I was recently reminded of an issue that has long plagued internal comms at tech companies: the leaders’ need to tell everyone everything, all at once, and right now. Every internal comms (and SOC) leader knows that attention is precious and finite, so what lessons can be shared between the SOC and internal comms to help leadership see that less sometimes really is, more?
Internal communications suffers a perennial problem. In technology companies, there is a persistent pressure to tell everyone everything, all at once, and right now. Every function has updates to share, every department wants visibility and every CEO wants to drive “good news” momentum. Making “noise” is a good thing.
If you work in SecOps more noise equals more risk. The more alerts you have, the harder it is to find the ones that need immediate action. Yet in my experience, this idea of more noise being detrimental into understanding and action, does not stretch beyond the SOC to internal communications. Frankly, noise (both internal and external) is seen as something to be celebrated. I say it’s time to re-evaluate comms noise as a business risk.
When volume of noise prevents focus on what is important
In the SOC, we call it alert fatigue. In a press release it is called momentum. On the intranet it is called ensuring internal alignment. Why is noise considered detrimental to focus in one situation, but not to the other?
We know that more alerts do not equal better security, they mean more investigation time, more false positives, and more opportunities for the zero-day to slip through amongst the phishing spam. Cybersecurity professionals understand alert fatigue as a serious risk and employ many tools to mitigate it.
Likewise, having more “news” to read does not equal more effective communication. It means more messages to digest, more changes of focus, more distraction from the job at hand. Employees are expected to consume massive amounts of information every day from every direction, and yet companies often make it hard for them to determine what is relevant and urgent.
Noise triggers our irrelevance filter
We instinctively filter out what we perceive as irrelevant noise. If you are interrupted by an irrelevant email enough times, you will learn to ignore it. So, if a company posts 8 internal emails with no real news in them, why should you imagine that the ninth is suddenly important enough for you to stop your work and read it? Especially if it was written by AI because your internal comms team is chronically under resourced, and the product management leader wanted to see action.
When every update becomes everybody’s update, employees stop knowing what matters. Leaders mistake distribution for understanding and internal channels become crowded with messages that are individually reasonable but collectively exhausting. The company intranet (and email) becomes less like a comms channel and more like a very polite denial-of-service attack on everyone’s attention. Good internal comms does not make everyone louder on every channel. It creates a system where information reaches the people who will find it relevant, useful, or motivating.
Noise is destructive to focus, and just as we are trying to reduce it in the SOC, we need to reduce it across the organization.
Lessons from the SOC
Cybersecurity professionals build trust into the architecture with verified identities, access controls, audit trails, segmentation, source validation, escalation paths and clear ownership. AI is used to tune signals and reduce the noise. They know that a flood of low-value alerts makes analysts slower and increases risk.
The intranet should do the same for organizational information. The platforms should enable role-based access to relevant groups, have built in friction to prevent the posting of noise, and creation dates and owners for all content. It also needs escalation paths to remove outdated information, so no time is wasted.
AI should not be used by internal comms (or anyone) to create more noise within an organization, its value is sort and filter fast. AI-driven intranets should route updates to the right audiences, summarize long material, identify FAQs and surface relevant information based on role, location, project or function.
The responsibility for success still sits at the top, and culture cannot be delegated to the agents to fix. If the organization cannot decide what matters, has poor governance and a political culture in which every stakeholder insists their update is critical, AI will simply amplify it with an automated newsletter and cheery summary.
The operational risk of an employee base overwhelmed by noisy signals and unable to focus effectively extends far beyond the SOC or SecOps team.
It's never just noise, it's a business risk.
