Nothing ruins a good intranet like intranet sprawl. Dozens or hundreds if not thousands of corporate intranet sites – all using different hardware, software, content, information architectures, etc. Confusing the users, wasting money, etc.

Just ask companies like IBM or Nortel who waste millions on maintaining thousands of intranet sites. The sprawl must be contained; the monster must be tamed.

Prescient Digital Media senior consultants Julian Mills and Tom Marciniak recently conducted a workshop on doing just that – taming the monster.

All organizations that disseminate information start with a dream: multiple websites integrating seamlessly into an intranet that minimizes the effort of managing content and maximizes stakeholder satisfaction. But for too many operations, the dream has become a nightmare, a Frankenstein’s monster of mismatched components that lurch onto monitors, terrifying audiences and causing managers’ sleepless nights.

Government organizations face unique challenges when setting out to tame the monster, starting with the focus necessary to organize the task. They can’t work with the obvious profit-drivers that enable private sector organizations to assess the damage being done when a monster enters their midst, or develop the return on investment (ROI) models that tell them the dream has been realized.

The ROI for a government intranet may not be derived from increased sales or profits, but it can be rapidly developed based on improving the efficiency of sharing and disseminating information, especially during an era in which political leaders promote government efficiency. After all, government departments exist to propagate information, so any initiative that demonstrably improves this core function will have an obvious impact on organizational goals.

Read the full article Taming the Monster: Creating an effective Government Intranet