Writing for the intranet

Good quality intranet content is integral to the success of an intranet. These full day hands-on writing for the web workshops will equip intranet authors with the skills and knowledge to improve their intranet content for scanability and usefulness.

Topics modules can include:

• the purposes of an intranet
• writing for the web key principles
• understanding your user and their needs
• common pitfalls for intranet content
• elements of great content (with specific ideas to help you improve your content)
• tests for quality content
• top tips for improving intranet content
• let’s write: hands on activity to re-write your content

With up to 15 participants per workshop, participants will learn the key principles and good writing techniques. There will also be an opportunity to write or re-write existing content within the workshop environment which means content is ready to go when it comes time to migrate content or launch the new intranet.

For a full details (including costs), and a list of other courses, see our in-house workshops page. Get in touch with Rebecca if you’d like to learn more.

Reviewing and rewriting content is a big job and cannot be done by the intranet manager alone. But training authors to write great content is a challenge, as most have never learnt to write for a specific audience.

This article outlines ways to help authors write content that is easy to find, easy to read and easy to use.

Conduct in-house training

More organisations are now recognising the importance of good quality content and are using professional trainers to conduct in-house workshops for intranet authors. This demonstrates the organisation’s commitment to the intranet and the role authors play as well as giving authors another skill to add to their resumes.

[September article by Rebecca Rodgers, read the full article]

This frees up the intranet team to focus on the big picture, but they still have a key role in teaching staff on how to deliver effective content.

Depending on the skills of the authors within the organisation, intranet teams may conduct training in:

• writing for the web
• the publishing process
• how to layout pages
• governance of the intranet

The intranet team may also run a community of practice, have specific sites for author support and provide ongoing ad-hoc support. Many of these options are discussed in an earlier article How to empower authors. But another way to support authors is with a drop-in centre.

A drop-in centre is regular forum for authors to seek advice without interrupting the intranet team or making an appointment.

The informal atmosphere makes learning easy, especially for those whose authoring responsibilities only form a small part of their role.

(June article by Catherine Grenfell, read the full article.)

This support must encompass content owners and authors, who are confronted by a new site structure and the requirement to deliver better content.

Training must also be provided on the new technology platform, which offers some complex and unfamiliar capabilities. These may include collaboration and social tools, which aim to change how staff work together.

Many organisations fail to put in place the necessary training and support for an improved intranet, and adoption levels suffer as a result. In the worst cases, the entire intranet project may be considered a failure when content publishers and end users alike rebel against the site changes.

These challenges make the work done by the Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations (DEEWR) particularly impressive.

In the context of the merging of two federal government agencies and major changes in the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act, the DEEWR team established comprehensive training initiatives and support materials.

Members of the Intranet Leadership Forum (www.steptwo.com.au/ilf), DEEWR have been generous in sharing examples of their approaches and deliverables.

[May article by Alex Manchester, read the full article]

Content comes in different shapes and context. Some needs ‘locking-down’, other content is ‘open’, while elements develop as it is pushed, modified and enhanced. There is not a ‘one solution’ fits all process flow within each stream, nor within each site area within a community site. Some communities have areas which are controlled by a central team, and no-one else can update/add. They also have areas which are open and require no authorisation or approval to publish and enhance. Other communities are more centrally controlled with some locked-down areas.

Often, one of the big justifications for a CMS is removing the webmaster bottleneck and delegating content entry to the people who have the information. The implicit assumption is that everyone wants to directly maintain their portion of the website but technology is standing in the way. But if you visit a CMS customer a while after implementation you are likely to find that the responsibility of adding content is still concentrated in a relatively small proportion of the employee population.

Intranet teams generally have little influence over who becomes an author. As intranets mature and become better understood as a business tool, it is to be hoped that this will change.

This article focuses on what intranet teams can do to empower authors by providing effective and targeted tools and resources. In the context of this article the term authors broadly includes staff who, write and publish content, publish content written by others, write content only.

Any tools or resources that the intranet team develops for authors need to take into account the:

• turnover of authors, that is the average length of time staff are responsible for authoring
• geographical location of authors, and whether they are all in one main office or spread around the country or the world
• cultural drivers for the organisation and the specific factors that influence management, change and peer groups in the workplace
• capacity of the intranet team to deliver support, tools and resources

In many cases the intranet team has an untapped resource in the number of authors in an organisation. Providing the right tools and resources can help harness this power.

[December KM Column by Catherine Grenfell, read the full article]

Many Web CMS products tout “in-context,” wiki-like content editing as an important feature or enhancement. In-context means letting contributors create or edit content from within the context of the site, without actually having to retrieve a content item from the back-end and filling in long forms.

Define the level according to the “natural business role”. Publishing on the intranet must be part of normal business procedures. Whoever is responsible for the accuracy of a specific content should also be responsible for that content on the intranet.

It can be a real challenge to properly staff properly to use and contribute to an intranet, particularly if struggling with a lack of management support at all levels. Your intranet can’t succeed without trained colleagues that actively contribute. So do opt for classroom training, workshops, e-learning or do you choose to dream of instant iPod-like adoption?

