A global intranet survey of 101 companies by France-based intranet strategy consultant Jane McConnell has revealed what many of us have suspected – only 13% said their senior management perceived the intranet as "business critical".
I’ve long said that the vast majority of senior executives think of the intranet as just another ‘cost center’. Jane’s survey findings certainly reinforce this notion. The final report and findings are not yet ready but Jane has shared some of the initial findings:
- The most important factor of organisational complexity is the high number of offices & locations. Language barriers came next to last on the list.
- 55% said their employees would be disturbed in their work if the intranet "went down" for 1 to 2 hours.
- The main obstacle preventing the intranet from achieving its potential is that it is "too communication" and lacks integrated applications. (cited 58 times out of 95 respondents.)
- A factor that slows down strategic decision making is "lack of awareness of the potential role of the intranet" - cited 71 times out of 98 respondents.
- 47 out of 99 expect their intranet budgets to increase over the next 2 years. (good for us!)
- Only 26% are required to measure ROI to justify new or current investments.
- Out of 101 participants, 28 have implemented internal blogs and/or external blogs and/or wikis.
- 18 have implemented internal blogs, 21 more plan to do so soon.
- Out of 68 respondents, 32 have a general taxonomy across the organisation, 34 have specific, detailed taxonomies for some business and functions, 11 have taxonomies for specific, temporary project teams. (multiple answers possible.)
- Bottom up and horizontal information flows are much weaker than top down flows. (I have different stats per region and size of organisation.)
- Only 13% said their senior management perceived the intranet as "business critical".
Survey sample:
- 101 organisations: 87 private companies, 6 world organisations, 5 public service and 3 other.
- Regions: Headquarters based in Europe (58%), North
- Size of organisation: Under 5000 employees (20%), from 5 to 15,000 (29%), from 15 to 50,000 (25%) and over 50,000 (25%).
- Organisational structure: De-centralised (29%), Integrated (21%), Matrix (47%), Other (4%)
- Over 57% of the organisations operate in over 20 countries.
- Over one third have from 2 to 4 official languages.
- 27% of the organisations have three-quarters knowledge workers.
- 21% said that about half of their employees do not have individual access to the intranet.