Intranet purpose: 3 angles
February 19, 2009I got a question a few days ago from an intranet manager who asked me:
"I'm working with my team on developing a shared understanding of the purpose of our intranet and wondered if you had a view you'd be willing to share?"
Here's my approach:
When you define the purpose of an intranet, there are several angles to examine. Each angle requires making a choice. However, they are not mutually exclusive choices. They are choices about what you decide to emphasize.
Angle One
Is the primary purpose to communicate, collaborate or work?
Granted, people need to do all three and these functions should all be part of the purpose of the intranet.
The real questions are more detailed:
- Are we trying especially to improve communication? If so, are we talking about bottom-up, horizontal or top-down. Which flow is the weakest in our organization and how can we improve it?
- Does our business need better collaboration, across different silos for example? Are we working on projects that need more efficient ways of supporting virtual teams, or teams that include our employees and external partners? How can the intranet help?
- Do we have business processes that should be supported by the intranet? Through a portal? Through integration of core process applications?
- Do we have secondary processes that we could integrate into the intranet? This could save time for employees and process owners.
Simply put, where do we want to put the emphasis?
Angle Two
Look at the intranet and its services from three perspectives: the employee, the business and the enterprise.
Are you serving all three well?
- For example, is there anything going on in the economic environment that means you should give extra support to business managers?
- Is your enterprise undergoing a down-sizing or transformation program that requires special support to employees?
- And so on.
Needs change over time. Needs can also be very temporary but nonetheless critical for the company.
Simply put, take your head out of the intranet, and think about your company, your business and the people. What do they need?
Angle Three
Do you want to position your intranet as a layer or as an integrator?
- Do you envisage a flat, thin layer over a lot of specialized sites, each one independently serving its users?
- Do you envisage a customized, single entry point into all the company's information, applications and resources. I say "attempting" because doing this successfully is hard and rare.
If you are in the first case, you need to:
- Understand what is common to all, and ensure that it is found only on the intranet-portal, leaving the specialized content for the independent sites. Otherwise, these sites will become the entry points for their users who will thereby not see the common, shared information and messages. Or they will see out-of-date common content because the site manager will not have realized there has been an update.
- Specify the purpose and scope for each piece: the layer and the underlying sites. They will most likely – all taken together – cover all the points in Angles 1 and 2.
If you are in the second case, your challenge will be twofold:
- Identify meaningful and workable profile criteria for personalization
- Ensure that the user experience is meaningful, starting with the home page
The biggest challenge here is accepting that in most large enterprises, from 10 to 15% of the content and services are common and the rest is specific. This is a switch from the way most headquarters-based intranet teams see things.
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Readers: please join the conversation. How have you gone about defining the purpose of your intranet or portal?
February 19th, 2009 at 3:21 pm
Hi Jane,
Great post again, helpful overview.
What I would like to add is that the focus that you choose will also affect your governance. The key question to ask in my opinion would also be: who should OWN the intranet? This may differ from you focus. in my view an intranet is in danger of falling in a void between different organizational entities.Nobody will feel responsible if you get it wrong, or the wrong people become responsible for things they don’t understand.
February 19th, 2009 at 6:21 pm
Totally agree, Jan. You’ve described 2 major risks perfectly. I’m not which sure which is worse – wrong owner or no owner.
Good addition to my post. Thanks.
February 25th, 2009 at 6:29 pm
Jane
A very elegant approach. I remain fascinated by the number of organisations I have come across where no thought has been given to the objectives of the intranet. In the current economic climate being able to point to specific benefits from the investment that is being made in the intranet could be a useful speech to have prepared. “Improve productivity” is not an adequate answer.
To respond to your comment about ownership, as a consultant I’d always prefer working in a situation where there is a wrong owner than no owner at all. Having no owner means that the organisation places no value at all on information. You can also usually effect a change from the wrong owner to the right owner – eventually.