Filed under: Intranets
One of the greatest challenges confronting intranets is ensuring that content is up-to-date, accurate and useful. In many organisations, much thought and effort is put into maintaining (and enhancing) the quality of published content.
What must be realised, however, is that not all content on an intranet needs to be of equal quality. Only once this is recognised can successful strategies be put in place to support content authoring and publishing.
Most intranets struggle to deliver consistent, up-to-date and useful content. In many cases, the overall content of the site is poor, impacting on staff trust and usage levels. Confronted by these problems, intranet teams often look to implement a range of activities to improve content quality.
These may involve:
- establishing writing guidelines and policies
- implementing standard templates and frameworks
- requiring compliance to these standards by distributed authors
- establishing review or workflow rules
- promoting the importance of ‘good’ content
- conducting training for authors
While these activities can certainly be beneficial, they are often applied equally to all authors, and to all content. When applied in this ‘broad brush’ way, these initiatives often have only limited impact, and may encounter resistance (or disinterest) from authors.