Becoming business critical seems to be a generic strategic goal for many intranets. But who is to judge whether an intranet is business critical or not?

To my knowledge there are two sources of data that look into this topic:

- The “Global Intranet Trends” report by Jane McConnell: here the “Senior management perception” as judged by the participating intranet managers is investigated

- The Worldwide Intranet Challenge (WIC): here the intranet’ users from the participating organisations are asked to state their perception of the intranet’s value

Now, a direct comparison of the results from the two sources isn’t really possible at the moment (e.g. the number of participants varies by factor 10 between the two). Still, I think it’s interesting how they offer quite substantially different pictures:

- Depending on what maturity stage an intranet is in, 7 to 28% of intranet managers rate their intranets as business critical in the “Global Intranet Trends for 2010″

- In contrast not a single intranet (0%) is rated as business critical from a user’s perspective in the WIC

Likewise, at the other end of the spectrum, the ratings for an intranet’s value to be “neutral or indifferent” vary – but this time it’s the other way around:

- 14 to 38% of the companies in the Global Intranet Trends (intranet manager’s perspective)

- 0% of the companies in the WIC (user’s perspective)

Quite extreme, huh? What does that mean for an organisation that wants to find out about the (qualitative) value of its intranet? One take away would surely be to always using a multi-faceted approach that includes all relevant stakeholder groups, from senior management to lines of business, to intranet teams to users.

What do you think?

(or get in touch and I’ll send you an invite)

Jane