Step Two Designs

Using Excel in more powerful ways can bring further insights beyond a typical content audit

When migrating to a new intranet, it’s important to establish the right authoring practices from the outset.

How much of your intranet home is red (irrelevant) vs green (directly helpful for staff)?

An intranet vision is the starting point, but a strategy is still needed showing how to get there.

This article outlines three tiers of activities that can make an intranet accessible for those with disabilities.

Training for intranet authors is best as a mix of online and face-to-face, and this article shows how.

There are three approaches to delivering mobile functionality for staff: native apps, mobile web or hybrid apps.

Avoid structuring the intranet to match today’s business units, and think twice about ‘my’.

While a CMS cannot magically keep content up-to-date, effective use of technology options can help greatly.

The 2012 winners of the Intranet Innovation Awards cover mobile, dashboards, social and beyond.

What does organisational culture mean, and how can intranets help?

There are a number of pitfalls to avoid when creating a new social intranet, to ensure adoption and business value.

A range of strategies can be taken to ensure that intranet content is up-to-date and well-written.

Authors need clear advice and guidelines to help them write great intranet content.

In this modern age, mobile devices should be supported when redesigning intranets.

While intranet governance is a big topic to make sense of, a great start is to get three key documents in place.

Policies and procedures are important information, and they need to be easily found and used on the intranet.

Intranet redesigns involve a huge amount of work, so how do we make this the last big redesign that’s needed?

There are many enterprise social tools, which vary greatly in their capabilities, and it is important to choose carefully.

This article outlines a checklist of items to address when developing an intranet project plan.

Visual design is important for intranets, and great work by design agencies is key to this.

The digital workplace offers a compelling vision of the future, but the right foundations must be in place.

Intranet authors need to be provided with comprehensive training if they’re to write great content.

All intranets must find a balance between global (common) and local (specific) information.

Including fun features on the intranet can send the message that the organisation is a great place to work.

Engineers working in operational environments have specific needs and issues that can be met with an intranet.

The 2011 Intranet Innovation Awards shine a light on the current and future direction of intranets globally.

Tree testing provides a cheap and effective way of checking draft navigation before proceeding further into a redesign.

Social intranets aren’t a technology, they’re a philosophy and a new way of looking at how intranets work.

There are a range of practical ways to help content authors produce better intranet pages.

Allowing commenting on intranet news is an invaluable stepping stone towards a more social intranet.

Intranet teams can’t afford to be technology ignorant, but nor do they need to be geeks.

Intranet teams seeking insight from other organisations need to adapt ideas to fit their unique circumstances.

When should online card sorting be used, and how to make the most of it as a research technique?

Organisations with a strong public brand and reputation are under growing pressure to deliver an intranet to match.

Intranet redesigns truly succeed when they address longer-term strategy, management and governance issues.

Effective coaching techniques are critical for achieving a well performing intranet team.

When examined more closely, the mobile enterprise means many different things, delivered in different ways.

It should not be automatically assumed that the one CMS will ideally serve both the intranet and website.

Comprehensive training and support is a critical component of delivering, and sustaining, a great intranet.

Including a tickertape on the intranet homepage can be an effective way of communicating real-time updates.

While broadly like any other intranet project, SharePoint intranets bring unique opportunities and challenges.

Rather than thinking of the intranet as a once-off ‘product’, consider it an ongoing ‘service’ to the business.

One of the greatest challenges for intranet teams is seeing other intranets and learning from them.

Clear governance, including well-written policies, are critical for intranet success. But where to start?

In this modern age, there is no reason to continue the 50 year-old practice of sending corporate newsletters.

Intranets can do much to support employee engagement initiatives and objectives.

Intranets can be used to surface and deliver valuable customer information that helps organisations succeed.

The 2010 Intranet Innovation Awards have shown that content is no longer king on intranets, and that social media has becomes standard.

Jargon can make it hard for even experienced intranet users to find what they need and to complete tasks.

The strength of enterprise search is also its challenge: how to pick which of the many features to use?

Mobile devices are changing the consumer landscape, and organisations must have an enterprise strategy to keep in the game.

Many key frontline and operational staff have limited access to desktop-based intranets. How best to reach them?

Intranets deliver the greatest benefits when they provide seamless access to common applications and tools.

Intranets should be reviewed every year, to ensure they are making steady and concrete progress.

There are many possible intranet policies that could be established regarding new windows and tabs.

HR is a key stakeholder of corporate intranets, and can use the site to deliver both information and services.

At any given point, intranet teams must be able to describe: where we’ve been, what we’re doing, and what comes next.

Intranet teams, and business stakeholders, often underestimate the length of intranet projects.

Intranets can’t afford to be useful but ugly, and inspiration should be drawn from modern web design standards.

