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10 Best Intranets of 2019
10 Best Intranets of 2019
Summary: Winners are from large and medium-sized organizations from around the
world; they had short development time and small teams who relied on both internal
resources and external help.
The winning 2019 intranets come from organizations with an average of 72,330 employees.
This year’s median was 33,000 employees. (The high average in 2010 was due to winning
organization Walmart’s size, with an intranet supporting 1.4 million store associates.
Excluding Walmart, the average for that year was 39,100.)
In 2019, the average team size was 20 members; this is the largest average we have seen
since 2013, when the average was 27 members.
It’s encouraging to see an increase in the average core-team size for the winning
intranets. For too long, intranet teams have been making do with limited human
resources. Creating and maintaining an intranet — no matter how much you automate
and build good workflows — is still a manual job in many ways. Including individuals
from across the organization always requires deep research, handholding, and
political maneuvering.
Further, our team numbers here reflect the number of employees working on
the intranet redesign; often, even fewer employees remain dedicated to intranet
maintenance, governance, and iterative development after the major redesign effort is
complete. Given the intranet’s importance — both for communicating internally and
completing daily work — intranet teams should be even more generously staffed.
This year’s winning intranet teams comprised 0.037% of the entire organization.
To further explore the relationship between organization and team sizes, we
compared team size to company size over the past 10 Intranet Design Annuals. We
found that our winning intranets have a similar intranet support ratio, or percentage
of employees who work on the intranet team.
The rather complex formula below summarizes the relationship between team size
and organization size for winning Intranet Design Annual teams. The intranet support
ratio formula is:
Intranet support ratio = 6.689 * number of employees-0.926
That is, you take the number of employees the intranet supports and raise it to the
power of -0.926. You then multiply the resulting number by 6.689 to get the expected
intranet support ratio. This ratio, multiplied by the number of employees, results in a
team size. (The equation explains 89% of the variability in intranet support ratios.)
As complex at this equation is, in practice, it breaks down simply to team sizes of 8–10
people as follows:
Size of winning
Number of employees at
intranet team
winning organizations
100 7.5
1,000 8.0
10,000 8.5
100,000 9.0
500,000 9.4
The intranet support ratio equation explains 89% of the variability in intranet support
ratios. This effect is visible in the chart, which plots the numbers on a double logarithmic
scale.
These numbers are likely so small because the teams enlisted agency support.
Regardless, we do not recommend having only 7–10 people on intranet teams. In fact,
teams should have many more people; this year’s winners, for example, had 20 team
members on average. Teams may need many more (or, in rare cases, fewer) people,
depending on the circumstances. These numbers are simply a suggested minimum
team size.