Company Intranet

Companies built private versions of the internet so employees would stop talking to each other.

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The company intranet emerged in the mid-1990s, when organizations began using the same protocols that powered the public internet to build private, internal networks. The term "intranet" was coined around 1994 to describe these closed systems, which used web browsers and hyperlinks to distribute information within a company's firewall.¹

Before intranets, corporate information lived in filing cabinets, printed manuals, and internal memos. The intranet promised to replace all of these with a single, searchable, always-available digital resource. By 1998, Forrester Research estimated that the average large company spent between one and three million dollars building and maintaining its intranet.²

The promise rarely matched the reality. Intranets became repositories for outdated documents, unread policy manuals, and news from departments no one visited. A 2019 study by Prescient Digital Media found that only 13 percent of employees reported using their company's intranet daily.³

13%, The share of employees who reported using their company's intranet daily in a 2019 study.

The shift to cloud-based collaboration tools, beginning with platforms like SharePoint, Slack, and Microsoft Teams, gradually replaced many intranet functions. What had been a static internal website became a set of real-time communication and collaboration tools.

The original intranet was modeled on the architecture of the public web but inverted its purpose. The internet connected strangers. The intranet connected colleagues who already worked in the same building. The tool designed to make information flow within organizations became, in many cases, the place where information went to be forgotten.⁴

Timeline

1994, The term intranet is coined to describe private networks using web protocols within organizational firewalls.
Late 1990s, Large corporations invest millions in building internal web-based information systems.
2019, Only 13 percent of employees report using their company's intranet daily.

Endnotes

Stephen Lawton, "Intranets Fuel Growth of Internet Technologies," Digital News, 1995.
Forrester Research, cited in various trade publications, 1998.
Prescient Digital Media, "Intranet Benchmarking Report" (2019).
James Robertson, Designing Intranets: Creating Sites that Work (Step Two Designs, 2010).