Thinking about the big thing

The project has not been started yet, so there is plenty of time to set things upo in a decent way.

What's the target: We want to create a groupwide intranet for a company in the banking industry that covers 9 countries (with 9 different languages), 55.000 employees and a lot of associate companies.

Why do we want to do this: Because the existing intranets are old and can't keep pace with modern technology and requirements, because something needs to be done for image and effiency puposes and because we want to promote group- and multimedia content.

what's the current situation: people use the intranet because they have to, they like the simple structure and the word-like appearance, nobody except the communications division is using any cms (it all happens in word-documents), usabillity and menu-issues are not the most sophisticated ones, but people are happy - or maybe they are just afraid of change...