Fuld & Company and MIT Sloan School Professor Seek Companies to Help Develop Intranet Intelligence Gold Standards - business - Brief Article

ISP Business, Nov, 2000

Fuld & Company has joined forces with John Rockart, founding director of the MIT Sloan School of Management's Center for Information Systems Research, to launch a study to examine the effectiveness of corporate Intranets.

The Fuld-MIT team is currently inviting companies around the world to join the study, which will examine the use of Intranets and how they capture and convey critical market intelligence to managers throughout an organization.

For the first time, a study will examine the critical effectiveness of corporate Intranets and how they influence management decision-making. In particular, the Fuld-MIT team will examine how corporate Intranets are linked to a company's overall strategy, how the organization supports its Intranet, the features of Intranets that make them effective drivers of strategic and tactical intelligence, and where they add value to the corporation. The group will examine issues surrounding cost savings, competitive advantage achieved through competitive intelligence, as well as other value-added areas.

"Companies are likely wasting billions of dollars a year on their Intranets, specifically as they apply to improving the critical use of intelligence by management," said Leonard M. Fuld, president and founder of Fuld & Company, a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based intelligence consulting firm.

This year alone, corporations will spend nearly $64 billion on Intranets worldwide and are expected to spend $200 billion per year by the end of the decade on hardware, software, and related services to support Intranets, according to Gartner, Forrester, and a host of technology forecasting services.

"The use of Internet technology to improve business-to-business and business-to-customer capabilities for organizations of all sizes dominates the headlines today," said Rockart. "The same technology, if used effectively internally, however, can provide seamless access to information and significant benefits. At present, we see a wide range of use of the Intranet with little knowledge of how to gain the best payoff. We need to study what leads to success in this area." According to a recent Fuld study, Intranets could actually hinder a company's competitiveness if not applied effectively. There has been an explosion of competitive or business intelligence Intranet services over the past five to six years. Many corporations offer multiple sites, serving different business units or divisions.

Because many of these home pages have emerged through grass-roots efforts, few of their creators have shared and compared their development efforts. Each "competitive intelligence home page" likely represents hundreds of hours of development time, thousands of dollars in other development costs, and software fees.

To date, the effectiveness of such sites has not been measured. By flying blind, many of these site developers avoid (or are unable to ask) questions, such as: Does a particular site meet the needs of its users? Does a site actually enable decision-makers to improve or accelerate their decision? Or, do the sites merely aggregate data pools, otherwise adding little value?

Fuld and Rockart are currently inviting a limited cadre of companies to participate in the study, which will be conducted over the next few months. Findings of the survey will be released by Spring 2001. A closed-door conference for all participants of the study will also be held.