Can anyone set-up an intranet site in your company? However they want, whenever they want?

Yes, yes and yes is the standard answer at most companies. Believe it or not.

A couple of weeks ago I talked a little about IBM’s intranet and how they had nearly 10,000 intranets a couple of years ago. They now have about 5,000...

What is the cost of managing all those renegade sites in your organization?

Cost considerations aside, why should we reign in intranet sprawl? Well technical and security reasons are also top of mind.

Paul Chin recently wrote on IntranetJournal.com....

-  “Renegade applications (including intranet sites) raise many concerns for IT teams responsible for maintaining overall IT integrity because they:

-  Are not included in IT's official security model — internal and external security, user and group access control, and authentication method.

-  Are not included in IT's overall application integrity plan — system architecture, maintenance and backup procedures, and disaster recovery and business continuity.

-  May have been built with non-corporate standard development tools, language, and platform of which only the developer (and no one from the official IT development teams) is familiar with.

-  Are at risk of being abandoned should the developer leave the company.

Another good reason to halt intranet sprawl before it advances: your users. Having dozens, if not hundreds or thousands of intranet sites will confuse and irritate your users. Theirs one universal complaint: “I can’t find anything."

If you’re looking to do a redesign and don’t have budget to do an inventory of the sites on your intranet. Then go to your CFO and tell him how much this is costing the company and how much you can save the company if you reign in that intranet sprawl... you could be a hero!