Most UK organisations have an intranet. Most of those intranets are barely used. This is one of those quiet facts that everyone working in IT knows and nobody particularly wants to write a report about, because the implications are slightly embarrassing. Money was spent. A project happened. A launch email was sent. And then the organisation went back to sharing links in Teams chats and emailing documents to each other, the way it always had.
The instinct is to treat this as a minor issue. Intranets are not glamorous. They sit somewhere near the bottom of the digital transformation priority list, below AI, below cyber, below anything with board-level attention. The problem is that the intranet is actually doing more work than most organisations realise, and when it’s failing, the failures show up everywhere else.
What the intranet was quietly supposed to do
A functioning intranet is the place where the organisation’s structured knowledge lives. Policies. Procedures. The right version of the expenses form. The induction pack. The safety notices. When that content is findable and trustworthy, everything around it works better. New starters onboard faster. HR fields fewer repetitive questions. Compliance audits go more smoothly. The legal team doesn’t find out six months after the fact that three different versions of the acceptable use policy are circulating in different departments.
When the intranet fails, none of this goes away. The need for structured knowledge is still there. It just gets handled by worse substitutes. People email the HR team. Teams channels fill up with the same questions answered slightly differently each time. Someone in operations becomes the de facto expert on the holiday policy because they happen to remember where the PDF is. The organisation carries a hidden cost of repeated, avoidable work, and because the cost is distributed across every department it never shows up as a line item anyone acts on.
Why SharePoint keeps ending up in a mess
Most UK intranets run on SharePoint, which is by some distance the most capable platform for this kind of work. SharePoint Online has matured considerably in the last five years. Modern pages are genuinely good. The integration with Teams, Viva, and the rest of Microsoft 365 is tight. The search works, when the content behind it is structured sensibly.
The issue is almost never the platform. It’s almost always the governance layer around it.
SharePoint rewards organisations that think about information architecture before they start building sites. It punishes organisations that don’t. When every team gets to create its own site with its own structure, its own navigation, and its own naming conventions, the result is sprawl. Three years in, there are four hundred sites, nobody knows which ones are current, half of them contain documents that should have been deleted, and search returns fifty possible versions of the same policy.
This is the state most UK SharePoint estates are in. It’s not a SharePoint problem in the narrow sense. It’s an organisational design problem that SharePoint surfaces.
The adoption question
The other reason intranets fail is that they get launched without anyone thinking seriously about adoption. A new site goes live. An email goes out. Leadership assumes people will use it. Nobody does, because nobody was involved in shaping it, and the old ways of working are easier.
The organisations that get this right treat intranet work as a change programme rather than a deployment. Content owners are named and held accountable. A small number of high-value pages are built properly rather than a large number of generic ones. Usage is measured after launch and content that isn’t being read gets either improved or retired. The intranet is treated as a product with a roadmap, not a project with a finish line.
One UK operator’s description of its SharePoint consulting services covers the practical arc of this work, from information architecture and migration through to governance, adoption, and integration with Teams and Viva. It’s a useful reference for what a serious intranet engagement should actually include, because the gap between “we installed SharePoint” and “SharePoint is how the organisation works” is mostly filled with the things on that list.
The underused Microsoft 365 feature
There’s a final point worth making, which is that most UK organisations are paying for Microsoft 365 licences that include SharePoint, Teams, Viva Connections, and the integration layer between them, and are using maybe 30% of the capability. Fixing the intranet is one of the highest-leverage uses of budget available, because the licence cost is already sunk. What’s missing is the design work, the content strategy, and the organisational discipline to actually extract value from what’s already been bought. That’s usually a smaller investment than people assume, and the benefits compound.
