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The intranet market is broken

There are a huge number of intranets within organisations worldwide. By Martin White's estimate, for example, there are over 300,000 intranets in the UK alone. Yet the intranet marketplace is almost non-existant.

For example, there is only one blog devoted to intranets, less than a dozen serious websites, and no active mailing lists. What is happening here?

Borrowing loosely from economics, what we have is a very inneficient marketplace. There is a need, and suppliers, but no easy mechanism for connecting the two. My thoughts on the reason for this:

• Most intranets have started as a quick "web development" job by a single IT staffperson (or a few at most).
• These have grown organically, until they encompass several thousand pages. Along the way, a few pieces of technology (such as a search engine) have been purchased, but otherwise, most functionality is custom-developed.
• There is little sharing of knowledge between organisations in the corporate sector, making it hard to benchmark intranets against best practice.
• Most organisations don't even realise that their intranet is not delivering business benefits, or that it needs reworking.
• Even if the organisation recognises that something needs to be done, they don't know where to start, or who to talk to.
• As a result, to due a percieved lack of interest or need, few organisations provide services or products specifically targeted at intranet needs.

Yet the need is certainly there. Intranets have the potential to deliver huge strategic benefits for an organisation, if they are designed and managed correctly. Thankfully the growth of content management systems seems to be providing an impetus for some businesses to re-evaluate their intranets.

I have some ideas about what can be done to fix the intranet market, but I would be interested in receiving your comments before posting them.

Posted by jamesr on August 28, 2002 09:21 PM
Categories: Content management, Intranets

Comments

I came across your site at random, and mentioned it in one of my posts, although it might not get upstreamed right away ... the link will be http://radio.weblogs.com/0107846/2002/08/27.html#a156

Basically I think weblogging and intranets are relatively new to each other, so there are tons of discussion groups out there for people to learn how to work intranets more effectively, but they are not in webrings but within the context of discussion groups associated with people using the same kind of computer system to host their intranets,

Posted by: Al Macintyre on August 29, 2002 07:14 PM

Al may be right, to a point. But I think the groups he refers to are discussing using the intranets from a technical perspective, not at all from the human performance perspective. I'm open to being educated, but I've been studying at the edges of collaborative computing since 1995 and I can't say that I've found tons of discussion groups on improving human performance or raising business performance via intranets.

Like many technology areas, the discussion is usually technical -- security, storage, policy, firewall, suitable applications, etc. It's what you expect from technical people. But it often completely overlooks what the users actually want or need.

I think your six points are on target, but I would add one. Most intranets were never designed to be interactive. They were designed to be internal brouchureware. As such, it's very difficult to measure any productive gain. When I was at IBM they put unimaginable resources into making the intranet the fount of all corporate knowledge, but even there it wasn't an interactive environment (in fact, you could get fired for putting your own info up except in strict circumstances.) Since people couldn't contribute back you had no mechanism to really measure if the system was being used.

I believe businesses would share info on intranets if they had a forum and leadership. That's starting to happen now in the CRM space, and it's being driven by the failures -- companies are tired of spending big bucks and having 20% user adoption rates.

I'd be interesetd in seeing what you have to say.

Posted by: Terry Frazier on August 31, 2002 02:40 PM

The interactive aspect is a big thing, and certainly matches with my experiences of corporate intranets.

Without these "collaborative", "interative" or "feedback" mechanisms, the intranet was viewed (correctly) as a static resource of corporate info, nothing more, nothing less.

The challenge is certainly to work out where the business needs are, and then use the intranet to meet them. This will almost certainly involve incorporating the intranet into common business practices.

Posted by: James Robertson on August 31, 2002 04:13 PM

I think CRM failures for much the same reason as ERP failures ... a widespread misperception that this is a computer solution, when in fact it is a changed way of running a business, in which the computer is an important component, but if the people cannot change their corporate culture, the computer component is like a piece of wasted junk.

I have seen two kinds of intranets.

1. PC Centric where people in an office have been doing work on separate islands of computing, and use a networking to help share information, but mentally they are still islands of computing, the network just makes it easier for people in same department to pass data back and forth, instead of using diskettes, or attachments to e-mail. They do not think of the intranet as anything more than a way to expedite sharing of corporate resources that ultimately are worked on by the individual computer usrs.

2. Big Computer (Mainframe, Midrange, Mini) in which most of the corporate data and software resides on a central computer to which all the work force connect using PCs NCs etc. and again the intranet is just glue or pathway connecting the people to the corporate resources. A good intranet is transparent to the users ... a channel in which they do their job with the data and software and not really think about how they get to it.

Upper management thinks about what else in the way of new applications can be added to the corporate network. They may ask what resources needed to improve capabilities, or they may ask how to improve performance ... usually the question is the other way around ... the error rate is too high, there are too many disruptions ... what do we need to fix that?

Again, the corporate end users focus tends to be on the applications that are running on the intranet, not the intranet itself. To these people, weblogging is like another application.

The discussion groups are populated by technical people who support the intranets. When a company has a staff of several technical people working on joint team projects, weblogging might seem like one way to help everyone stay current on the projects.

Even when you have a project to implement ERP CRM or whatever upgrade, involving people from different specialities, multi-author weblogging might seem like a good way to keep track of all the issues and their resolution.

Posted by: Al Macintyre on September 24, 2002 04:53 PM