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

As discussed in the earlier article Every intranet has its successes, there are few intranet teams who are not steadily delivering valuable improvements to their sites. Despite this, many intranet teams are almost invisible within their organisations, with little recognition for the new enhancements and functionality they have delivered. This must change, if intranet teams are to obtain the resources and support they need. Part of the solution is for intranet teams to be more proactive and effective in communicating their successes. This briefing outlines a number of practical ways of promoting success stories, drawn from the real-life approaches taken

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

The inaugural Intranet Innovation Awards celebrate new ideas and innovative approaches to the enhancement and delivery of intranets. Uniquely, these awards recognise individual intranet improvements,…

There is no one-size-fits-all solution for meeting the needs of staff. Beyond the broadest level, the information needed by staff is not generic. Someone working in HR has quite distinct needs from a staff member in finance, the call centre, or in the sales team. This is why organisations are progressively implementing personalisation or segmentation features as part of their corporate intranets or portals. While the functionality that can be implemented varies greatly, there is a single goal: to better target information to the specific staff who need it. In practice, there are three main ways of segmenting staff needs

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

Organisations often envisage their intranets as integral to the way staff do their jobs. Staff are expected to visit the intranet daily. While this is an admirable goal, it doesn't necessarily match the reality of most intranets today. There are clear reasons for staff to use the intranet, but these are not always well understood. In practice, 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. Recognising this, intranet designers can ensure that intranet resources are targeted in ways that will have

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…

Something has really crystallised for me over the last few months in my discussions with many intranet teams. More often than not, these teams are quietly working away, delivering valuable but unseen improvements to the intranet. This includes implementing a new CMS, cleaning up content, developing taxonomies and adding search functionality. All of these activities are valuable, and probably necessary. They are also invisible and often unrecognised within the organisation as a whole. Now I've talked often about the importance of focusing on tangible and visible improvements, but let me state that more bluntly: When it comes to improving intranets,

Intranets have now grown to be core tools for most organisations, tools they cannot do without. Despite this, it is still a struggle for intranet teams to gain the resources and support they need to sustain and grow their sites. In general, it is not hard to describe what the 'perfect intranet' looks like, and each intranet team can generally paint a clear picture of their desired future site. What is needed, however, is a roadmap that helps intranet teams to get from 'here' to 'there' within current resource limits and other constraints. The 6x2 methodology provides a powerful new