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Intranets still in their Infancy
 Engaging Top-Management
Intranets considered important or even business critical by the top-management are clearly more successful and generate higher benefits than those, whose relevance and potential as a strategic instrument is inadequately recognised and supported by corporate management. Top-Management, therefore, has to take greater responsibility for the intranet.
This situation, where the intranet is considered business critical, is found in only 13 percent of the polled companies. In contrast, in almost half of the companies (45%) even a breakdown of the intranet up to one full day would remain without effect on the staff's work.
Hence, it comes as no surprise to find the factors that are hindering and slowing down decision processes are above all "lacking knowledge about the potential of the intranet" (71 companies) and "political aspects" (54 companies). The fact that in 61 percent of the companies the intranet team is not considered a strategic institution by the management clearly points out the cause of many basic intranet problems.
The management's missing commitment to the intranet is depicted in the following chart, where management’s typical high priority topics are mentioned notedly lower-ranking.
Factors of Complexity
Astonishing results arose from the question about the factors that increase the complexity of an intranet. While language barriers and high staff numbers seem to play only a lesser part, the geographical distance between staff members is quoted to be the most important factor that increases complexity.
In order to stay in control of the rising complexity and also to optimize the intranet in general, emphasis is mainly placed on improving the usability of the intranet and on making the information contained easier to find.
Trends and Perspectives
To the participants of the poll, the most important trend for the future are highly personalised intranet portals, that offer staff members extensive control about what is being displayed as well as how it is being displayed. More than half of the companies (58%) are in the process of implementing such concepts, whereas only 7% have already put them into practice.
A second trend is the enhancement of the enterprise search functionality based on the model of the major web search engines. For instance, intranet search should include "best bets" maintained by the editorial staff as well as automatically suggested links and news on the topic searched for. Search engines will thereby develop into a kind of "mini-portals" offering extensive information for a chosen topic. Considering users' permanent dissatisfaction with internal search functions and corporate information architectures, this appears to be a comprehensible trend.
Further trends, that only a few companies mentioned are podcasts, video coverage and an adoption of elements from the "Semantic Web" into the intranet.
Can a common denomination be found in this study, that allows to discern the better intranets, the ones producing high business benefits, from the lesser ones? As mentioned above, this common denominator is the management's attitude towards the intranet. 42 out of the 101 companies questioned rate their intranet as "very beneficial" or even "business critical ". In comparison to the other 59 companies this group shows different results in a range of aspects:
- the proportion of "knowledge workers", who especially depend on information, is significantly higher
- implementation of integrated intranets or portals is far more advanced
- information flows in all three directions (top-down, horizontal and bottom-up) are better developed
- intranets are "younger" (and thus easier to manage due to less inherited burdens)
- dissemination of blogs and wikis is higher
In this respect, the present study reinforces the significance of upper management support for the intranet as a critical success factor. Management's attitude and commitment to the intranet are hard to influence, though. Therefore intranet officers in companies with low management attention are well advised to focus their efforts into this direction.
Once this issue has been resolved, other typical intranet problems, like lack of budget and resources, low acceptance within the business lines or slow decision processes, will be much easier to address.
The full report is available free of charge from Jane McConnell. Companies wishing to participate in next year’s edition of the study are welcome to register.01/2007, Stephan Schillerwein
| | Stephan Schillerwein is a Senior Intranet Consultant and Manager of the Schillerwein Net Consulting Ltd. His expertise includes strategy, conceptual design and governance of intranets, employee portals and enterprise content management solutions.
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