How many intranets are there that need the skills and vision of an intranet manager? It is a very difficult question to answer. In the UK, information from the e-business survey conducted annually by the Office for National Statistics indicates that at the end of 2008 there were certainly over 50,000 intranets in businesses with more than ten employees. There will certainly be more in other types of organization. Every intranet needs a manager, even if managing the intranet is only one of their roles. Scale the UK figures up to the European Union and add in North America, and the installed base might easily be of the order of a million or more intranets. That is a lot of potential readers for books on how to ensure that the organization is getting the best from its intranet. Yet look along the shelves of any major bookshop and only rarely will there be even one book on intranet management. A search on the term ‘intranet’ on Amazon.co.uk will, in the first 24 titles, include 12 published before 2000.

Now that this book has been published, both I and Facet Publishing will be interested to find out whether this is an untapped market, or whether all the problems have been solved and no one needs any advice. We both hope that it is the former!

I should say at the outset that I have never managed an intranet, but over the last ten years I have worked on nearly a hundred intranet projects and talked to a very large number of intranet managers at conferences and workshops around the world. I have learned much from these projects and encounters, including that there is still no such thing as best practice in intranet management. Almost always the objective of the projects I have undertaken, be they in the USA or Kuwait, has been the development of an intranet strategy.

This book sets out how I go about developing an intranet strategy. One

of my heroes is the Nobel physicist Richard Feynman, and his view of his work is that he was creating a tool-box of mathematical tricks that others could use in the development of something useful. This book contains some of my consulting tricks, which I hope that readers will be able to adapt to their own particular requirements.