Intranet Strategy and Reviews
Time to take stock and plan how to best use your funds and resources?
|
Like it not, most intranets underwhelm staff. After the fanfare of launch they quickly become white elephants, with out of date and insufficient content and staff finding it hard to find what they need. It doesn't have to be this way.
An Intranet Strategy can get you off to the right start, with a clear vision; common understanding of what an intranet should deliver; governance and roles; and determination of how it integrates with other systems (eg CRM; document management; collaboration sites; line of business systems).
The "virtual workplace" model shown below, is one of a number of models we use in strategy and design work. It legitimises a wide range of information needs people have that today are probably catered for in separate and unconnected ways. The model can be a good start to getting internal consensus on what the "intranet" should deliver (and then how, who,when) versus other content management systems.
.
Our strategy and roadmap assignments are customised to your situation and needs.
They can cover:
|
|
Connection between business drivers and ECM |
Identifying your key business drivers, issues and goals, and determining what the role and focus of your intranet is and how it integrates and relates to other key systems. |
|
|
Effectiveness of information and knowledge use today |
Assessing by observation, interview and surveys how effective your intranet is today and what the key disablers are that need to be addressed. Often this will centre on different perceptions of the "role" of the intranet and who "owns" it. |
|
|
Information and
knowledge vision |
Forming, through a workshop process, your vision for the role of information and knowledge in your organisation's success, and where the intranet fits into this, as a "used every day" business tool. |
|
|
Strawman of future options and ways of working |
Creating mockups and presentation material to socialise the ideas and choice points on what the future could look like. This effectively gets the change management process off to a great start, and helps ensure the strategy is well grounded and practical. |
|
|
Role of the "intranet" |
In particular, dealing with the often conflicting views from different internal stakeholders that create an "or" intranet - i.e. it does this or this or this. What is needed is an "and" intranet, that includes all needs which may include:
- Comms and Marketing: our brand and message
- ICT: reliable, secure and available as needed
- HR: meets core process and communication needs with staff
- CEO: platform for communication, blogs & discussion
- Project teams: collaboration spaces
- Subject matter experts: place for collaboration & reference material
- Corporate Risk: Place for policies, procedures, checklists etc
|
|
|
The right content |
Most intranet designs start by determining what content we have and therefore how and where it should be displayed. We take a user-based perspective, and ask instead, for a particular role, situation, or a new recruit what might they want to know. We then shape the content and findability options to let them get it quickly. |
|
|
Information design |
Creating the right mix of metadata, classifications and navigation to allow staff to quickly and consistently file and find content. |
|
|
Roadmap and budget choices |
Creating a high level roadmap, with key deliverables and outcomes, as well as creating a spreadsheet with costing options. |
|
|
Findability |
How to cater for a range of needs including:
- google style search, with facets to refine results
- tag clouds and ability to rate and "like" content
- simple browsing and word or phrase refining
- scoped searches and best bets
- use of landing pages - hubs for content
- use of wikis to form knowledge bases of know-how
and know-who
|
|
|
Self sufficiency options |
Reviewing your internal intranet system skills and comparing these with different implementation strategies. These can range from "turn-key" externally supported right through to full knowledge transfer and self sufficiency. The strategy would highlight the pros and cons of different approaches. |
|
|
Infrastructure & system options |
This can include what systems will form the future blueprint, and how they interact. It can also include system architecture for more complex environments (eg intranet, internet, extranet sharing of common content). Previous work has also included a review of private cloud and local cloud alternatives. |
|
|
Governance options |
What roles, policies and measures are needed to manage the implementation at technical, information architecture, support, training and business-as-usual usage levels. |
|
|
Change Management |
Your intranet may be web based but that doesn't mean users will flock to it! The strategy and roadmap can use our proven behaviour change models to form a communication, training, monitoring and enforcement framework suited to your culture. |
|
|
Recordkeeping |
The strategy can be underpinned by compliance and business risk drivers. Often while "recordkeeping" may be seen as an "extra" we have to do, good retention and disposal of content can aid findability of key know-how and business critical documents, while removing the less important content (and saving storage costs) on a regular basis. |
|
|
|
