Strategy.manage.ent

James provides a quick summary of, and pointers to, a well written strategic white paper on intranet design. That this paper is five years old and still 100% relevant says something about the veracity of its author.

A different view on intranets: Cities of Text. Marc Demarest writes an often amusing, but always thoughtful, article on intranets as data junkyards. He draws parallels to city planning, and uses this to highlight common problems with corporate intranets.
He identifies a number of common intranet myths:

Intranets are just a matter of technology
Intranets have nothing really to do with technology
If we give people an intranet, they will spontaneously share knowledge
Intranets deliver huge ROI almost immediately
Intranets are a new kind of IT system, and don't require the definition, design and implementation discipline we employed with OLTP and DSS systems
The IS organization can run the firm's intranet
The IS organization has nothing to do with the firm's intranet.
Intranets are self-organizing
Intranets are knowledge management
Intranets are cheap
What is really interesting, is that this article was published in 1997. What has changed in the last five years? Nothing. [Thanks to the Guide to Ease weblog.] [ Source: Column Two]

Demarest goes on to speak clearly about issues that affect virtually every intranet project, and how looking at the lessons learned in building physical communities are equally applicable in virtual communities:

[...] Unfortunately, the average firm's intranet is typically based on none of these real-world forms, with their histories of successes, failures, limitations and advantages. Instead, the typical intranet looks, if anything, like Tombstone, Arizona: a boom-and-bust, clapped-up, clapped-out frontier town, a buildings-now-rules-later, caveat emptor shoot-em-up wild west town. [...]

In the comments section of Column Two, Denham Grey adds the following:

Marc's "Knowledge management: an introduction" also 1997 vintage, is still a classic:
http://www.hevanet.com/demarest/marc/km1.pdf
One of the best KM / intranet books I have read is is "The 21st-Century Intranet" by Jennifer Stone Gonzalez

I've not yet read these two, but have no doubt they will be well worth the time.