Intranets still in their Infancy

http://www.crmmanager.net/magazine/article_1279_intranet_study_results.html



Statements about the quality and the real value proposition of an intranet are difficult to make. If only company-internal factors and matters which the responsible intranet team considers "important" are included in the evaluation, the intranet is not taken seriously enough as the most important internal medium for communications and information sharing.

Helpful in this situation are benchmarks and studies which allow to clarify the own status by comparing different intranets in order to create a point of reference.


The first global Intranet Study

An intranet study with an international basis is now available: the 90-page report "Global Intranet Strategies Today & Tomorrow" offers insight into the intranets of 101 companies in 5 continents. The report was published by the internationally renowned intranet expert Jane McConnell, owner of NetStrategyJMC, Paris.

The report throws new light on the current "state-of-the-art" of intranets and identifies future intranet trends.


Potentials of Intranets remain unused

Most intranets have arrived at the first milestone of their evolution and serve as the company's primary communication channel. However, only few of them live up to their full potential and contribute significantly to accomplish a high standard of business efficiency. Referring to the report, only 2 percent of the companies do for instance explicitly make use of the intranet as a means of establishing new business opportunities.

Moreover, major processes are rarely executed via the intranet and important lines of business are clearly less involved in intranet decision processes than, for example, communications or IT departments.

There is a positive trend in this regard however: about half of the companies (47%) expect the intranet budgets to raise within the next two years. Bigger budgets should enable companies to lead their intranet out of its infancy.


The Intranet gets personal

Although the vision of a unified portal as the single point of access to all company information and all necessary applications is realised only in a few companies today, the intranet is getting closer to the user: with personalisation features, individual content and support for portable devices.

The today common situation of insufficiently informed employees that are complaining about a permanently increasing flood of information could thus be improved.

In this context however, it is astonishing that the intranet homepage of more than three quarters (78%) of the participating companies contain almost only information that is identical for the entire staff. Hence, information that is adapted to an employee’s department, role or specific interests are rarely found on an intranet's most important page.

Likewise, there are deficiencies in regard to the different types of information flows that exist in every company. While 67 percent of the companies have efficient top down information flows, intranets support horizontal and bottom up information flows only in 26% respectively 20% of all cases.

There is an urgent need to manage the relevance of information on all levels more effectively in order to provide staff with information that is specific to their individual needs and – if possible – only this kind of information, regardless of the particular source the information comes from.

"Web 2.0" and its concepts of intensified user participation is also slowly but surely entering the intranet domain. With 18 mentions each, wikis and internal blogs are the most frequently used elements. While the purposes of these "new instruments" are well known intranet topics, there is a chance, that the social and cultural influences of "Enterprise 2.0" could increase their prospect of success.




Ironically, when used inside the company, these Web 2.0 applications are struggling with the same problems that intranets used to face in their early days: a search function is usually missing, there is no central point of access and possibilities to trace information corresponding to the user's individual interest seldom exist.

Proceed to: Engaging Top-Management

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:

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.

Published: 01/2007
Author: 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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