Content area
Full text
Introduction
Fueled by the overwhelming media attention to the internet and the explosive growth in world wide web usage in the mid 1990s, many organizations began to establish their own internet presence that ran entirely within an organization, called corporate portals or the intranet ([23] Griffiths, 2000; [50] Scheepers and Rose, 2001). [41] Muller (2002) defined intranet as "a private TCP/IP network that usually supports the same protocols and services as the public internet including e-mails, news, chat rooms and web pages." Key components that built intranet are Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP), web browser, web server software and web authoring software ([46] Pedley, 1999). According to [41] Muller (2002) companies adopt intranets to improve internal communications, distribute information and enable more employees to access legacy systems. Several reasons why intranets were so successful as reported by [46] Pedley (1999) were:
- platform independence in which web technologies allow a whole range of different platforms to be linked by a common interface;
- quick wins as it is relatively cheap but if it is well designed it can make big impact upon internal communications; and
- cost saving especially in terms of paper utilizations, printer toner, etc.
At present, intranet technologies have significantly matured since their first introduction as static web pages for intra-organizational announcements and notifications. Today, intranets are used as portals for group communication and collaboration as well as a common interface for back-end applications. Some companies extended intranet access to external users such as customers and suppliers transforming the intranet into what are known as extranets. New terms are also coined to reflect the intranet sophistication such as portals, business-to-employee portals, business-to-business portals and business-to-customer portals. In tandem with such an overwhelming development, the interest among academicians about the topic is also growing. This interest is evident by the growing number of research publications embracing different aspects of the topic such as development, implementation as well as measurement of its effectiveness.
While research on intranet effectiveness has been greatly reported in the literature, gaps still exist in a number of areas especially when evaluating effectiveness at the user levels in terms of effective usage and impact on user work task. This paper is an attempt to provide a conceptual understanding of the...