It is a mistake to assume that recognition that the current intranet is broken translates automatically into support for fixing it.

While giving staff access to the intranet from home can be beneficial, the rollout needs to be carefully managed.

Game theory provides a new way of looking at employee engagement and action on intranets.

Intranet business cases are more powerful when they draw on real-life examples of issues and needs.

Understanding common and important staff tasks underpins every aspect of intranet design and management.

It is widely assumed that intranet homepages need to be squeezed into a single screenful, but can longer pages be made to work?

Can we replace our intranet homepages with a Google-inspired search page?

Intranets are an important internal communications channel, and it’s important to get the right mix of news.

Executive support is critical for intranets, and there are a range of practical approaches for gaining this.

When designing and structuring intranets, it is useful to distinguish between core content, and business-unit specific information.

There are a range of practical ways of assessing whether the team is spending its time to greatest effect.

MyHomepage enables better communication, dialogue and expertise sharing between employees, through the use of social tools.

Three intranet teams describe how they chose the name for their intranets, and the impact it has had.

There are many good books that can help intranet teams to deliver great sites and overcome challenges.

Intranet projects are challenging, and it’s easy for teams to fall into common traps that can undo the good work being done.

It’s important to have an ‘elevator pitch’ to hand at all times for both the intranet and intranet team.

The ‘three clicks rule’ is perhaps the most widely known web design principle, but it’s a myth.

Intranet teams can never maintain a whole site themselves, and empowered authors will do much to deliver great content.

The intranet should provide a human face to staff, and can do much to build and transform the corporate culture.

Explores the benefits and risks related to including photos in the corporate staff directory.

Learn more about the intranet innovations that will help every intranet team to deliver a better site in 2010.

Even when time and resources are tight, it is always worth squeezing in at least a little user testing.

The intranet should have a section devoted to the intranet itself, communicating to stakeholders, authors and general staff.

There are many different uses for the intranet homepage, and a balance must be gained to meet business and staff needs.

The Forest Products Commission shares their use of video, in this guest article.

Getting the right visual designer for your intranet or website project is critical.

The home page of the intranet should provide a one-click gateway to collaboration tools.

Intranet-based rich media, including audio and video, provides new ways of connecting with staff.

Intranet managers need to be careful not to get caught up in their own experiences and perspectives.

By planning projects carefully from the outset, intranet teams can build a strong business case.

The different uses for PDFs and web-based content on intranets is a common source of confusion.

Successful intranet managers balance their technical skills, business acumen and leadership capabilities, and take a pragmatic approach to their sites.

There are five fundamental publishing models for an intranet, and each has strengths and weaknesses.

Intranet business cases need to beyond dry numbers and recommendations, and target emotions and key business needs.

If intranets are to achieve their full potential, intranet teams must go beyond just reducing frustration.

There are three main sources of staff directory information: IT systems, HR/payroll, and staff themselves.

Following a core set of guidelines will greatly improve the effectiveness of staff interviews.

The intranet is a powerful way of helping staff to get things done more effectively.

Getting the fundamentals of good communication right is a prerequisite for collaboration initiatives.

A wiki for new starters and a discussion forum enhance collaboration at EUMETSAT.

There are three main approaches to delivering custom functionality and interactive features on websites and intranets.

‘Boris’ is the intranet at City of Casey, a local government organisation in Victoria, Australia.

Managing the intranet through the cycles of boom and bust that are inevitable in our organisations and economies.

Governance is about having a framework in place that enables the decision-making and planning processes for the intranet.

Staff directories are only useful when they contain all staff, even those without a PC or payroll number.

While basic metadata is routinely captured by most publishing tools, there is still widespread confusion about its uses and limits.

There are three main ways of keeping a staff directory up to date: centralised updates, self-service updating and via integration.

Giving the intranet a name helps to build its identity, and may even give it a personality within the organisation.

Some of the greatest value in a staff directory comes from the cross-linking, within the directory and to other resources.

Wikis can be used as both collaboration tools and as an intranet, and these are two very different situations.

Intranet teams need to carefully manage their time, to ensure that progress is always being made.

Public-facing websites often have a strong marketing element to them, but do intranets need to be as polished in their design?

To help build team confidence, intranet teams should understand staff needs and the motivations of content owners.

To be successful, intranets must have a clear definition of their purpose and character, underpinning decisions about future directions.

ABCD for intranets is a step-by-step tool that can be applied at any time and then used for the continual refinement and improvement of the intranet.

Too many approaches to improving intranet content are destined for heroic failure.

Over the years, we have published a vast amount of information on intranets. In this article, we attempt to wrap up all the activities that form part of an intranet design (or redesign) into one concise checklist.

Before personalisation can be implemented, underlying LDAP or Active Directory implementations need to be cleaned up.

