Getting the most from intranets and extranets

The survey (1) indicated that 60% of employees in the UK now have access to an intranet. Of course this does not mean that 60% of businesses have an intranet. Our best guess, based on a range of sources, is that around 30% of UK businesses actually have an intranet at present, and there continues to be a high rate of new intranet installations.

The early adopters of intranet applications were management consultancies, the financial, pharmaceutical and IT sectors, and more recently other professional services companies. Many not-for-profit organisations, especially charities, have benefited from working more efficiently through the use of an intranet, and the network of Citizens Advice Bureaux is a good example. In general the public sector has been somewhat slower to deploy intranets, mainly because of a lack of ICT skills and knowledge, and issues about changing internal cultures. However the pressure to deliver effective public services will act as a catalyst for the adoption of intranets, especially in local authorities.

Benefiting from experience
One of the challenges faced by anyone responsible for managing an intranet is that is it all but impossible to exchange good practice information with other intranet managers. Most companies seem not to have an intranet manager, relying on an IT manager or corporate communications manager to fulfil this role alongside their other tasks. As a result even finding other intranet managers is all but impossible, though there is an organisation in the USA that offers intranet and extranet benchmarking (2).

It is noteworthy that the Office of the e-Envoy has published guidelines on web site design, but nothing on intranet design. Although there are some similarities, the issues of information architecture to provide effective navigation and search of an intranet are more complex, mainly because there has to be 100% trust in the currency and accuracy of the information on an intranet.

Given such an information black-hole, surveys on intranet use are therefore very valuable. Probably the best recent survey was carried out by Melcrum Publishing last year (3) among large companies in the UK, North America and Europe.

One question that we get asked on a frequent basis is how many staff should be involved in intranet development. The report indicates that for organisations of up to 10,000 employees around 50% had one to three staff, and 20% had four to five staff. However in our experience many companies still assume that staff will contribute content and manage intranet development in the spare time between other responsibilities.

Content management
The issue of content management is now really coming to the fore, as companies start to realise the importance of seeing content in enterprise terms. The result is that electronic document management, customer relationship and other database systems, along with the intranet and e-mail systems, all meet in the middle. This has significant implications for metadata schemes. In the December 2001 issue of Consultants Advisory (www.consultants-advisory.com) there was a survey of UK company attitudes to content management, mainly in larger companies. The results indicate that in 52% of the companies responding there is someone with the specific responsibility of managing corporate information assets, up from 29% in 2000. Because of the size of these companies it is not surprising that 96% had an intranet, and that in 64% of these companies it was deployed on every desk-top.

Respondents could give multiple answers, but it is interesting to see that information-related justifications are high up on the list.

In many companies the quick ROI is to enhance productivity. This is one of the angles explored in a report released by Agency.Com (www.agency.com), which has a London office on 0207 964 8200, though the report can be downloaded from the web site after registration. The survey was carried out in the USA in late September 2001 amongst users of intranets, rather than intranet managers. There are some very interesting outcomes in this survey, including the fact the respondents were claiming to save around 7% of their time from using an intranet or portal. Another comment is that the respondents shared knowledge because it is of substantial benefit to them, and not because of a company-dictated policy or incentive programme. Finally, employees who are highly satisfied with their intranet or corporate portal also have a high level of job satisfaction.

Another trend is in the use of intranets for e-learning support. An excellent survey has been conducted for several years by the Xebec corporate training subsidiary of McGraw-Hill. The survey reports that in 2001 87% of all responders had an intranet or technology with similar functionality, a 10% increase on 2000. Of these 28% indicate that they use it for delivery of training within their organisations. This figure is the same as in 2000, but because the total proportion of organisations with an intranet has increased significantly, Xebec comment that there has been growth in the implementation of e-learning. Of organisations that have an intranet, 54% claim they plan to use it to deliver training within 1 to 3 years. Again this is an increase on the previous year's results, when 48% indicated that they planned to implement e-learning within one to three years. Only 18% of organisations with an intranet currently have no plans to use it to deliver training.

Implementing a content management solution
All the action in intranets at present seems to be focused on content management. The interfaces between intranets, enterprise portals, document management systems, electronic archives management, employee self-service portals, desk-top e-commerce/procurement services, web sites and a host of other systems will, in the future, have to be considered in content management terms and not just in systems integration terms.

As intranets become larger and more complex it will be essential to deploy a content management system. Most organisations now realise that intranet content contribution should be undertaken by any member of staff that has something to contribute. This approach requires there to be a content publishing system that is very easy to use by staff, and which can take Word files and PowerPoint presentations and adapt them effectively to a web browser environment with the minimum of manual effort other than adding meta tags. These meta tags are essential in the management of content, indicating who is responsible for the content, when the content needs to be removed or revised, and what are the subject categories for the content.