Intranet Portals: The Corporate Information Infrastructure
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/990404.html

Nielsen, Jakob
Alertbox
1999

Abstract:

Over the last half year, it has become popular for large and medium sized companies to build portals to their intranets which have been spinning out of control for years. Still, many companies don't even have a single default starting page for all of their employees: some leave browsers set to boot with the browser vendor's page (an utter waste of bandwidth and time) and others have a smattering of department pages but no company-wide internal home page.