Other surveys indicate that 65 percent to 90 percent of America's biggest corporations expect to implement intranets by the end of this year. There's no doubt that intranets are the emerging big business information infrastructure. And there's little debate about why. Used successfully, such a powerful one-stop information tool can help the organization improve communication, cut costs and ultimately shrink time to market. What's still open to debate are the best strategies for developing an intranet that best serves those purposes.
Issues scale up for companies with more than a hundred users.
It's a result that is unlikely to inspire confidence in the intranet as a collaboration tool or a knowledge-management repository. The strategy must also address ways to integrate the internal Web site into the company's information systems, as well as into its culture and business processes. Because the big guys oversee funding, user access, security levels and other key issues, their buy-in is critical for the intranet's success. To convince reluctant leaders, teams might want to promote not only t he Web's expected benefits and ROI but the possible consequences of not building an intranet, such as losing competitive advantage because of inability to cut time to market. As always, it's better to show than to tell.