How to cut your intranet budget
October 30th, 2008 by Janus Boye
In these interesting times with a crisis in finance as the New York Times puts it, many of our members are either forced or strongly encouraged to look at ways to cut intranet spending.
Intranet Benchmarking Forum (IBF) has already commented on the recession-proof intranet, while James Robertson in Australia recently asked whether intranet teams are feeling the pinch?
I want to take this discussion a step further: It may indeed be helpful for some to look at the intranet as a cost cutter, but actually it should be pretty straight-forward for most intranet teams to achieve more with less. This might sound like heresy, in particular knowing how many intranet teams are fighting an uphill battle with very few resources at hand as it is. Still, experience tells me that senior management will be more impressed with direct and immediate savings than with future potential savings based on a fancy Return-On-Investment calculation.
During the recent boom years, I’ve seen how many intranet professionals have been far too careless with resources. They’ve attended too many conferences, travelled too much, bought too many analyst reports, engaged too many consultants, bought expensive content management systems, and had too many memberships in various organisations. Let us be frank: Did you really need that €9,500 tag cloud on your intranet?
Yes, intranet innovation is a good thing, but looking more carefully at costs will certainly help the industry mature.
Tags: budget, finance crisis, intranet
November 4th, 2008 at 9:25 am
I agree with what you’re saying here. In my view only a fraction of the work that intranet teams do actually provide real value. They usually know what that work is but the organisation pushes them to do a lot of useless work.
November 28th, 2008 at 1:29 pm
[...] December is around the corner and many organisations have long found that their 2008 intranet budget depleted. On the wish lists for 2009 are many interesting projects, including Enterprise 2.0 initiatives, but as I’ve said previously, you may need to cut your intranet budget. [...]
December 23rd, 2008 at 10:09 am
[...] in October I suggested that you can do more with less on your intranet. Since then recession has become a reality in many countries and most industries are now faced with [...]
February 16th, 2009 at 8:11 am
[...] What I really appreciate about the current difficult economic climate, is that it once again is OK to challenge conventional wisdom. Everybody is forced to be much more critical and when it comes to intranets many are looking at the fat smoker they have created during the boom years and thinking; what really happened? Let’s just cut the intranet budget! [...]