All publishers of formal content in BT must do the basic training courses before they can publish formal content on our intranet. Each course takes about 30 minutes to complete on-line and should be repeated every two years.

Sitting behind this huge volume of content are a wide range of approaches to creating and publishing pages.

The central team has a clear role to play in managing this content, as do publishing guidelines and intranet governance documents.

Yet the central team alone cannot manage thousands of pages, and a decentralised publishing model is established to give business areas responsibility for maintaining their own content. New authors do, however, require support and training.

Against this backdrop of ‘traditional’ publishing models, the growth of web 2.0 and ‘user-generated content’ is raising new questions about how to maintain an intranet.

The key challenge is to establish the right mix of publishing models, flexible in many cases, rigid in others. The intranet team needs to manage the overall process, including adjusting approaches when circumstances change.

This article explores five fundamental publishing models for intranets, providing a description of each, and a brief summary of strengths and weaknesses.

Use these models as the starting point for discussions with authors and stakeholders, and put in place a balanced mix of publishing approaches that deliver the best standard of content within resource constraints.

[May KM Column, read the full article]

1. fully centralised publishing
2. decentralised publishing
3. publishing with review
4. federated publishing
5. end-user content contribution

In a little more detail:

1. Fully centralised publishing

A central intranet team is established, which takes on responsibility for publishing and managing content on the site. Business areas contribute information via email, Word documents and other source documents. The central team takes the source information, and reworks it to match intranet requirements.

Advantages:

• increases content quality
• increases intranet consistency
• minimises training required
• simplifies technology requirements
• provides consistent resources for updates

Disadvantages:

• becomes a bottleneck
• content may not be written for the web
• limits subject matter expertise
• limits engagement from the business
• zero cost for business areas

2. Decentralised publishing

Decentralised publishing puts the responsibility for creating and maintaining intranet content into the hands of authors situated in business units across the organisation. Decentralised publishing model, where authors located within business units can publish directly to the site.

Advantages:

• harnesses the efforts of many authors
• more scalable
• gives responsibility to business units
• may provide more up-do-date content
• integrates content creation into business activities

Disadvantages:

• quality can be impacted
• consistency is harder to achieve
• sustaining effort can be hard
• can become chaotic unless managed
• publishing tools become vital

3. Publishing with review

Content is produced by decentralised authors within business areas, but is reviewed before being published to the intranet. In practice, these reviews may take a number of forms.

Advantages:

• ensures content is double-checked
• improves consistency and quality of content
• can catch mistakes
• improves accountability
• allows intranet team to keep track of changes

Disadvantages:

• requires additional effort
• can overwhelm the central team
• reduces the speed of publishing
• can create bottlenecks
• reviews can be limited in scope

4. Federated publishing

Business areas appoint a coordinator who takes responsibility for managing intranet authors within their area (this role is given many different names across organisations). The effect is to create the equivalent of a ‘mini intranet team’ within major business units, with the central team working closely with the coordinators.

Advantages:

• builds expertise in key business units
• offers as hybrid approach
• smaller number of people for the central team to work with
• reduces the load on the central team
• scales well

Disadvantages:

• requires business units to devote more resources
• coordinators must be qualified
• still requires strong management

5. End-user content contribution

In addition to having appointed authors using back-end publishing tools to create intranet content, staff staff across the organisation can contribute news items or content to the site directly. This could be via forms, wikis, blogs or other similar approaches.

Advantages:

• allows for broad staff engagement
• allows information to be published instantly
• addresses content needs
• simple for content contributors
• allows content to grow organically

Disadvantages:

• potential for poor content quality
• need to differentiate from reviewed content
• less structured and consistent
• may expose the organisation to business risks

—

These are just outlines of the key points, and I’m writing full explanations for each, and more. But my question is this: have I missed anything?

In time, the value of this started to be recognised by organisations, along with the need to better manage these sprawling sites. Intranet teams were born, and structure and order were brought to intranets. Perhaps in reaction to the mess created by sustained organic growth, many intranet teams instituted rigid publishing policies and formalised workflow.

Intranet authoring became more tightly managed, restricted to just a few authorised publishers in each business unit. In the process, intranets became “read only” sites for the majority of staff, useful at their best but too often out of date.

Unnoticed, we quietly came to a fork in the road, and went down the route of traditional, formalised publishing. Which is a pity.

Intranets were never meant to be so centralised, so reliant on just a few to maintain thousands of pages. This is not realistic, and it’s not effective.

When wikis came along, they were therefore seen as a revolution, a new way of managing content. Death to the stuffy old intranet, bring on enterprise 2.0 and intranet 2.0. In the process, however, too many of the lessons learnt from “traditional” intranets have been forgotten in the naive belief that “content will manage itself”.

What we need to do, as always, is find the middle path. Intranet content was always intended to be maintained by many staff, those with the actual knowledge. On top of this, we then need all the benefits that come from best practice usability and information architecture, including great navigation and search.

This doesn’t mean an end to centralised intranet teams, quite the opposite. The need for true leadership has never been greater, we just need to combine it with a return to the democratic vision of intranets that originally existed.

Your thoughts?