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How long could you survive without the intranet?

Written by James Robertson, published November 25, 2009

Categorised under: Intranet Leadership Forum, Intranets

We’ve got great stories coming out at the two-day Intranet Leadership Forum intensive in Sydney. One that jumped out to me was the following:

The intranet team at a major Australian bank talked about their data gathering efforts over the last year. The goal has been to build a strong business case, in order to get the resources needed to substantially improve their site.

As part of, they posted a survey to the homepage of the site. Staff indicated whether they were “front office” (bank branches) or “back office”, and this was one of the questions asked:

“If the intranet went down, how long would it be before it would impact on your ability to do your job?”

Amazingly, 70% of front-line staff indicated that they would be impacted within 15 minutes or less if the intranet were to go down. That’s a strong business case, and a compelling reason to deliver a stable, effective and useful intranet.

Has anyone else uncovered similar results in their organisation?

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3 Comments:

  1. Louis W commented on November 26th, 2009

    Quite often when the internet goes down I fire up my web browser to go to my provider’s website to get their contact number to call and complain…. only to realize THE INTERNET IS DOWN!

  2. Caroline Coetzee commented on November 26th, 2009

    We have been gathering evidence around this as part of our current business case for more investment in the intranet. Several areas came up with compelling evidence, that their operations would be severely hampered, potentially from the point when the site went down onwards.

    Our intranet is not nearly as stable as it should be and we have asked people to file incident reports when it goes down, so that this is formally logged as a risk. Of course, the incident reporting tool is accessed … via the intranet.

  3. James Robertson commented on November 28th, 2009

    @Caroline, this is a great example of using business risks to justify intranet investments. (No doubt due to Martin White’s involvement in the project!). I’ll be interested to hear what comes out of the research…