IBM's Intranet

David Schatsky | January 14, 2003, 12:20 AM

With one of the world's largest intranets, used by most of its 300,000 employees on a daily basis, IBM has immense experience in building and operating enterprise information portals. The company is also investing heavily to dominate the market for portal software with its WebSphere Portal product. But does it effectively tap that expertise to enhance its product, or to educate its services arm, which builds portals for clients?

With a centralized full-time staff of over a dozen professionals, including writers, content managers, a library scientist, and software developers, and dozens of contributors managing over 8,000 Intranet pages, IBM's experience with enterprise information portals is just about unparalleled. The fact that the company is also a becoming a major player in the portal software market presents a rare opportunity to draw on that experience in the evolution of their products. Yet IBM has no formal process in place to express the learning from its internal efforts in its commercial ones. The company should fix this. That experience could be a key differentiator for IBM in a market to which they arrived late.