The Value of an Intranet

“You don’t know how good something is until you loose it.”

If a company invests in an Intranet Site it is important that the value of the site be realised as an asset, early in its lifecycle.

Story… One organisation had built a substantial Intranet to cater for its 25,000 staff. It had become the thread to organisational navigation and knowledge. It had a team assigned to its management; it had standards, it was a good system. If you ever wanted to know anything about the organisation, you went to the Intranet.

The challenge I believe the company had was that it didn’t realise how valuable the Intranet site was to them.

They usually found this out the day there was a network issue and no one could access the Intranet. All of a sudden it was important to bring the system up ASAP.

If the company had taken the time to realise that this was a strategic information asset, I’m sure there would have been an increase in funding to enable newer technologies such as implementing a Content Management System rather than static HTML pages.

Some questions that may make you consider how valuable your Intranet is:

• How many visitors utilise the Intranet on a daily basis? (Do you have any reporting in place to measure this)
• How much corporate information is available on the Intranet?
• If the Intranet was down, due to an outage, where would you go to get that same information in the interim?
• How long would it take to get the static copies of the corporate information?
• How long could you afford to have the Intranet inaccessible? 15 mins, less or more?
• How much money would you potentially loose if the outage was more than say 15 mins? What about if it was half a day or a full day?

There’s a few questions to think about.

So, how valuable is your Intranet?