All the action in intranets at present seems to be focused on content management. Many Web content management vendors I have spoken to in Europe over the last couple of months have indicated that the intranet market is now at least as important to them as the Web site market. However, the vendors are finding that the time and effort they need to spend on intranet pre-sales activities is much higher than is the case with Web sites, and given the pressure on pricing and margins they can ill afford to spend much time without a good probability of closing the sale. The problem seems to arise from the fact that very few companies have a formal intranet strategy, let alone a more widely-based content management strategy. A recent survey in the U.K. by Consultants Advisory magazine (www.consultants-advisory.com) reported that only 34% of companies surveyed had a content management system, and that of those not employing such technology 75% said they either had no plans to do so within the next two years, or did not know what will happen. At the heart of the problem is that, in my experience, very few organizations have a formal intranet strategy, or better still, a content management strategy. I have seen a number of RFPs for content management software which are written onlyin IT infrastructure terms, with no business objectives other than vague mentions of "enhancing productivity." I have a very straightforward approach to intranet and content management strategy planning, and it is based on three core elements, information content, technical infrastructure, and governance. These three elements are all interrelated, so although I will comment on each of them in sequence, strategy development requires an incremental approach that looks at these interrelationships.
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