Abstract
The intangible nature of benefits brought by innovations based on Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) makes it difficult to assess the economic value of these projects. Moreover, since costs cannot be easily charged to an ICT project, the evaluation of the toal investment represents a complex task. As a consequence, whenever facing the issue of adopting an ICT solution, companies refers to results of previous similar experiences. However, this option turns to be useless when the evaluation refers to Internet-based applications, due the shortage of any exploitable experience: although their effectiveness is widely recognized, it is still not clear how to perform their cost/benefit analysis. This paper analyzes the impacts of the introduction of an intranet in terms of the deriving costs and benefits: the resulting framework aims to represent an effective support to the decision process driving the adoption of the intranet.