A lot of work is done to incrementally improve intranets, often focusing on resolving common areas of staff frustration with the sites.

These projects may be large or small, but most concentrate on making the intranet work better, without adding new capabilities or content.

This is not enough. If intranets are to achieve their full potential, intranet teams must go beyond just reducing frustration.

Fixing what is broken

Some of the most common intranet projects and activities are designed to improve the current site, including:

• improving site navigation
• making search work better
• refining the design of the home page
• updating content and removing old pages
• restructuring key areas of the site
• improving metadata quality
• establishing governance around authoring

These individual improvements may be wrapped up into a complete site redesign, a project at least 12 months long that aims to deliver a site that works much better for staff.

The common thread that runs through all these activities is that they are addressing the frustrations that staff express about the current site.

[CMb 2009-07, read the full article]