This week we finished and submitted a business case for an intranet. It’s the culmination of months of work. First looking at their existing content and services, and identifying ways to streamline and simplify them. Then spinning up a proof of concept to test and validate our thinking on site structure, IA and templates. Then once everyone was comfortable with the approach, going away and working out how what suppliers, budget and people will be needed to make it a reality.

For the client, it’s just the start of the journey. They still have to build and launch the thing. But I feel comfortable that they have a realistic, pragmatic plan which allows them to start small, deliver fast and grow from there.

But we can’t underestimate the scale of the task. Like many organisations, this one wants to build their intranet in SharePoint. There are lots of good reasons for that –  alignment with the rest of the stack, integration with other productivity tools, and the promise of AI magic in the future. And often teams are just being pragmatic; it’s easier to get the go-ahead to build an intranet using a platform you already have (SharePoint) than to make the case for anything else.

And you can build great intranets in SharePoint. For example, most years 8 of the top 10 intranets in the NNg Intranet Design Annual are SP.

But in a world where people want fully-formed toys, SharePoint is a box of Lego. And just as with Lego, your ability to deliver is limited by your skills, imagination and budget.

Allow me to stretch this analogy to the point of absurdity.

As it comes, SharePoint is an unlimited box of Lego. In theory you could do anything with this.

But in reality you lack the time, skill and imagination to build much more than this.

And that’s fine. It meets the brief. It shuts the kids up for five minutes.

But it’s not really what you were hoping for. You want something more impressive. You have a few options.

You could buy a Lego Kit. Following the instructions you get this, which looks way more impressive, in just a few hours.

The intranet equivalent of this is an ‘Intranet In A Box’ (IIAB). These are products that work alongside SharePoint and make it work like a regular CMS. Using one of these you can spin up something that looks and works brilliantly, really quickly. We’ve just delivered one end-to-end, including all the content, in three and a half months. It’s still just Lego (SharePoint) but it looks good and is simple to use.

But you’re stuck with the pieces that come in the box. If you want to convert the Main Street Record Store into a bookshop, you’re bang out of luck because the kit only includes the orange and yellow storefront.

IIABs, like Lego kits, come in all shapes and sizes, from simple to complex, and you can choose based on your needs and budget.

If you want something more bespoke, you need to work with the box of Lego. But you need to find some experts to make it look good, and work consistently, or you’ll just have a proliferation of disconnected home-made crappy Lego houses.

You can engage an agency to build a site and templates for you using regular bricks. Think of this as the equivalent of getting someone to custom-design your own kit. You’ll get a box of parts and a set of instructions, so you can spin up Main Street and houses consistently and quickly.

This gets you broadly to where you’d have been if you’d just bought a kit, but this kit will be precisely to your specifications, with a bookshop instead of a garish record store. This will typically take 9-12 months.

If you want to switch the bookshop for a Gail’s Bakery in the future, you can go back to your agency, or hire a developer to change it for you. You’ll also need to hire a bunch of people to manage it all.

The other option is to custom-develop. If you have time, detailed knowledge of all the pieces and possibly a 3D printer (ie a team of in-house developers) you can build anything.

This looks pretty cool, to be fair. And so do all the winning SharePoint intranets in the NNg annual. But you have a remember that they took an average of 23 months to build, with a team of 15 behind them.

If you have the luxury of time and money, then fill your boots.

But typically organisations have neither of those things. And so they need to compromise, somehow, on a solution that is good enough for now and meets most of the needs they have.

Some non-work things I did this week

Like much of the middle-aged internet I have a soft spot for true crime podcasts. And few has sucked me in as much as Kill List, in which tech journalist Carl Miller uncovers a dark web murder-for-hire website listing hundreds of potential victims.

The team have, thankfully, eschewed the fashion for live podcast recordings but they did have a panel talk this week when I happened to be in London, moderated by Jamie Bartlett (the guy behind Missing Cryptoqueen).

Depressingly, but not surprisingly, the intended targets of murder-for-hire websites are mostly victims of intimate partner violence. But while these websites are scams that con people out of crypto for ‘hits’ that will never happen, the threats against people are very real indeed. The intent is there, and these people could well take matters into their own hands. Miller and the show’s producers talked about their frustrations when authorities were slow to act, leaving them in a race against time to warn those in danger.

Dark but fascinating. Do listen to the podcast.

What I’m reading

I’ve started reading A Certain Idea Of France, Julian Jackson’s biography of Charles de Gaulle.

It’s a hefty tome and I’m only part way through but he quotes de Gaulle asking “How can you govern a country with 258 cheeses?”

That line struck a chord immediately, as this week I’ve been putting the finishing touches to an intranet governance model for one of the most complex organisations I’ve ever worked with.

Managing this level of complexity isn’t about reducing variety—it’s about creating the structures and processes that allow diverse inputs, roles, and goals to align effectively. Clear governance doesn’t stifle creativity; it provides the guardrails to harness it.

De Gaulle had a lesson for us all here: Complexity isn’t the enemy. With the right framework, it can be a strength.

Connections

A trip to London gave me a chance to catch up with a whole bunch of people I’ve been meaning to see for ages including

Unfortunately there were just as many people I didn’t have time to meet. See you in 2025.

Coming up

2025 is less than a month away. So this upcoming week I’m doing a webinar for Modolabs on hybrid work trends for 2025. Despite high profile RTO mandates hybrid’s going nowhere. That’s because using people, places and digital work practices creates organisational resilience – and that’s critical to weathering whatever the future of work holds.

So in this session I’ll look at resilience, and at three related trends for the year ahead.

It’s on Thursday. Register here.

Travel

One more week until holiday. HMU with your tips for Kigali and Nairobi.