That being said, it is still dangerous, and maybe setting the team up for a fall. If the organisation “calls the bluff”, then the team may be stranded before it even starts…

If a new team is starting out, I would further reinforce the value of finding some (small) business problems, and demonstrating their ability to solve them. Then build up from there.

Any thoughts?

I think that because enterprise search solutions are more common today, ‘findability’ isn’t as much of an issue — especially if the intranet team continually improves the search with metatags and ‘Best Bet’ links.

I think we can add value to intranets now by guiding employees to the right channel for the information they are looking for, whether it be an internal blog on a specific topic, a department Web site, or the name and number of a subject matter expert in the company. The intranet can create opportunities for conversation and knowledge sharing between employees who would otherwise not interact at work. It also connects employees to senior leadership who wouldn’t normally be visible and give employees a voice for feedback and input into the business strategy.

Hooray for intranets!

I’ve also just posted a recent blog entry which provides some concrete ideas and approaches:

Intranets: measuring before and after
http://www.steptwo.com.au/columntwo/intranets-measuring-before-and-after/

“Time saved” for the “finding information” tasks can be an appropriate measure of an intranet’s value. Of course you’d want some rigor around the calculation (like multiplying the time saved by the # of actual users who actual need to find that info). For call centres using an intranet, for example, this can be real $$ (staff time saved is put to another call, long distance charges are reduced).

The main point is not to make it your only measure. What you need to do is to tailor the intranet – and the measures of its value – to the your organization’s strategy and business model (e.g. reducing risk; higher customer satisfaction; more innnovation).

The quicker we get beyond just “finding stuff” to adding real value to the organisation, the easier it will be for us to get the resources and usage we need to succeed.

Well amen and hallelujah. Until we factor in all of the activity that follows “finding stuff” we won’t have a holistic sense of the benefit to the business.

Even if one focused only on eliciting the effect on the part of the process that immediately follows the search for and discovery of information you’d quickly run into a seriously complex set of variables that directly affect the utility of the information discovered on the intranet. Is the information in the most usable format? How much parsing of the document is required to extract the useful nuggets? Is the content easily parsable given the user’s existing expertise? Etc. and etc.

The point: the reason for improving access to information and/or services on an intranet is a function that is best measured in terms of the end-to-end effect of change to a business process.

Thanks for another thoughtful post, James!

And absolutely agree that the focus must (can only) be on an Intranet being useful … it’s obvious, isn’t it