Jane McConnell is an intranet consultant based in France but of international repute, as you can tell from the coverage and insights of her web site and blogs. A couple of years ago Jane had the vision to embark on a survey of intranet management trends, and in the 2006 report presented an analysis of just over 100 companies. A year on and the number of companies has risen to 176 and the scope and depth of analysis in the 2007 edition, pubished in late 2007, has increased by an order of magnitude. This is no ‘market survey’ report, as the questions could only have been framed and analysed by someone who really can identify the trends against the background noise. This is also not just a collection of charts and graphs but provides the reader with Jane's professional insight into the implications of the results based on a large and diverse range of consulting projects she has undertaken. Any intranet manager would benefit from this analysis and synthesis as they return to work to begin what is probably yet another round of gaining financial and managerial support for what in most companies is now regarded as an essential business tool.  After all 75% of respondents said the business of theor organisation would be seriously affected if the intranet was unavailable for a 24 hour period.

Among the topic areas are globalization, customization, collaboration, the adoption of Web 2.0 applications, search implementation, measurement and evaluation. A valuable feature of Jane's analysis is the way in which she has developed some structural models for the way in which intranets develop in multinational organisations. Jane has also come up with an informed guess about a typical level of intranet support as a function of the number of employees, but you’ll have to buy the report to find out the answer.

This report provides all the evidence you are ever going to need to make a business case for intranet enhancement, and as each year goes by this report will become even more valuable as the scope and level of contribution continues to increase. The base report runs to 95 pages and is priced at $525. However I would strongly recommend the  purchase of the Analysis Report, which is twice the length, priced at $1175 and sets a new standard in intranet insight. Details of the scope and content of the reports can be found on the NetStrategyJMC web site, and sample sections can be downloaded.

Jane’s commitment to the intranet business is amazing – reward her by buying the report. Do consider completing the survey for the 2008 edition when it becomes available in March, because the larger the sample the more credible the benchmarking becomes. It will also enable Jane to do more in the way of segment analysis by country and industry sector.

Martin White