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Intranets still in their Infancy
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.Read the next chapter | | | more |  |
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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