As discussed in the article Elements of a mobile enterprise strategy, there are many issues and questions to answer when considering the corporate use of mobile devices.

While this list can be daunting, the good news is that organisations are finding that simple approaches are often the best. These can be summed up in the question: what six things do staff want on their mobile devices?

Access the whole intranet?

One starting point for enterprise mobile functionality would be to provide a ‘mobile version’ of the intranet. Stripping out headers, footers and complex navigation, this provides a mobile-friendly way of accessing the entire site.

But is this what staff want or need? The reality is that there are few situations where staff want to browse all 10,000 intranet pages on a screen several inches across.

There will also be many elements of the intranet that are difficult to quickly adapt for mobile access. Online applications will often be the biggest challenge, limiting the interactive functionality that can be delivered to mobile devices.

[December one-pager, read the full article]

While currently lagging somewhat behind the consumer world, enterprise solutions will not be exempt from these seismic changes. All organisations should therefore have a clear mobile enterprise strategy, outlining their business needs, and how they will be met.

This is, at present, uncharted territory. This briefing will outline a number of questions that can help guide the creation of a concrete and pragmatic mobile enterprise strategy.

Who and what

• What are the common tasks that will be done on mobile devices?
• What is the key information needed by staff when mobile?
• Which enterprise systems need to be mobile-enabled?
• One-way or two-way flow of information?
• What overall user experience will be provided for staff on mobile devices?
• What mobile capabilities should be provided for all staff?
• Which groups of staff have distinct or more intensive needs?

[October one-pager, read the full article]

While these discussions echo the policies established for public-facing websites, intranets may require very different approaches.

Even on public sites, browsing the web shows that practices have changed greatly over the last few years. Previously, any link to an ‘external’ site (managed by another organisation) would open in a new window (or a new tab, in modern browsers). On government sites, there would even be an intermediate page, warning that ‘you are leaving this site and we are not responsible for the content that you may read’.

On recent websites, links opening in new windows have become much rarer, suggesting that both practices and user expectations are changing. So what should be done on intranets?

Many possibilities

There are a wide range of policies that could be put in place:

• all links open in the same window (no new windows)
• links to public (external) sites open in new windows (or new tabs)
• links to systems or applications open in new windows
• links to documents or other non-web content open in new windows
  
• any link that takes the user away from the current task open in new windows

• links to other internal ‘intranet sites’ open in new windows

[September 2010 one-pager by James Robertson, read the full article]

With four times the content of our last book, What every intranet team should know, this is the definitive textbook for intranet teams planning to design or redesign their sites.

In 275 pages, this book walks through a practical user-centred approach to the design process, richly illustrating each step with full-colour screenshots from organisations across the globe.

We’ve already had some great feedback:

“I cannot recommend this book too highly, and it should be bought by every intranet manager. Even if you are not contemplating a re-design you probably will after reading the book.” Martin White

“In his most recent book Designing intranets James Robertson promises nothing less than ‘creating sites that work’. An over-promise? Not at all!” Lukas Karrer

“Highly recommended: even experienced intranet managers will find something new in this book.” Sam Marshall

Read more and obtain your copy

Regardless of the scope and duration of the plans, successful strategies all build on a common narrative structure that describes:

• where we’ve been
• what we’re doing right now
• what comes next

This basic structure helps intranet teams to give shape to their strategy development efforts, and ensures that nothing is missed.

Where we’ve been

Intranets are generally the product of a long history of changes and organic evolution, which provides vital context for the planned improvements.

[CMb 2010-13, read the full article]

With the creation of sites such as Intranet Lounge, I’m thinking of stopping re-posting articles. Instead, I’ll move to a format of weekly or bi-weekly insight and commentary. Before I make this big change, however, I felt I should seek the input of you, the reader.

Please add your comments! What would you like me to be doing with this blog from now on?

One of the most common mistakes made by intranet teams is to push forward on site redesigns without gaining the necessary support. Worse, some teams fail to even recognise the scale of support needed, and are brought sharply to a halt by unmanaged stakeholder and staff issues.

Even when the organisation as a whole recognises that the current intranet is broken, considerable on-the-ground support will be required to make the necessary changes. Without this, the redesign project will proceed slowly and fitfully.

At the outset of any major project, intranet teams must spend time and effort building support for the work ahead.

Impact of change

A major redesign project will impact every aspect of an intranet, including:

• overall site structure and design
• content ownership and management
• authoring and publishing processes
• resources and responsibilities
• technology and infrastructure
• day-to-day use by staff

These changes will be disruptive for many, and may reduce productivity and familiarity in the short term. Migrating content to the new site, with new publishing models, will also require considerable effort and time.

[CM Briefing 2010-10, read the full article]

Several approaches were outlined in the earlier article Intranet kiosks or remote access?. This highlighted the benefits gained by giving staff access to the intranet from outside the organisation, such as from home.

This enables staff to look up information and do transactions in their own time, as well as making it simple to confer with their partners or family.

In a large organisation, providing this type of remote access may seem daunting. While the technology hurdles have been greatly reduced, there is still a significant change management effort required.

Without this, staff will struggle to master often unfamiliar technology, and the investment in remote access will deliver few benefits.

