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I used to have this Swiss Army knife that I carried around with me everywhere I went. It proved its worth in almost every situation that could befall a hapless adventurer with a tendency to get into trouble — both in my day-to-day job as well as when I headed out for weekend backpacking trips into the mountains. It had every imaginable tool tucked conveniently into its trademark red handle and then some.

During the day, as a young network administrator out on a field call, I used it to splice cable, cut boxes open, unscrew hardware cases, and to protect myself from unruly users. But by night, I was a poor man's MacGyver, using my trusty Swiss Army knife to disarm villainous foes with little more than a pine cone, two feet of mint-flavored dental floss, and the ingenuity of an overactive imagination.

After years of use, I noticed that only three or four out of the 20-plus tools were ever used. The main blade showed signs of multiple re-sharpenings, and the scissors still bore evidence of the time I sheared a sheep and knit an emergency sweater when the temperature dropped drastically in the great outdoors. But the majority of the other tools remained unused, still shining like the day it left the factory.

I'm not making any allusions as to the compactness of this portable utility chest either, since it was more that capable of being used as a boat anchor. It suddenly dawned on me that I was carrying around this behemoth — adding extra weight to an already gear-laden pack — when all I really needed was a simple blade.

Jack of All Trades, Master of None

The majority of corporate IT implementations are developed and focused around a set of core components aimed at a single objective, and any additional features outside these core components are just gravy.

Let's take corporate e-mail as an example — a tool used for communication, collaboration, and personal information management. In addition to the software's basic e-mail management abilities, supporting features — spam filtering, message rules, newsgroup and RSS reader, address book — can be added to enhance the overall value and quality of the application. But after a certain point, an application's required featureset will plateau, and anything added after that is just showing off — usually at the expense of user productivity. I'm sure that few of us would actually trade in the stability of core components for the inclusion of "nice-to-have" features.

An intranet, however, is not as definable as many other IT implementations. It's a blank canvas with few hard-and-set guidelines this is reinforced by the amount of e-mail I still receive from people asking me what goes into an intranet. But an intranet is many things to many people. I can't answer this question unless they have already asked themselves the same question, and at the very least determined the primary purpose of the system. Once this has been decided, then we can talk about what features to include.

This lack of a focused goal may cause intranet developers and content owners to over-develop, making it a Jack-of-all-trades (JOAT) system when a much smaller solution would suffice — and is probably preferred.

JOAT intranets are the Swiss Army knives of IT — they can contain any number of tools, and can be used to solve countless problems. If a particular tool doesn't fit into the handle, you can always make a bigger one. But therein lies the problem: if you keep adding more and more, you may as well wheel a tool chest around with you, which defeats the purpose of having something small and portable.

You need to know when to say enough is enough. Are you putting features into your system because users have a genuine need for them or are you putting them in because you're afraid of leaving something out? You should be developing your intranet to meet a business need, not to wow users with the its extensive list of features.

There's really nothing wrong with JOAT intranets if that's what's called for and, more importantly, if it's done properly. Unfortunately, in many cases, JOAT intranets that try to do too much end up doing many things adequately but no one thing very well. I can honestly say that there are several JOAT-type software applications on my PC where only about 25 percent of its inflated featureset is ever used. They take forever to load and do little more than occupy hard disk space and suck up valuable memory reserves. And without an option to uninstall all these unused tools, I have little choice but to bear with them.

But don't expect your user community to show the same type of resigned indignation; and don't assume that they will automatically be happier with more features. An intranet needs to suit the job it's built to support. Sometimes less is more; and it takes quite a bit of skill to prevent JOAT from becoming bloat.