Paper info

Exploring the Effect of a Corporate Intranet on the Sharing of Information and Internal Relationship Building

Katherina Wong Ming, Margo Buchanan-Oliver and Michael Sherrard

The paper was published at the 16th IMP-conference in Bath, U.K in 2000.

Over the last decade the world has witnessed an emergence of technology that allows realtimeinteractive communication, namely the Internet (Hornick, 1998). The benefit fromusing this new medium has been realised primarily for communications between anorganisation and its external stakeholders. Borne out of the Internet, the corporate Intranetenables organisations to develop internal networks and strengthen relationships withstakeholders within the organisation (Gupta, 1997).It has been considered that in order to be highly profitable an organisation should beconsciously establishing, maintaining and enhancing long-term customer relationships(Gronroos, 1990). It is argued that in order for this to occur an organisation shouldconcentrate on building and sustaining strong relationships with its internal customers, i.e.corporate stakeholders and employees. Corporate Intranets, ??.provide an inexpensive yetpowerful way to transparently deliver the vast information resources of a corporation to eachemployee's desktop worldwide? (Gulati, 1997, p. 6). The corporate Intranet is vital inbuilding relationships between stakeholders and the organisation, as well as improvinginternal corporate communication by encouraging ??.people to communicate moreeffectively? (Rogers, 1996, p. 35).Despite the cost-efficiency, data collection ability and productivity gains of intranetcommunication, there are relatively few studies on the ability of the corporate Intranet toenhance the sharing of information and the impact that the Intranet has on relationshipsbetween an organisation and its employees, also known as the internal network [SeeAppendix A]. The aim of the present study is to gain an insight into the ability of the Intranetto strengthen internal networks by disseminating information in order to build and strengtheninternal relationships.It is proposed that the corporate Intranet has a positive impact on internal networks,particularly for corporate communication and the development and strengthening oforganisational relationships. Several research questions were proposed in order to explorethe relationships between a corporate intranet and organisational relationships:
Q1: Do Corporate Intranets enhance the sharing of information?
Q2: Does the sharing of information enhance internal relationship building?