| This dissertation explores, in a contemporaneous study, the introduction of a new information and communication technology—corporate Intranets. New means to facilitate communication in organizations have always posed an attractive enticement for management. With the rise of the World Wide Web, HTML, and web browsers the internet, once a reserved domain for data and file transfer, and understood by lay users as the vehicle upon which electronic mail traveled, became a standard fixture on office desktop workstations and home computers everywhere. Quickly following the introduction of the ‘web’—the internet between individuals and organizations—came the desire to communicate and share information between individuals within the same organization, thus the Intranet was born. The internet phenomenon and its ‘within-the-corporate-walls’ implementation, the Intranet, have taken hold in corporate offices around the world with surprising speed.; In this dissertation we have taken a look at the impact Intranets have made on organizational communication and businesses processes. The primary focus of the research was: to explore and describe the Intranet phenomena; to review through observation the rate of adoption and diffusion, and compare that to the rhetoric and hype surrounding the Intranet; and, lastly, to evaluate the adequacy of current literature to describe and explain the behaviors found. We evaluated organizations, across a variety of industries, whose experience with the Intranet ranged from several years to only a few months. We discovered high interest, excitement and expectation along with disappointment and frustration.; Our research clearly demonstrates that establishing and maintaining a corporate Intranet is anything but a ‘plug-n-play’ application. Despite the prevalent volume of rhetoric extolling the virtues of the Intranet, the reality of current Intranet deployment in industry has yet to match the full intensity of that rhetoric. The Intranet is proving not to be a revolutionary contributor to organizational change and the transformation of work, but another step in the evolutionary deployment of information technologies in organizations. While, taken by themselves, the technological concepts of the Intranet are revolutionary, the rate of deployment and the complexity of Intranet applications are essentially proceeding at an evolutionary pace in comparison to the rate of technological change. There certainly is more than smoke behind the firewall, but it will take time for organizations to fully comprehend, explore and utilize the Intranet application domain. |
