Subscribe to newsletterSize of intranet teams: NN and NetJMC agree
In the NN report Intranet design Annual 2009 – The Year’s 10 best intranets, the authors state that the average team size this year is 14 people for organisations averaging 37,500 employees. This makes 1 resource for roughly 2700 employees.
In the NetStrategy/JMC Global Intranet Trends report for 2007, we came to the conclusion that the ratio of intranet resource to number of employees was 1 for 2,300. You can read the full blog post here: Intranet resources: numbers.
Let’s negotiate it to 1 intranet resource for 2,500 employees.
How does this compare to your own situation?
5 Responses to “Size of intranet teams: NN and NetJMC agree”
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March 13th, 2009 at 4:48 pm
Here, at a small-medium consultancy, it’s about 1 for a little over 130 employees. I say “about” because I devote most of my time to intranet development, but not all, and there’s another person who spends some time focused on content and knowledge management on our intranet.
But if we grew to 2,500 people, it would probably still be about 1 intranet resource.
March 13th, 2009 at 6:49 pm
I put little faith in those numbers.
Firstly, some companies outsource tremendous amounts of work & maintenance that others do internally.
Secondly, some companies have teams of highly qualified and competent developers and managers for each department that do a great deal of work on their portions of the intranet – yet aren’t considered part of the intranet team.
Case in point:
Company A has has 10 staff for 10K employees
100% of development, training, marketing, content management, support, site build-out is done by this team.
Uses 25 hours of consulting per year
Positions:
Director
2xContent Manager
5xDeveloper
2xSys Admin
Company B has 2 staff for 10k employees
Uses 1,200 hours of consulting per year
Relies on departments to handle their own development, content management, marketing, site build-out
Relies on IT Operations for Help Desk and upgrades and HR for training
Dedicated staff is strictly for strategy and project management
Comparing the staffing of these companies is apples and oranges.
March 14th, 2009 at 12:28 pm
Jase – I agree the numbers make more sense for fairly large organizations.
Geoff – I agree with your comments and 2 examples that are very different scenarios.
In the 2008 survey I specified how people should count resources to avoid confusion around the very issue you raise.
I asked them to include the following three categories of resources:
“1. the dedicated intranet/portal teams in communication, IT, HR or business functions”
“2. major content providers who spend at least a day a week dedicated to the intranet”
“3. external people if you outsource some of this work or have interns (trainees)”
I also gave the following instructions:
“If some people spend half or less of their time on the intranet, try to estimate in terms of “full time equivalent people”. For example, consider 2 half-time people to be 1 full time equivalent person.”
I’m not sure how NN defined an intranet resource, but we’re still in the same ballpark.
My 2007 number was 2300 as I said in my post, and the 2008 one was just under 2600. I did not publish the second figure this year, because I did not consider it a significant difference from 2007. But it does serve to confirm the one from NN.
An interesting aspect about your two scenarios would be to see how the costs compare (direct and indirect such as management time), and whether or not there are quality differences (reactivity, level of service, quality and relevance of content and services, appropriation of the intranet by stakeholders, …)
Has anyone attempted to analyze these types of criteria for deciding what and how much to have in-house versus contracting out?
March 25th, 2009 at 10:41 pm
Wow, I think we would be *way* over that number. Yikes? I should sit down and attempt to get the actual number–it would be interesting. I sometimes feel that we don’t have a good overarching, company wide, complete view of our intranet. It’s a monstrosity, it’s definitely the way we work, but no one, I think, is looking at it in its entirety…
March 29th, 2009 at 5:23 pm
I posted a question a few months a go on the LinkedIn Intranet Professionals discussion forum asking how many resources organisations are using to support SharePoint and also who owns the intranet. (Note: answers were only for SharePoint sites).
From 30 responses, the average is 1 resource for every 2592 resources… this supports Jakob and Jane’s above estimate.
Incidentally, the responses to ownership of the intranet were as follows:
You can check out the results yourself at:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/sr.aspx?sm=wir8iozuJ_2bG4Ri6omYB0E3lmpjfkz6I1GXruJOVZPS4_3d
You can also add your own data if you wish.
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=lpn8ImRzRstsSmsC1iMzWg_3d_3d