What is the value of your intranet?

The top search term that visitors used to arrive at this blog in November was 'value of intranet' So it is obviously a hot topic out there among intranet managers. If you get the chance I'd be interested to know why you think it is such a hot topic.

I'm going to split the question into 2 totally different starting points
1. You've got an intranet and you are asked 'what is the value of the system that we have' i.e. can you justify the ongoing cost and expenditure
2. You want a new system function and you need to justify the future work.

I'm going to leave point 2 for a future blogpost so let's take a look at situation number 1.
It may be counterintuitive to some of you, but I would suggest that you should not start with 'the numbers'. I would ask yourself the question about how much agreement there is in your organisation that the intranet is an intrinsically useful thing. A business case, especially in a large organisation, is the outward manifestation of an agreement to do something - and that agreement goes way beyond what the numbers on the spreadsheet may or may not say about your payback period, internal rate of return and overall ROI. The bottom line is - do you have the right supporters across the organisation?

Some practical consideratioins
Are you measuring what people do on your intranet every day? If you are, then start putting a value on that stuff. When someone is viewing a page they should be completing a task (we should come back to task completion in a different blogpost) and that task must have a value. Let's take a practical example - making travel plans.
Firstly, this isn't a new task, just because it is online now doesn't mean that it wasn't done before so you can compare the cost of doing it before to the cost of doing it now. You can do this by using timings i.e. 3 minutes to do it on paper versus 2 minutes to do it online, multiply by the total number of times the transaction takes place per annum and you get a saving. More powerful though is looking at the intrinsic value of the task and claim a proportion of that. In this example the procurement benefits may run into very large numbers very quickly, and in a large organisation putting a task online is the only way to get control of it.
What about tasks that have a very fuzzy intrinsic value? Well, perhaps that is telling you someting. After you have put your 75th blog on the intranet and added your 120th RSS feed you probably ought to be pretty clear on how you are going to measure the value of it.

Do you have a known, current value for your intranet? leave a comment below if you have.