Step Two Designs

CMb 2003-07

Five minute intranet self-evaluation

Written by James Robertson, published March 18th, 2003

Categorised under: articles, intranets, knowledge management, usability & information architecture

How well is your intranet working, and is it meeting business needs? These are the fundamental questions facing many intranets.

Having grown organically for years, most intranets are now suffering from major structural and content issues.

This briefing presents a simple checklist that will allow you to judge just how much work will be required to bring your intranet back to top performance.

Work through this checklist, and tick all those statements that apply to your intranet.

Intranet danger signs

Layout and structure

Intranet issue	Yes?
Design and layout of the intranet is inconsistent across different sections
Staff have considerable difficulty finding required information
Search engine works poorly
Overall appearance of the intranet is unprofessional and dated
Navigation is ad-hoc and inconsistent
Few cross-links between different sections of the site
Intranet is not accessible for disabled users

Intranet content

Intranet issue	Yes?
Content is out-of-date and inaccurate
Level of detail and amount of content varies greatly between sections
Few dynamic or interactive features (the intranet is not a “place to do things”)
No clear idea of what content exists on the intranet
Content owners are not known for all pages

Intranet maintenance

Intranet issue	Yes?
Update processes are labour-intensive
Authors require extensive HTML knowledge
Very long cycle times for updates
Bottlenecks in the publishing process
Limited review or authorisation for changes
No audit trail or version histories maintained
Little or no security control over intranet changes
Unable to easily make global changes to the intranet (eg. new design or branding)

Processes and strategy

Intranet issue	Yes?
No documented intranet goals
Intranet metrics not measured or assessed
Intranet not seen as strategic asset by senior management
Intranet resourcing is inadequate
Other competing information platforms exist, with no clear distinction between their use
Some staff are not aware that the intranet even exists
E-mail is (over) used as the primary communications tool
Intranet usage by staff is very low

Results

Add up all the entries that you’ve ticked. If the total is more than five, you will need to do some work to address these problem areas.

If you have more than ten marked, a complete intranet overhaul may be in order. See our article Sixteen steps to a renewed corporate intranet for some ideas on where to start.

(For an overall methodology for developing or redeveloping an intranet, see the
6×2 methodology for intranets.)

Tags: benchmarking, intranets, metrics, self-evaluation