It's easy for people to communicate around shared data and common tasks and goals. Intrapreneurs can create exciting intranet pages fully explaining their proposals, creating interest and finding out who'll sign up. They form their own informal working relationships with distant colleagues which criss-cross departmental boundaries. The ideas are refined online and the work is conducted online. Organizations can formally create distributed teams and projects.
Intranets mean that distance becomes irrelevant in selecting the right people for the job.
External links are becoming more common. Intranets, then, display exactly the characteristics needed to create the second-level effect of accelerating online work and communication. However, while not underestimating these skills, they are technical in nature and not very different from the well-understood skills of producing a good report or brochure. Publishing on an intranet is not a deeply personal matter of communication, working in new ways, and forming relationships that enable team work. If, as we predict, a second-level effect of intranets is to accelerate migration to the online workplace, we can also predict very confidently that people will need to be prepared for that online workplace.