Source: Intranet Journal
Author: Troy Dreier

How does your intranet compare with those of other companies? It can be difficult to know, since intranets are typically inaccessible to those outside the company. That's why a recent survey of global intranet use and trends compiled by Intranet Dashboard should find interest with any developer.

Intranet Dashboard timed the Global Intranet Benchmarking Survey to coincide with the 2.0 release of its award-winning intranet creation software. The company surveyed a global audience, with over half of respondents (53 percent) in Australia, where Intranet Dashboard is based. Only 18 percent of respondents were in North America.

Cautious about new features

The Intranet Dashboard survey asked questions about what features companies offered on their intranets, what tools were most useful, what they plan to add, and who at their company controls the intranet. As a whole, the responses suggest that most companies are cautious about adding new features -- even collaboration tools that generate a lot of hype in the press -- until they're certain they makes sense for their business.

If your intranet is decidedly low-tech, it turns out it's not the only one. The largest group of respondents said their site was made of static HTML pages, while far fewer said they use a content management system or an all-in-one intranet creation tool.

When asked about current features and their popularity, these proved the most popular: content management, document management, search, news, and shared calendars. Despite all the attention they've gotten, blogs have not become a mainstay on the majority of intranets, with only 11 percent of respondents saying they were very popular on the company intranet.

On the subject of challenges that developers planned to overcome for their intranets in the next 12 months, the most popular answers were to improve internal communications, improve content management, improve overall usability, and to work on knowledge management. Despite all the social tools available, it appears that people view the intranet primarily as a practical tool that needs to enhance collaboration among workers.

Another surprise is that while we often hear about the diversification of the intranet -- with different departments empowered to run their own section and keep it current -- the company intranet still belongs to the IT department, albeit by a slim margin over the other main controller of intranets, marketing and communications. Respondents said that the IT department was the most likely to control the intranet's budget, and that the IT department was overwhelmingly responsible for the day-to-day operation of the intranet.

But the marketing and communications departments are making ground. 34 percent of marketing and communications departments have overall responsibility for the day to day intranet operations, the survey showed.

"The Global Intranet Benchmarking Survey showed IT departments and marcoms were battling for control of the intranet, and if global trends are any indication this conflict will only escalate," said Campbell Dobbin, CEO of Intranet DASHBOARD.

Social networking

The topic of social networking provides some of the biggest surprises in the survey, with social tools not receiving the same level of importance as practical tools. Only 14 percent of respondents had added blogs to their intranets and only 21 percent planned on doing so. The numbers were only slightly better for discussion forums: only 31 percent had them and 26 percent planned to add them. RSS feeds, wikis, and podcasting were not often offered.

The survey leaves open the question as to why so few intranets offer advanced social features. Do the powers-that-be view them as unnecessary or do the intranet developers lack the resources and time to create them? Or is there another reason?

To download a copy a copy of the Intranet Dashboard survey for your own reference, click here.

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