The literature on intranets have been so overwhelmingly positive that it is a wonder why any organization would not create an intranet as soon as possible. The biggest foreseeable problem with an intranet is maintenance. There has to be procedures for updating materials and for reviewing and discarding items on the network. Someone must be assigned to these duties and to the maintenance, design and upgrade of the hardware and software. As well, there is a trade off between ease of maintenance and performance.
More servers usually mean greater performance but also more maintenance troubles.
The difficulty may be that the managing of the intranet have to be done without extra staff. It then becomes even more work for an already overtaxed work staff. Another possible problem with an intranet is that people will not use it. This obstacle is very real and must be overcome by a decided effort to train and encourage users to fully utilize this tool. Again, this may require a great deal of resources.