Ask where the holiday policy lives and you’d get three answers: the shared drive (2019 version), the wiki (2021 version, contradicts the drive), and Dana in accounts, who just knows. The company didn’t have an information problem. It had an authority problem — no single place had the right to be correct.
Why intranets die
Every failed intranet I’ve been shown died the same death: it was built as a library when the company needed a front door. People don’t open a library every morning. They open the thing that tells them what’s happening today.
What we built instead
One page, opened at 8am, that answers three questions before anyone asks them: who’s out today, what changed since yesterday, and where the thing you’re looking for actually is. The reference material lives behind it — one copy of every policy, with an owner and a date on every page.
A document with no owner is a rumor with formatting.
The trick that made adoption stick was ruthless: when the intranet went live, the old folder went read-only the same morning. There was no transition period, because a transition period is just two sources of truth with extra steps.
Eight months on, the measure of success isn’t a usage dashboard. It’s that Dana in accounts gets asked about numbers now, not policies.