Introduction

All too frequently content contribution to an intranet is best described as a ‘hobby’. Content is added as and when there are no other jobs that have a higher priority, by employees who have ended up with the task by default. There are usually no standards for content contribution, limited training and no rewards. Is it any wonder that one of the most frequent criticisms of an intranet is that there are too many out-of-date pages and a lot of duplication? An intranet can only ever be as good as the content that it contains, so developing a content strategy and making sure that it is complied with is the best single way of enhancing the value of an intranet.

There is a lot of investment in information creation in an organization. In the 21st century virtually every employee is an information creator, even if that information is a quality check on a product before shipment. That quality check gets aggregated into the quality-management process and may well end up in a business intelligence application which is being accessed through the intranet. The salary bill of the company will approximate more or less to the investment being made in information creation. That is a very considerable amount of money, and the reason why an information management strategy is so important for any organization.

Less is more

Few intranet managers are able to state with any confidence just how many pages of content the intranet contains, but there are highly likely to be some 80/20 rules in operation, along the lines of:

Those may seem some very depressing figures, but in many cases the truth is even more depressing.