An intranet gathers several things a company needs in one place: announcements, documents, a directory, a search box, and somewhere to put the things that belong to everybody. The gathering is the advantage and it is genuine. The catch is that a place where anything can go becomes a place where everything went, and that is the condition in which almost every intranet is replaced.
One place people already have open
Attention is the scarce thing. A company announcement in an intranet that people open anyway reaches further than the same announcement in a system they have to remember exists, and that advantage compounds with everything else you put beside it. It is the strongest argument for an intranet and it is an argument about habit rather than about features.
A directory that is worth having
Who does what, who to ask, what a team owns. This is the part an intranet does better than any alternative because it can be derived from the systems that already know, and because everybody needs it occasionally and nobody would build it separately.
One search across things that were separate
Documents, announcements, people and pages in one result list is a real improvement over four systems with four search boxes, and it is usually the feature that sells the purchase. What it cannot do is make a stale document look stale, which is where the trouble starts.
A place for the things that belong to nobody
The holiday calendar, the office address, the expense form, the induction pack. Each is too small to own a system and too necessary to lose, and an intranet is the right answer for all of them. This is unglamorous and it is most of what employees actually use it for.
The failure every intranet shares
Because anything may be published and nothing needs an owner, the content ages invisibly. Five years in, search returns three versions of the same policy, two of which were true once, and nobody can tell which is current. The intranet is then declared a failure and replaced, and the replacement inherits the same rule, which is that publishing is easy and ownership is nobody's.
What fixes it, and it is not a product
An owner on every page that answers a question, a date on which somebody confirms it is still true, and a visible mark when that date passes. Any intranet can be made to do this and almost none does it by default, which is why the answer pages of a company usually end up somewhere the intranet is not.
Questions people ask about advantages of intranet
Is an intranet a knowledge base?
It contains one, badly, unless somebody imposes ownership and review on the part that answers questions. The rest of an intranet, announcements and forms and the directory, is a different job it does well.
Should the knowledge base live inside it?
It can, if the intranet lets an article carry an owner and a review date and lets you see what is overdue. If it does not, the base belongs in something that does, linked from the intranet so people still find it where they look.
Why do intranets get replaced so often?
Because the replacement is bought to fix stale content and arrives with the same permissive publishing model. Two years later the new one is stale too. The cycle ends when ownership is added, not when the software is.
What about a company that only wants announcements?
Then an intranet is straightforwardly a good purchase and most of this warning does not apply. The trouble starts when it accumulates answers, which it will, because a place that accepts anything eventually holds everything.
Does an assistant searching the intranet help?
It makes the stale pages easier to reach and harder to spot, because the paraphrase hides which page it came from. Retrieval raises the value of ownership rather than substituting for it.