In this article we talk with user experience consultant Gerry Gaffney, about his experience in using a new technique called cultural probes.

This article completes the exploration of the Intranet Hive, a new model for managing intranets.

This article introduces the Intranet Hive, a comprehensive model for managing ongoing intranet activities.

Being an intranet star isn’t easy, but there are practical ways of making it happen.

Intranet teams should use a range of approaches to track and communicate their success stories, to managers and the wider organisation.

This article shares the winners of the 2007 Intranet Innovation Awards, providing a screenshot and summary for each winning entry.

There are three main facets that can be used to segment staff needs for information: job role, business unit and geographic location.

This case study outlines the process undertaken by Canon Australia to evaluate and redesign their corporate intranet, including an overview of the innovative IA developed.

There are two key reasons for a staff member to come to the intranet: to find a specific piece of information, or to complete a specific task.

This methodology provides intranet teams with a new and powerful approach to planning intranet improvements.

A simple rule of thumb when planning a site redesign is that the new site will be no more than 20% different from the current site.

This briefing draws a clear line between two separate functionalities: personalisation and segmentation.

This article discusses the results of a worldwide survey conducted to guage what extent personalisation is being used in intranets and portals.

This briefing explores the idea of intranet successes, how to identify them, and how to gain the greatest value from them.

Explores a number of approaches that can be taken to build innovative intranets, all of which move intranet teams beyond just maintaining their current sites.

To be truly effective, intranets need to address three fundamental purposes: content, communication and activity.

The intranet team must guide, coordinate and integrate activities across all three fundamental intranet purposes: content, communication and activity.

The Intranet Review Toolkit provides a free way of assessing where your intranet is up to, benchmarked against industry best practice.

Intranet teams should be guided by two words when planning intranet activities: tangible and visible.

Position descriptions describe the key responsibilities and duties of the intranet manager, fulfulling two audiences, the intranet manager as well as the organisation.

There is a ‘rule of thirds’ that can be used to categorise the main types of forms that exist on an intranet.

Usability and information architecture (IA) are core areas of expertise for intranet teams, and all organisations should take steps to build this expertise internally.

The most successful intranets are those that directly reflect the unique nature of the organisations they serve.

Conceptually, ‘news feeds’ are quite simple, allowing content to be delivered over the internet. Web users are very familiar with the idea of feeds, but what about their use within an organisation?

here are many staff that have little (or no) access to a computer during work hours, and there are two main approaches for making intranet available: kiosks and remote access.

The enemy of intranets is not resistance to change, it is apathy, which must be overcome to build support and resources.

An intranet homepage policy is tool that can provide some welcome support to intranet managers as well as providing a clear direction to business units and senior managers on the use of the homepage.

An intranet concept is a single sheet of paper which outlines where the intranet is at, where it is going, and what it will deliver in the short-term.

This article provides a long (but still not comprehensive) list of ongoing tasks for intranet teams.

A very simple improvement to the intranet is to ensure that all staff login to the site in order to use it. This allows a number of immediate benefits to be offered, as well as providing a foundation for future enhancements.

It is not enough to focus an intranet redesign on just the home page, global navigation and page layout.

While news on the intranet home page is widespread, the question needs to be asked: how effective is it?

This briefing takes a different look at the role of intranet policies, and outlines five policies that all intranet teams should develop.

The intranet needs to have a strong brand, a sense of identity that, at a basic level, distinguishes it from the public website and other information sources within the organisation.

This article explains a quick and effective technique for assessing whether your home page is an effective gateway to site content.

Rather than embarking on a major project at the first sign of problems, consider tactical solutions such as the redesign of the home page.

This article outlines nine steps that can be taken by all intranet teams to improve the effectiveness of search, covering both design and under-the-hood changes.

This article provides 10 words that describe successful intranets, including: innovative, productive and collaborative.

Much is expected of intranet authors, in terms of the quality, accuracy and timliness of published material. Yet, many organisations treat intranet authoring as a hobby.

Intranet teams must take on a strong leadership role, and drive forward the evolution and enhancement of the site.

The intranet manager should be free to focus solely on managing the site, and not writing HTML or publishing content.

Intranet content and tools should be aggregated, to help staff find required information, and to complete key tasks.

Users are not all the same, and do not have the same needs. A key principle is therefore: you can’t usefully deliver information to users you haven’t personally met.

This briefing outlines a simple scenario in which the intranet helps staff find key corporate information, while the documents accessed are stored in the document/records management system.

There are two main approaches to redeveloping an intranet: a big bang and evolution.

Determining what an intranet is actually for involves gaining an in-depth understanding of staff (and organisational) needs and issues.

It is widely recognised that an intranet must be trusted, if it is to be regularly used by staff across an organisation.

