Filed under: Intranets, Usability
Not all staff needs are the same. Staff in different parts of the organisation, located in different areas and doing different jobs will have quite distinct needs.
In a globe-spanning manufacturing business, these differences are very obvious: individual countries sell different products; the sales division operates very differently from product development; and field engineers are not office-based designers.
Yet even a hundred-person government agency has important distinctions: each area of the organisation conducts different activities; policy officers are distinct from admin staff; project teams are working on different initiatives.
In all these cases, there is a mix of global information, common information that is shared across all staff, and local information, specific to groups or individuals.
Historically, intranets have tended to focus on global information needs, with the majority of resources devoted to HR, finance, IT, policies and forms.
Unfortunately, while this information is corporately important, it’s not what staff need daily. Nor is it the information that drives the core business of the organisation.
In contrast, local information tends to be tied directly to operational needs and service delivery. While it’s only relevant to a subset of the organisation (by definition), it can have the greatest impact on what the organisation does.
This challenges all intranet teams to find a way of delivering a site that meets both global and local needs.
[December article by James Robertson, read the full article]