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The Internal Web

Intranets are everywhere. In a recent Forrester Research Inc. survey of executives at 50 Fortune 1000 companies, 96 percent of those polled were either building or already using internal Web sites. Only 4 percent had no plans to invest in intranet technology. 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. The bigger the company, the greater the cause for concern: Issues scale up for companies with more than a hundred users. In large organizations, intranet development--both construction from scratch and major renovation--often happens in a scattershot way, with different groups creating their own sites or pages and with little coordination or oversight. That approach can lead to information chaos: a patched-together intranet with clunky navigation, information gaps and redundant, conflicting, unreliable or outdated content. It's a result that is unlikely to inspire confidence in the intranet as a collaboration tool or a knowledge-management repository. Some corporate intranets that have fallen into that category have already been mothballed; it's a safe bet that in the next year others will follow.

This presentation outlines some thoughts on how to approach intranets in a planned way, and hopefully avoid some of the potential traps.

What are intranets? There are many definitions of intranets, including our favorites:

"Using Internet-based technologies within an organization to facilitate communication and access to information."

or....

An integrating mechanism for people, processes and information within the enterprise.

or simply....

The corporate "information network".

With Intranets we are moving beyond "island of information" towards more collaborative networks, within the enterprise and with our other business partners. Intranets provide many benefits and addresses several major problems we faced a few years back as the use of computers exploded.

Companies are realizing the benefits of using the Web as a key part of their information strategy - thus the interest in Intranets.

While there are many benefits there are also new challenges:

The Web provides the basic mechanism to change how information is shared within enterprises, but it is just the framework. Work needs to be done to make information available, to provide users with tools and training, and to help information providers publish their information. This is the challenge for the Webmaster.

We need to understand that this is a difficult task. Chaos is very possible. Inertia is possible. Anew set of people are taking responsiblity for ensuring the successful deployment and use of the Web within the enterprise.

If we can "manage" growth, add new sources and users and avoid getting out of control the benefits can be tremendous.


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