Principles for designing global-local intranets
Categorised under: Intranets, Usability & user-centered design
A little while back I wrote a post about the global-local challenge for many intranets. To quote:
In any large organisations, there will be many different business units, with different needs. Individual staff across the organisation will also need specific tools and information. The challenge is to meet global needs (corporate communications, top-level strategy, culture), while also meeting varying local needs.
In the previous post, I sketched out a comparatively simple scenario we encountered for one client, and promised that I’d write more. I thought a useful starting point would be to spell out the principles that underpin a good global-local solution.
Principles for global-local intranets
In thinking about designing intranets to meet global-local needs, the following principles may to be relevant:
- Meet local staff needs
It’s an obvious statement to make, but intranets must meet local staff needs. In particular, they must support day-to-day operational needs, recognising that staff needs vary greatly (there is no single ‘intranet user’).
- Ensure the starting point is relevant for the end user
The first page presented when the intranet is opened must be directly relevant for the individual staff member. This is not to say that it has to be personalised, but if someone is located in Brazil, they shouldn’t have to click three times off a global homepage to get to their country’s homepage.
- Provide a channel for corporate communication
There is important information and news that is relevant to the whole organisation, and the intranet must provide an effective channel for communicating this to all staff.
- Bring things together where possible
In general, it is better to aggregate information in a single location that works for staff, rather than splitting it apart. For example, the value of a single (well-designed) news channel is many times more important that providing different news in 20 different locations across 10 different sites.
- Do the work on behalf of staff
There is a temptation, for example, to use personalisation features to give the user the option of tailoring their intranet experiences to match their local needs, and then declaring “problem solved”. The issue: only 5-10% of staff will make use of these features. Instead, we need to find ways of making the intranet easy for staff, and doing the hard work behind the scenes to solve the global-local challenges.
- Provide clear signposts
There will rarely be “one site to solve all problems”, and we are often left with multiple sites across a whole organisation. Staff must be given clear “signposts” to allow them to confidently know which resource to use when.
- Work within technology constraints
Whatever is designed must be possible to implement. An obvious statement, but there are few organisations that have unlimited technology or resources devoted to the intranet.
So, what have I missed?
James Robertson is the Managing Director of 
5 Comments:
I think number 8 should consider governance principles. No single principle will work for all global/local organizations, but you have to find the right balance about what is decided and controlled on a global level and on a local level. I think it mainly is a question of your business model – to what extent do you have the same processes, share data or need to be seen as one brand across markets?
@Lars, great input. So item 8 would be something like “Matches the business/operating model of the organisation”. Very important.
I’m not sure it should be number 9, but language barriers are definitely something you need to consider as well. An organisation may declare English as a corporate language but in my experience you have to leave room for communicating in local languages in order to get a proper implementation.
James, i fully agree with your points!
If the Intranet is to become “the way of working” (to use Janes term…), in my opinion, the global/local issue has to become invisible to the end-user.
I think our future intranets will focus much more on roles and mashing-up global as well as local content into ONE unified Intranet to specifically serve the different roles and functions within an organisation. IMO, the user does not care if content is served from a global or local intranet, as long as he/she has the right information at the right time. Thus, global/local will evolve more into a technological discussion.
I know of two large corporations using this aggregation-approach together with an iGoogle-like Intranet Startpage who have overcome the global/local issues.
@Lukas, I agree completely with your future vision! There’s plenty of agreement about the final solution we want to deliver to staff, but the challenge is how to get there from here.
At present, I see a number of big hurdles to get over:
* current technology platforms
* end-user adoption (a huge issue!)
* ownership, governance and internal politics
Fundamentally, we need to deliver solutions that work now, within our current constraints. These solutions should then help the organisation forward at least one step towards the desired future outcome…
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