Introduction

Intranet managers seem to be on an almost perpetual quest to find ways to justify not only investment in the intranet, but almost the very existence of the application. This is not the case for other enterprise systems. The finance director is not asked to justify the accounting system, nor the personnel director the HR system. The reasons for this have already been discussed. It is therefore important for the governance strategy to present a range of ways in which the value and impact of the intranet can be assessed. This chapter sets out a wide range of options for consideration.

All too often procedures for measuring value and impact are implemented only when a need for investment is seen on the horizon. The result will be that metrics dating back only a few months are available making it difficult for all concerned to work out whether the peaks and troughs are real, an artefact of poor server performance, or indicate the start-up of a major project that required intensive research.

The challenge is to develop a balance between absolute metrics (number of documents downloaded) and relative metrics (percentage increase of documents), and between quantitative metrics (number of users per working day) and qualitative metrics (level of trust in intranet content). This chapter sets out a range of approaches, but to use all of them is unrealistic. The choice of approach must take into account available resources and the way in which the organization typically makes investment decisions.

Website logs

In the website business, logs of clicks and downloads are essential for optimizing the site and justifying enhancements to the technology and the content. Data on page hits alone can be quite useful, but the paths that people take through the site before taking an action to buy or download also provide very valuable information. It is also widely recognized that visitors to a website often arrive via a search site, such as Google; knowing which page they land on when arriving is important in developing effective routes through the site.

Many years ago, at a KMWorld/Intranets conference in California, aspeaker suggested that in the intranet world HITS was an acronym for How Idiots Track Success of an intranet. This is perhaps an extreme view, but not far from the truth. A few years ago a company was heavily involved in developing its business interests in China.