A great article by Jakob Nielsen, the guru on web design.
Useit.Com: Ten Best Intranets of 2002. A few of the concepts he discusses that I found most interesting included:
In terms of management structure, the only trend we found was that there was no clear picture of who winning intranet teams report to within the organizations. The two most common organizational homes for the intranet teams were information technology departments and human resources (HR) departments, but we also found good intranet teams reporting to the corporate secretary and the corporate communications department. Finally, a few intranets belonged to broader e-solutions departments responsible for both the public Internet website and the private intranet within the firewall.
Perhaps just as interesting was the concept of a "killer app"
Much of the value of an intranet comes from making it a communications tool that all employees check every day. This can be a challenge, especially if the old intranet was universally hated for being clumsy and impossible to work with, as was the case in some of the companies. A common solution (in addition to redesigning for better quality, of course) is to prominently feature a killer app that is so useful that people will voluntarily -- and frequently -- visit the intranet homepage.
In most companies, an employee search tool serves as the killer app. We also found several companies that used a daily lunch menu as their killer app. MORE....
7:11:08 PM 
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