Editor's letter: Intranet consolidation

The most common project in today’s enterprise that has the potential to become a major headache is the corporate intranet. Most organisations of significant size have grown their internal-serving websites organically as the need or employee demand has required. This has led to a disorganised proliferation of myriad intranets serving the needs of specific users or business units. The end result is that many corporate intranets have no common functionality and no central navigation, and fail to integrate corporate databases and enterprise-information applications.
It is now a core focus of many organisations to rationalise these different sites. Organisations looking to get the most from their intranet deployments are also starting to recognise the value of adopting an integrated approach to content management, search and enterprise-portal development.
But what are the main business drivers for intranet consolidation? What are the biggest barriers to consolidating intranet content? Is an enterprise portal the right solution?
It is answers to these questions, and more, that our special report on intranet consolidation looks to answer.
I hope you enjoy this month’s issue. As always, if you have any comments, questions or suggestions, please do not hesitate to contact me at jschofield@ark-group.com.

Editor
Jason Schofield

Features

People power Free
With expansion plans underway in 2004, Circles recognised the importance of collaboration among its employees and developed a knowledge-sharing process...

Building a knowledge-sharing platform Free
How Burson-Marsteller uses its corporate intranet to support the development of a dynamic, knowledge-sharing culture. By Vanessa Colomar and Andrew Sarnoff...

The journey to a portal Free
Choosing a portal product that fits your company’s needs requires research, testing, formal proposals and executive buy-in. The road may be bumpy, yet your travels will be worth making...

Information-lifecycle management Free
Maintaining peace and public order in and around the urban conurbations of Sheffield, Doncaster, Barnsley and Rotherham in the UK is the daily challenge faced by the men and women of the South Yorkshire Police Force. Managing the data that they create in their daily working lives, meanwhile, creates another daily challenge – this time, for the Force’s IT team...

Regulars

THE LAST WORD: Gartner identifies the fatal flaws of business intelligence Free
At Gartner’s recent Business Intelligence Summit in London, UK, analysts warned that although business intelligence (BI) offers great business opportunities, most enterprises are still failing to use it strategically. Gartner’s analysts identified the most common pitfalls of BI implementations and advised an audience of more than 750 attendees how they might be avoided.

THE WORKSHOP: Writing a statement of requirements Free
At the heart of any software-procurement process is the development of a statement of requirements (SoR). By Martin White

There's no content in copy Free
Over the past several months I have written about the importance of classifying, categorising and otherwise organising content so your users can find it. But, there is little point in doing all this great work if, when your users arrive at their destination, there is little more than a page of copy to greet them.

It’s not illegal, but it’s not nice Free
It is unlikely that I will be invited to write this column again, or indeed, any column. As we get older, we get odder, and I am getting very odd. I know that wanting to talk about classification schemes is seen as slightly worrying: I recall an episode in Manchester in the UK following copious amounts of Guinness discovering that I had a need to explain Dewey to a charming young person. It’s not illegal, but it’s not nice. And yet I feel the need to launch off on the Universal Decimal Classification.