There has been very little published research on intranet evaluation. There were a number of papers in the early days of intranet adoption but not much since. In preparing for a new intranet evaluation project I thought I’d check on what had been published over the last five years to see if there were any novel approaches that I could adopt. I have listed below the best the papers that I have found.
- Intranet Model and Metrics. Grant A. Jacoby and Luqi, Communications of the ACM, February 2007, pp43-50 (For the full description of the model download Jacoby’s earlier paper published in 2005)
- Using Pathfinder in the design of an intranet website. Susan M. Stevens and Coutrney C. Dornburg, CHI 2009
- Towards a toolset for intranet evaluation. Peter O’Boyle et al, 22nd Bled eConference
- Towards a holistic model in investigating the effects of intranet usage on managerial performance. A study on Malaysian port industry. Mohd Daud Norzaidi et al. Maritime Policy and Management, 2009, 36(3), 269-289
- Knowledge sharing for sustainable development. A mixed-method study of an international civil engineering consultancy. 2011. N.C.Meese Thesis, University of Bath
- User acceptance and corporate intranet quality. An evaluation with iQual. Stuart J. Barnes and Richard Vigden. Information and Management. 2012, 49, pp 164-170
- Crowd-funding inside the enterprise. Employee initiatives for innovation and collaboration. Michael Muller et al. CHI 2013 and a very brief summary on YouTube of this IBM research
Note that some of these papers are behind a publisher firewall and unless you are working in a university or have other access rights you may have to pay a fee to download the article. Sometimes searching for the title in Google or Bing may bring up a more accessible version but these have a habit of disappearing without notice. The exceptions are the 2005 paper by Jacoby and the thesis by Nicholas Meese. There may be others and I would appreciate an email with the citation details. The work of Grant Jacoby and Luqi (the author is Chinese) is interesting even though now it is a little dated as it deals at length with issues around measuring RoI and the balance between hard and soft metrics for intranets.
Martin White