Introduction

Any internal investment made by an organization will always need to be justified by a business case, especially in the current economic situation. Many organizations have a pro forma approach to investment cases that can be very difficult to adapt to the delivery of what, in essence, is an information service. This was the case with a major hospital in the UK where most of the investment was targeted at meeting performance targets for clinical excellence set out by the government. The entire pro forma was based around patient numbers and treatments and it was totally unsuitable for an investment into new web content management software for the intranet. There was general agreement at all levels in the hospital that the intranet was a valuable support tool, but the intranet manager was placed in the situation of not being able to show an auditable link between the investment and clinical performance – the alternative being to persuade the hospital trust that the investment pro forma needed to be rewritten.

In this chapter a number of different ways of making a business case for an intranet are presented, all of which will need to be adapted to the way in which investment decisions are made by the board. Indeed, the initial step has to be to establish any rules for investment decisions before starting to prepare the business case, especially where the investment is for computer hardware and software. There are often levels of investment that can be signed off by an individual senior manager without having to go to the finance director and the board. Sometimes it pays to be pragmatic and to pitch the investment at a level where it does not need full board approval, as almost always in the intranet business some investment is better than none at all.

The focus of this chapter is on making a near-term business case, perhaps for the next 6 to 12 months. Preparing a longer-term, perhaps three- or even five-year, strategy is covered in Chapter 17.

All or something?

One decision to be made at the outset is whether the best approach is to write a business case for the entire intranet or to take some specific elements of the intranet and use those to make such a good business case that everything else can be wrapped into it.