[Sigia-l] Intranet strategies and fundamental assumptions - to portal or not to portal?

[Lamantia, Joseph C.]

My team is in the midst of strategizing and defining the scope of our intranet redesign effort, and I thought I would invite comment on our thinking by the rest of the list - while our major assumptions and decisions are still malleable.

A quick outline of the situation:

Large software firm (~4000 employees and $800 million in revenue) in the midst of major product line and business shifts needs to re-architect intranet to reflect new needs of employees and new business strategies, improve usability, support rapid growth of knowledge content, etc.

At the moment, we're leaning toward a concept that I would quickly summarize as "a portal-style interface into a knowledge sharing platform that is designed and deployed - UI, taxonomy, CMS - by a small central team, but fed with content by the community of employees within the firm"

Ignoring the business-ese, this concept reflects (at least) four broad assumptions:

1 - knowledge sharing is an appropriate over-arching goal of an intranet for a firm like this

2 - portal style interfaces a la myMSN, myYahoo, etc., are, or can be, effective for these purposes

3 - it is possible to establish centralized tools to support points 1 + 2 in a tightly siloed and somewhat cranky cultural environment

4 - employees will - or will be able to - access and contribute high-qualilty reusable content within a system like the above

These are broad *broad* issues, so I'm hoping that we might first find out if any of us has taken on a task like this, and used a similar approach, and then dive into some of the details?

Many Thanks,
Joe Lamantia

PS: Team size survey results are on the way soon - I just need a few free minutes...

Joe.Lamantia > Information.Architect > PTC
jlamantia at ptc.com : 781.370.5173