Merril Lynch recently completed a survey of 100 CIOs in the United States and Europe on Internet readiness.
Asking them to rate on a scale of 1 to 10 (10 being ‘finished’), the CIO’s where asked how far each respective company had progressed in implementing its Internet strategy.
The average response: 6.5. That’s 65% complete.
Unfortunately employees take a backseat to customers and the greater public in most companies and not surprisingly the intranet is always plays poor cousin to the Internet.
While not a priority for the vast majority of companies my guess is that if the same question was asked about the intranet the rating would be far less – perhaps a three or a four.
The paradigm is changing for some, but most executives still view the intranet as a cost center and have no understanding or inkling on the potential return on investment for an intranet (see Finding ROI white paper).
A good way to take this temperature reading at your organization is to ask all of your intranet stakeholders (key stakeholders, owners or content publishers that influence the future of the intranet). At Prescient Digital Media we use a rating methodology to formally evaluate and score an intranet. Ultimately, the intranet gets a rating on a scale of 1-10 that can also be used to benchmark the intranet to other intranets. During an intranet assessment I will ask stakeholders at the end of a business requirements interview to also rank the intranet on a scale of 1-10.
I’ve conducted this type of assessment dozens of times and without fail, the average stakeholder rating is never more than .5 from the formal methodology score (e.g. stakeholders rate the intranet a 4 out of 10 while the formal rating is a 4.5 out of 10). The point is that the cumulative knowledge of all key intranet stakeholders (often averages 10 – 15 per organization) is amazingly precise. If the process of gathering, documenting and analyzing that knowledge is sound (this shouldn’t be left to amateurs), then it is not difficult to determine your own organization’s intranet readiness (though if there exists any internal politics or confusion over the ownership of the intranet a precise rating is not possible without the use of a third party assessor).
How does the intranet rate at your company? All good stories and bad stories are welcome!