This briefing outlines a number of practical tips and suggestions on how to roll out access, drawn from real-world projects.

[CM Briefing 2010-09, read the full article]

The best approach for helping staff is to focus on tasks. These are the activities, simple or complex, that staff need to do on the intranet. The goal is to streamline and simplify how these tasks can be carried out.

Uncovering staff tasks

It is valuable to understand the full range of tasks, including common activities done by a wide range of staff, and important tasks that deliver business benefits to the organisation.

There are many ways of identifying these tasks:

• Interviews and focus groups. Discussions with staff, whether one-on-one or in a group, will naturally uncover information about key tasks. Staff will also express frustration with current bottlenecks, as well as highlighting their most important activities. Guide these discussions to ensure that sufficient information is gained about intranet-based tasks. (See the earlier article Conducting intranet needs analysis for more on this.)

[CM Briefing 2010-07, read the full article]

Within the intranet industry, the homepage also inflames passionate debate. This is particularly true on the question of how long the intranet homepage should be.

In the earlier article Seven roles of the intranet homepage, a range of purposes were identified:

1. news
2. navigation
3. key tools
4. key information
5. community and culture
6. internal marketing
7. collaboration

Effective designs find a productive balance between these seven roles, without any one being excessively dominant.

This turns out to be extremely difficult if the homepage is kept entirely ‘above the fold’, squeezed into a single screenful. Within this limited space, homepages often end up being mostly news with a little navigation squeezed into the edges. Internal marketing and a few key links round out the mix.

If the homepage is made longer, much more content and functionality can be included. This could increase the value of the page, and help to balance competing priorities.

But can it be made to work?

[May KM Column, read the full article]

Every once in a while, intranet teams have to justify the amount of time they spend structuring their sites and improving navigation.

Stakeholders, often very senior ones, ask: ‘Why don’t we just provide search, like Google’. This would save the time spent developing a user-centred site structure, and after all, ‘it works for Google, and it’s the most popular site on the web’.

It’s an interesting idea, and on the surface, an attractive one. Search is something that can be bought as a product, and deployed. It’s even possible to get a Google-branded product for enterprise deployment.

Coming up with a good information architecture (IA) for intranets is hard. With a huge volume of content, and widely varying staff needs, intranet teams can sometimes despair of ever producing a site structure that keeps everyone happy.

How easy it would be to abandon all this work, and to deploy a great search engine instead. Problem solved. Or is it?

[CM Briefing 2010-06, read the full article]

As discussed in the earlier article Escaping the organisation chart on your intranet, this often means getting away from a navigation structure that mirrors content ownership.

Experience has shown that staff will struggle to find information if they have to know who owns the content first. Yet on many intranets, sections are named after the business owners who publish content, or in the worst cases, entirely separate intranet ‘sites’ contain isolated islands of content.

Intranet teams can, however, find it hard to move their sites towards more user-centred structures. Black-and-white goals such as structuring everything according to task and subject often founder in the face of site complexities.

To help with intranet redesigns, this article outlines three broad categories of content:

1. core staff and organisational content
2. business-unit specific content
3. back-office content

[CM Briefing 2010-04, read the full article]

Intranet projects may confront challenges such as:

• unclear intranet ownership and governance
• tight timeframes
• limited (and often insufficient) budgets
• varied (and sometimes competing) stakeholder opinions
• large number of end users (staff), with widely varying needs
• technology considerations and constraints
• limited team experience and skills relating to intranets
• poor access to best practices and other intranets

Is it any wonder that intranet projects go off the rails? Even the most experienced and well-resourced teams can struggle under these circumstances.

It is useful to explore common mistakes made on intranet projects. These have been distilled from observations across many organisations, in both the public and private sectors.

The purpose of outlining these problems is to help teams avoid them, and to highlight good practices.

[February KM Column, read the full article]

The best-known is the ‘three clicks rule’, which says that all content should be no more than three clicks away from the homepage of the site.

This, however, is a myth.

Three clicks rule

The principles is that "users don’t like to click", and that their satisfaction with the site falls with each additional click.

This has developed into a rule that every page must be no more than three clicks away from the homepage. The big advantage of this rule is its simplicity: it’s easy to state and understand, and is therefore widely known throughout the industry.

It’s also perhaps the only rule that is familiar to management, outside of the intranet and design profession.

[CM Briefing 2009-21, read the full article]

To start: I was interviewed by Gerry Gaffney for the User Experience Podcast. 29 minutes in length, we cover a range of intranet strategy and management topics, and where information architects can add value. To quote:

Yeah, it’s interesting, talking with intranet teams to say: Where are you spending your time? And after a little bit of chatting it becomes apparent that, say, 80% or 90% of time is spent maintaining the current site. And the lack of time is the single biggest point of pain for intranet teams the world over.

What we would say, and maybe it’s easy for us to say, is that only 30% of time should be spent maintaining the current site. 30% of the time should then be spent on relationships. So that’s relationships with end users but particularly with stakeholders and managers. And what we’ve observed is the most successful intranet teams are people people. They’re great at building relationships, maybe ahead of everything else.