The primary purpose of intranets is to support staff in doing their jobs, to help them complete common business tasks. In practice, however, this can be very frustrating on many intranets. Policies are located in one section, procedures in another section, and forms in a third. Information then needs to be hunted out in order to complete even simple activities.

The effectiveness of intranets can be greatly enhanced by bringing together all of the information and tools relating to a task or a subject, and presenting them in a single location. This is the basis for the “all together” rule for intranets: aggregate content together, to help staff to find required information, and to complete key business tasks.

This article explores some of the issues currently experienced on intranets, and discusses alternative models that can be put into practice.

Evolving intranets

Intranets have evolved in an organic way over time, with content published by many different areas of the organisation. This naturally leads to intranets becoming structured along organisational lines, with each business unit maintaining a separate intranet section or sub-site.

[December KM Column, read the full article]