designed intranets,  they are often viewed like spare parts that don’t integrate well into the regular workflows of users. If you don’t have to go there on a regular basis, do you? Do you really? And when you do, do you know that the event calendar exists? Nope.

Let’s be real about these experiences. If we want to improve them, we have to recognize them. True organizational authenticity, recognizing who you are, where you are and what you have, and reconciling your assumptions with realities, virtues and vices, is a great step towards Heroik change.

What do you think? Do you work in the enterprise and love your tools? Tell me about it in the comments.