All too often, centralised intranet teams find themselves battling with decentralised authors to enforce consistency and quality standards.

This case study presents the findings from five intranet reviews across a range of organisations, each with very different results.

Intranets must be more than just a dumping ground for ‘second-hand documents’ if they are to be successful. Instead, a radically different policy needs to be put in place.

This article summarises the results of a public survey into intranet teams: how large they are, where they are located, what skills they have, and more.

Staff in geographically isolated locations are most reliant on information sources such as intranets, and yet in practical terms they are the hardest to reach.

Any intranets structured around the organisational chart are difficult to use. Before attempting a restructure, consider why this structure has been used.

If intranets are to succeed, an upwards spiral must be created, where each success (no matter how small) leads onto further improvements.

This article shares survey results and recommendations on the design and implementation of online staff directories, the most used element of most intranets.

Explores a number of practical ways that an intranet can be improved incrementally without yet another redesign.

Online forms on a corporate intranet deliver clear benefits and cost savings. This article outlines a simple step-by-step approach to implementing online forms.

One of the first challenges when establishing an intranet is to determine who should have overall ownership of the site, and where the intranet team should be located.

The challenge is to deliver sufficient intranet content and capabilities, within the time and resource constraints. This briefing outlines a simple approach for balancing these factors.

Explores the advantages and disadvantages of using ‘under construction’ on an intranet.

All delivery channels (not just the intranet) must be considered when planning an overall information management and communications strategy.

A critical success factor for an effective and sustainable intranet is the establishment of an intranet ‘community of practice’.

By improving the way the intranet supports key tasks, immediate business benefits can be delivered in a manageable and cost-effective manner.

Many intranets are dedicated to allowing staff to complete administrative tasks easily, instead of assisting staff to do their core business.

An intranet is something that staff need to learn, just like any other business application or information system. This will require both formal and informal training.

We are often asked whether we have seen the perfect intranet, and our answer is no. Read more to find out why.

FaCS applied user-centred techniques in the redevelopment of their large Government intranet, and it serves as a useful model for other organisations looking to tackle the same issues.

AGIMO Better Practice Checklist, for staff responsible for intranets, including those in website or intranet teams.

The intranet can serve as a platform for knowledge management initiatives, via approaches such as collaborative environments, staff directories, wikis and weblogs.

This article outlines a phased approach to creating a new corporate intranet when organisations merge, following the progress of the merger itself.

This briefing looks at the role of corporate policies within an organisation, and the need to better communicate their message to staff.

Intranet teams should play a leadership and coaching role in the organisation, in order to ensure that the intranet is effective, up-to-date and usable.

This article provides five techniques to identify likely usability problems in your intranet. Some techniques provide indications about where the main problems lie, others provide concrete evidence.

Lack of project sponsorship is one of the greatest causes of IT project failure. For an organisation-wide platform such as an intranet, the need is even greater.

A redesigned site can be easy and quick to use, and perfectly structured, and still be useless. For a site to be useful, it must meet user needs, and there are a range of techniques for identifying these.

Escaping an organisational structure for your intranet is not easy, but will deliver many business benefits.

Staff induction is vital in getting staff up to speed, and ensuring they are productive. Yet most organisations have inadequate or ad-hoc processes in place.

A simple intranet feedback mechanism is an effective way of keeping an intranet up-to-date, and assisting with change management and cultural change processes.

The intranet goal ‘to efficiently disseminate accurate information’ is meaningless, and must be replaced.

This briefing focuses on who to select for stakeholder interviews. It provides some general guidelines, and lists some areas of the organisation to involve.

Stakeholder interviews are a very effective way of gaining an understanding of an organisation, and can be considered a form of ‘knowledge mapping’.

A multi-disciplinary approach is needed when establishing an intranet team. This briefing outlines the key roles required.

A successful intranet ensures that: staff needs are met, and the content creation processes are supported.

This article outlines ideas for promoting your intranet, ranging from the obvious through to the very unusual. Somewhere in this list should be a few approaches that you can apply to your own intranet.

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.

Beyond using HTML, intranets and websites have very little in common.

Twenty public-sector intranets surveyed as part of the Intranet Peers in Government forum.

Review of the Hunter Health intranet, which generated a wealth of strategic and tactical recommendations.

The real challenge is to maintain the quality, consistency and value of an intranet, well into the future. This article shows you how.

Outlines a disciplined approach to re-invigorating a corporate intranet, making it deliver real business benefits.

Read about the project to create a customised content management system for the NRMA. It now holds over 15,000 pages, and is constant use by a dedicated team of over half a dozen authors.

Read about the project to develop Frontline Help for the Newcastle Call Centre. This project deployed a full content management system, created a web-based delivery infrastructure, and captured large amounts of business information.