When you say intranet are you talking the internal network or the web services?

If you are talking the network, then as the others have mentioned it involves gear and management tools. However, I will add security and trend analysis. Retrofitting security is a nightmare. Been there; done that. On the matter of your network trends. You can't design a network if you don't know.

You may think it is slick designing all this web stuff and yet most of your traffic turns out to be simply storage access.

No matter which side the topic is huge. Finally, hope you have a "proper" budget. It's great managment wants it, but if they aren't going to pony up the cash....