There are many intranets that have been built in-house by the organization’s own people. IBM, Cisco, Microsoft, HP are just some that have been featured on IntranetBlog.com. Most of these however are technology companies that are highly web savvy and have had a constantly evolving intranet for more than 15 years.

There are many advantages to building or redesigning an intranet with internal staff resources:

·         Costs less cash out of pocket

·         Internal stakeholders are forced to learn the ropes

·         Internal jobs are reinforced

The disadvantages of building or redesigning an intranet with only internal staff are obvious:

·         Lack of skill and experience

·         Lack of people to execute

·         Internal politics on what and how to do it

·         Lack of available time to execute

Many organizations however don’t have great resources or experienced staff that know what it takes to build a great intranet (see Good to great intranet). Hiring an external consultant makes sense for many that face some of the above hurdles. However, an Internet consultant is not an intranet consultant. A web design firm has deep creative skills, but rarely has any business acumen and intranet expertise. A big-five consulting firm has very smart people but is very expensive.

So what should you look for in an intranet consultant? Here’s 10 questions to ask potential consultants or intranet consulting firms:

1-     How many intranets have you worked on?

2-     How long have you been in business?

3-     How well do you understand our organization / our business?

4-     Provide a written understanding of our needs / requirements.

5-     Provide client intranet case studies.

6-     Provide intranet client references.

7-     Provide bios of the proposed consultants.

8-     Provide detailed pricing

9-     Provide documentation of your project methodologies.

10-Provide evidence of vendor neutrality / technology neutrality or evidence of experience with the organization’s chosen technology.

Some things to look for and to be cautious about:

ADDITONAL READING:

Hiring an intranet consultant

About the author: Toby Ward is an intranet consultant (Internet consultant too) and the founder of Prescient Digital Media. He has worked with and improved many, many company intranets including Amgen, HSBC, Mastercard, Manulife, PepsiCo, Royal Bank, etc. Toby and his company are consultants for hire and can build your intranet or improve an existing intranet You may contact this intranet consultant directly via the Prescient Digital Media website or email him at: toby{at}prescientdigital{dot}com.

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“Portals still effectively link together concepts of identity, application integration, access to content, personalization, and search. But increasingly, we’re seeing interest in alternative ways to deliver applications to information workers, making it unlikely that portals will ever become the single employee destination site many anticipated they would be,” says Matthew Brown, an analyst focused on the enterprise portals market for Forrester Research.

In my column, Is the personalized intranet portal dying?, I discussed the lack of personalization adoption by employees who use or have access to their intranet portals that feature personalization options. A 5 – 20% adoption rate is normal. This for a technology that, despite the hype, is likely only available in approximately 10% or less of medium to large organizations in North America.

It’s not surprising then that some of the new Web 2.0 technology including RSS and mashups are beginning to undermine expensive portal solutions and the concept of intranet personalization.

“Given the technology trends at work — new methods of integration via programmable thick clients, widgets, gadgets, RSS feeds, and more — it’s unlikely that companies will continue to look at portal servers as their only choice for application integration,” adds Brown.

In my estimation, if implemented correctly, 70-90% of the desired results delivered by a portal’s integration framework can be achieved by other means. There are a number of different options to expose this information to other users, including linking, aggregating information via RSS, and embedding data or functionality inside the intranet via Portlets.

Microsoft’s Sharepoint 2007 features a suite of new Web 2.0 tools including RSS, blogs, wikis, etc. Oracle’s newest portal product, WebCenter, a separate product from their first and better known portal product Oracle Portal. IBM also well understands the power of Web 2.0. Lotus Notes and Domino 8 features an RSS editor, composite application support and standards-based document editors (also, Sametime 7.5 is to include tabbed chat capabilities, compatibility with Microsoft products and integrated video with chat). Domino will also feature Web Services consumer support, which allows Domino applications to 'call' other web services Although the depth of the integration capabilities by Notes is not yet fully known, and depending on how it is implemented, Notes could render a portal solution mostly redundant.

One of the simplest alternatives to personalization could be represented by the potential of RSS to deliver recently updated content between applications and the intranet. RSS is a XML format for publishing frequently updated content. While it is typically used for blogs and news feeds, it can also be used for publishing any type of regularly updated content, including reports, documents, and other key information.

It is relatively straightforward to integrate information from applications to the intranet using RSS. It’s not true integration in the traditional sense, but key business applications can be configured to output RSS for timely information, such as news items, regular reports and performance indicators. 

Mashups offer a glimpse into the RSS alternative. A mashup is a website that combines content data from more than one source to a common view or home page (portal). Google Maps is an example – it draws all the listings and information from many different sources without having to use an expensive piece of portal technology. These are quite simple to do, and for some represent most of the desired content for integration into a single view or portal.

“Many of the new tools like RSS, AJAX, and others remain relatively immature for the purpose of application integration, and there is less availability of reasonably priced labor around these technologies than there is around portal frameworks,” adds Matthew Brown. “But insofar as these technologies promise lighter-weight, faster integration and composition of applications, they’re worthy of consideration.”

A number of vendors are offering mashup solutions that are not yet alternatives to deep, enterprise level integration, but are alternatives to SOA and portals that are able to aggregate top-level data. Here are just a few of the emerging solutions: