The corporate intranet or portal has always played the poor cousin to the customer-facing Website. Most executives have traditionally viewed, and sadly continue to view, the corporate intranet as a cost-center with little perceived and almost no measured value.

In fact, some executives I’ve interviewed have proven to be down right daft (see Stupid begets stupid). A CEO of a major financial services company with a horribly pathetic intranet that barely earns the title ‘intranet’ was famous for saying: “I think we’ve invested too much in technology already.” This company makes money hand over fist.

Another, a Director of Human Resources, once told me during a business requirements analysis for crafting a new intranet plan, “I don’t understand why we need an intranet... I mean we have a pretty good phone system that cost us a lot!”

However, you’ll have to forgive some of these folks as god bless them they just don’t know better given their unshakable faith in the fax machine, telex, and their respective assistants who can type their handwritten emails.

While intranets while likely always play second fiddle to the Internet sites with the larger budget and customer focus, they are catching up. A centralized intranet or portal home page was still largely a rare commodity in the mid-90s. Today, almost all large size organizations have them – in the form of an off-the-shelf portal product or something custom-built and pieced together by the internal IT team (though usually lacking the level of customization or personalization options that characterize many of the portal products offered by leaders such as Plumtree, Oracle, IBM and others).

How many companies have intranets and what does the average intranet look like? Good question. An exact count is not readily available but and IDC study in 2001 found that about 85% of medium to large size organizations have an intranet – in some form.

Author Martin White has done some research and it appears that Canada is leading the way. “The country with the highest intranet penetration is reported to be Canada with 58% of businesses having an intranet, says White, founder of Intranet Focus Ltd. in England. “The U.K. figure is reported at 52% (compared to 9% from the National Statistics survey) and the U.S. figure is 48%.”

In the UK alone, White estimates that the number must at least break 200,000 as of late 2003.To put that in perspective, the total number of intranets therefore is likely in the millions.

The average look and composition of the corporate intranet is even fuzzier. I’ve had the good fortunate to work as a consultant with dozens of companies and their respective intranets and portals. Believe me, no two intranets are alike.

There are however some universal similarities in the evolution of the average corporate intranet:

·     The first intranet was a simple HTML page or collection of pages with static information – often policies and/or some newsletter stories.

·     Started and managed by an IT person with a server under their desk.

·     First appeared somewhere between the early and mid-1990s.

·     HR and communications often followed with their own intranet sites – other business units and groups soon followed.

·     Within a couple of years the ‘organic’ evolution of the intranet became a rag-tag sprawl of mismatching sites with little or no standards, policies or economies of scale.

In the majority of organizations this organic growth produced a kingdom of intranet feudal states of varying qualities – and each state highly protective of their property and assets. Usually some bold manager who is not afraid of a little politics and blood-letting has stepped-up and tired to convince these nobles that the sprawling mish-mash of intranet sites and pages were confusing employees and wasting the organization thousands if not millions of dollars due to lack of standards and cooperation amongst the various feudal properties. In some organizations this intranet sprawl was gross and bloated.

By the late 1990s IBM had about 10,000 intranet sites representing well over 10 million pages (at best count). Enough was enough and Big Blue put in place a federated governance model with universal standards and began consolidating and shutting down sites. Yes some lords were upset, but many fell in line and this wise and necessary effort has saved IBM tens of millions of dollars in a few short years (see Leading intranet case study: IBM’s W3).

As for value, the ROI is there but it’s not being measured. A 2003 study by Prescient Digital Media revealed that only 6% of organizations undertake ongoing, specific measurement of the ROI of their intranet. Occasional measurement is undertaken by only 26% of organizations and 51% either do no measurement, don’t know if they do, or only guess at the ROI. 18% are considering ROI measurements.

It is not that organizations don’t care about ROI. They do care. But actual measurement is a little more elusive and difficult to undertake.