Any of you fellow parents out there know that the wish list letter to Santa is a big deal. My daughter Rachel had her letter in the mail on December 1. Anything Barbie or Bratz is an instant winner. Frankly, I think they all look like cheap harlots.

Anyhow, I am not as well organized as my daughter so I figured I’d skip the letter writing paper and hit the blog with my intranet wish list for Santa. Gone are the dreams of the ol’ G.I. Joe, or the subsequent Star Wars action figures (though that Jar Jar Binks action figure is an instant collectible!). I’ve even given up on the Porsche and hockey season tickets. Instead, I’ve prepared a most reasonable wish list – all in the name of clients.

Dear Santa, having been a good boy (mostly) this year, I would like to request the following for the intranets of my clients (past, present and future):

1-     Senior management support – as you know all to well, as the CEO of a flourishing elven manufacturing conglomerate, the success of the intranet is largely dependent on the level of support afforded by the executive suite. As your case study reveals, the success of Santa’s intranet largely flows from the big guy in the big red suit. Please impress upon the elves and in turn all of their customers and clients that their respective intranets deserve more support (and funding) from the other big fat executives.

2-     Measured value – successful intranets deliver a ton of value – almost as much value as toys in your sleigh. From cost savings to increased sales and employee productivity, the intranet is a virtual Christmas stocking chalked full of goodies. Please convince more companies to measure the value of their intranets – particularly ROI and employee productivity. If they refuse, a lump of coal should suffice.

3-     A decent RFP – Santa, please send a fleet of your elves out into the market to teach purchasing, IT and communications managers how to write an RFP. With the North Pole’s purchasing power and financial genius surely you can impart upon these souls that a successful RFP is more than one or two paragraphs of requirements and 15 pages of legal mulch and schedules. As Donder and Blitzen have oft said, a thorough RFP to reconstruct an intranet has some at least a dozen (if not two dozen) pages of requirements and should include information architectures, site metrics (including number of pages requiring migration), required functionality and integration, etc. If teaching fails, then send that new reindeer Knuckles.

4-    Loose the design – Please ignore any letters that ask for an intranet redesign. Even the half-wit reindeers Prancer and Vixen know full well that the success of an intranet has nothing to do with design. In fact, design doesn’t even make it into the top 20 most important aspects of an intranet. Please deliver each manager seeking to reconstruct their intranet a copy of Transforming your intranet so that they may shake this deadly design virus. Or heck, give them an RSS feed of IntranetBlog.com. It’s particularly good reading when washed down with some shortbread and egg nog (the real stuff, not that sickly drool called egg nog lite. Be afraid of any food that spells ‘light’ as ‘lite’… be very afraid.)

5-     A gun – Actually, all I want for Christmas is a Red Ryder carbon-action, 200-shot range model air rifle with a special sight, a compass in the stock and a sun dial. I promise not to shoot my eye out. But I’d settle for world peace – and tall glass of real egg nog.J

ON A PERSONAL NOTE: We’ve crawled from under all of the freakish storms that have pounded the Pacific West Coast in the past few weeks. We survived, but unfortunately, the equivalent of many forests were wiped out (see some of the windstorm damage to the world famous Stanley Park where thousands of trees were toppled).

I won’t be working much over the holiday except for the odd sign-in and missive on IntranetBlog.com so please, no e-mail! I’ll be too busy having fun with family, playing hockey, skiing a lot, catching up on my reading and mostly sleeping (if the baby lets me).

Happy holidays, Merry Christmas, Happy Channukah, Merry Kwanzaa and Happy (insert religious festival here)!! Special kudos to the Iraq Study Group, Steve Nash and the Phoenix Suns for winning 15 games straight, Stephen Harper for calling Hamas for what they are, Sidney Crosby for taking over the NHL, and to everyone and anyone who gives generously to the less fortunate this year (my cause continues to be Unicef – click to donate).

Most intranets have humble beginnings that grow and grow and then, like a weed, grow out of control. Fidelity’s intranet began at the grass-roots level in the mid-1990s, and since then has undergone three formal design iterations – with many smaller enhancements along the way. 

In 1997, the first official corporate intranet introduced content integrity standards, a cohesive information architecture, and a standard look and feel.  In 2002, the introduction of portal technology allowed content to be targeted to employees based on criteria such as business unit, region or role, and enabled each employee to customize the homepage to best meet their needs. The portal’s user interface got an extreme makeover in 2006, with a streamlined appearance, added functionality, and improved performance.