Large corporate intranets can bind together tens of thousands of employees in dozens of countries. For instance, IBM's intranet is now bigger than the entire Internet was a couple of years ago. But lack of strategic planning, inadequate executive sponsorship, and inconsistent content management has led to lukewarm success or total failure for most.According to web guru Jakob Nielsen, sub optimal intranets can drain corporate profits in two ways: 1) time lost searching poorly organized content, and 2) poor decisions based on low-quality information.
It's a frustrating mess consisting of abandoned sites, outdated sites, and incomprehensible sites. Management is starting to awaken to the fact that devoting appropriate resources to internal sites can pay off in the form of greater efficiency, knowledge sharing, productivity, and cost savings.
Information Architecture tools that can help this effort include: 1) conformance to agreed-upon structural and navigational guidelines, 2) a site development plan that specifies the site's offerings, specifies the strategic business objectives, and describes the content, 3) an outline of where the data will be housed, and 4) a plan of how the site will be marketed to its constituency.
How to deliver value? Update content, offer meaningful services, give your users stuff that will help them do their jobs, don't waste their time. And use metrics to measure what content is being accessed.
Seems like there is a lot of revision work on intranets underway. The challenge now is to arrive at If You Build It They Will Come and avoid If You Build It They Will Com-plain!