BEST PRACTICE ARTICLEMicroscope from Shutterstock
Filed under: Articles, Intranets, Knowledge management, Usability
How well is your intranet working, and is it meeting business needs? These are the fundamental questions facing many intranets.
Having grown organically for years, most intranets are now suffering from major structural and content issues.
This briefing presents a simple checklist that will allow you to judge just how much work will be required to bring your intranet back to top performance.
Work through this checklist, and tick all those statements that apply to your intranet.
Intranet danger signs
Layout and structure
| Intranet issue | Yes? |
|---|---|
| Design and layout of the intranet is inconsistent across different sections | |
| Staff have considerable difficulty finding required information | |
| Search works poorly | |
| Overall appearance of the intranet is unprofessional and dated | |
| Navigation is ad-hoc and inconsistent | |
| Few cross-links between different sections of the site | |
| Intranet does not meet accessibility standards |
Intranet content
| Intranet issue | Yes? |
|---|---|
| Content is out-of-date and inaccurate | |
| Level of detail and amount of content varies greatly between sections | |
| Few dynamic or interactive features (the intranet is not a “place to do things”) | |
| No clear idea of what content exists on the intranet | |
| Content owners are not known for all pages |
Intranet maintenance
| Intranet issue | Yes? |
|---|---|
| Update processes are labour-intensive | |
| Authors require extensive technical knowledge | |
| Very long cycle times for updates | |
| Bottlenecks in the publishing process | |
| Limited review or authorisation for changes | |
| No audit trail or version histories maintained | |
| Little or no security control over intranet changes | |
| Unable to easily make global changes to the intranet (eg. new design or branding) |
Processes and strategy
| Intranet issue | Yes? |
|---|---|
| No documented intranet goals | |
| Intranet metrics not measured or assessed | |
| Intranet not seen as strategic asset by senior management | |
| Intranet resourcing is inadequate | |
| Other competing information platforms exist, with no clear distinction between their use | |
| Some staff are not aware that the intranet even exists | |
| E-mail is (over) used as the primary communications tool | |
| Intranet usage by staff is very low |
Results
Add up all the entries that you’ve ticked. If the total is more than five, you will need to do some work to address these problem areas.
If you have more than ten marked, a complete intranet overhaul may be in order. See our article Sixteen steps to a renewed corporate intranet for some ideas on where to start.
(For an overall methodology for developing or redeveloping an intranet, see the
6×2 methodology for intranets.)
