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Intranet benchmarking for free

It can often be hard to assess where your own intranet is up to. By definition, other organisations" intranets cannot be seen, and there are few absolute measures to assess intranets against.

A strong desire remains, however, to clearly assess the intranet"s strengths and weaknesses, and to gain some insight into how the site is progressing against general "best practice". To help meet these needs, this briefing will explore the Intranet Review Toolkit, a free way of benchmarking intranets against commonly accepted standards.

Intranet Review Toolkit

The Intranet Review Toolkit provides intranet managers and designers with an easy-to-use method of assessing the strengths and weaknesses of their intranet. It contains a substantial set of heuristics (guidelines or criteria), allowing a detailed intranet review to be conducted that focuses on a wide range of functionality, design and strategy.

While there are a number of published heuristics for reviewing public websites, up to now there has been no equivalent set for corporate intranets. Initially supported by an IA Institute Progress Grant, the Intranet Review Toolkit was drawn from experiences running expert reviews in many different organisations.

The Toolkit was then developed and published as a comprehensive set of intranet heuristics. It has been published under a Creative Commons license, allowing it to be freely downloaded and used (as long as certain conditions are met).

[CM Briefing 2007-04, read the full article]

Posted by jamesr on March 06, 2007 01:42 PM
Categories: Information architecture, Intranets, James' articles, Usability & user-centered design