A safari of South African organizations

Intranets hold great promise as `̀ organizational Internets'' to allow information sharing and collaboration across departments, functions and different information systems within an organization. Yet not much is known about how to implement intranets. We adapt a taxonomy based on institutional theory and distinguish six broad diffusion drivers that might be considered to sustain the implementation process. An exploratory field study of four intranet implementations was conducted to analyze which drivers were used and the results that were yielded. We draw several conclusions. First, all six drivers were deployed in the analyzed cases. Second, the choice of drivers varied with the level of the intranet (corporate or unit), the implementation stage, and existing organizational practices and contingencies. Third, it seems that the critical drivers are knowledge building, subsidy and mobilization in the early stages of implementation. In the later stages knowledge deployment, subsidy and innovation directives were most commonly used. Introduction Internet technology and specifically the World Wide Web, have enabled computer users to overcome some of the technical problems of sharing information, collaborating across geographical boundaries and across incompatible computing platforms and networks (Berners-Lee et al., 1994). The potential of implementing Internet technologies to overcome similar problems within organizations was quickly realized. Hence the concept of an intranet. Intranets hold great promise of allowing information sharing and collaboration across departments, functions and separate information systems (often legacy systems) within the organization (Lyytinen et al., 1998; Bernard, 1996). Therefore many organizations are in the process of adopting and implementing intranet technology (Scheepers and Damsgaard, 1997). Some have great success, but unfortunately there are already some The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at http://www.emerald-library.com Thanks go to the CSIR, the BOUTEK division, Telkom, the Regional office, and in particular Dr Adi Paterson and Mr Paul Pretorius for their time and valuable inputs. An earlier version of this paper appeared in the Proceedings of the 21st Information Systems Research Seminar in Scandinavia (IRIS), Sñby Sùbad, Denmark, 8-11 August 1998. The pioneering work done by Markus (1983) in the field of understanding implementation processes has been a major inspiration in this paper. We subscribe to the view that power and politics represent key dimensions in the choice of drivers employed by implementers. However, in the case of intranet implementation, our research indicated that influence represents another key dimension, hence our title for this paper.