Top tips for taming your intranet

Compiled by Luke Tredinnick
L.Tredinnick@londonmet.ac.uk

These tips will help you avoid the common pitfalls of intranets and describe the reasons behind some of the success and the failures of intranets.

The term Intranet means different things to different people. For some, it is the application of Web technology in the workplace, and the backbone of an intranet will always be the HTML content. For others, the intranet is an umbrella for a very wide range of technologies, including email, groupware, database applications, RSS feeds and dynamic content integration, electronic document and records management systems, enterprise search, and many others.

Intranets are usually created from many individual contributions, which are somehow to be co-ordinated into an integrated resource with a clear strategic direction. Every intranet is largely tailored to the needs of the organisation, but we can still identify common themes, and best practice for implementing a successful intranet.

Tip 1: Decide what your intranet is for

It is one thing setting strategic objectives for your intranet, and quite another carrying those objectives through to implementation. It is not enough to state what you intend to achieve, you also have to show precisely how the intranet will achieve those ends.

Every part of your intranet should be accountable to the objectives that you set for your intranet. If you have good content that does not meet your objectives, then there is something wrong with your objectives.

Couch objectives in concrete and realistic terms. It is better to do a few good things really well, than a wider range of things poorly. You can always expand what your intranet does later.

Tip 2: Integrate intranets and communications strategies

The intranet as an internal HTML web is just one technology, suitable for certain kinds of information needs. The passive nature of HTML content means that HTML performs well as a reference resource, but poorly as a means of directly communicating information. The user is required to identify an information need before they can set about resolving it by using an intranet.

Take a cool rational look at the range of information and communications technologies available to you, and map out a fully integrated information and communications strategy.

Tip 3: Know your audience

An intranet should reflect the culture of an organisation. Technology can be a part of a strategy for transforming that culture, but technology on its own is unlikely to bring about cultural transformation. Adding discussion groups to your intranet will not make people want to discuss, and share knowledge if there is no existing culture within the organisation to do so.

The strategy you adopt for content creation and intranet development therefore has to be based on the expectations and tolerances of the user group.

Tip 4: Work towards full process integration

The real advantage of HTML technology is in hyperlinking. If you are using HTML, you should take advantage of the features of HTML, and implement information as far as possible as hypertext.

Another advantage is that information can be quickly and efficiently processed. If you are uploading forms online as pdfs so that the user can download them when they need a form, you are missing an obvious trick: automate the entire process so that the form can be completed, authorised and actioned in its digital format.

Don’t just opt for integrating only part of the processes in which information is used, usually the storage and dissemination of information. For everything you implement, ask if you can go further, to make the entire process digital.

Tip 5: Avoid short-term strategies for encouraging adoption

In the early days of intranet management, much discussion focused on killer applications, which were so useful to the user that it would encourage them to see the intranet as an essential resource. If you are thinking about how you can encourage user adoption, you have already gone wrong. Short term strategies for encouraging adoption will only lead to short term increases in usage.

Nobody had to encourage users to adopt email by running competitions;.the obvious benefits of email meant that adoption was voluntary. If you are having difficulty persuading users in the value of your intranet, could it be because they have other more convenient ways of meeting their information needs?

The intranet should be an integral part of the work environment, such that users cannot very well avoid using it, because alternatives to using the intranet achieve less or are more cumbersome. This can be achieved by focusing on a core set of critical objectives, working towards full process integration, and never allowing the intranet to become bloated and unwieldy.

Tip 6: Work to real-costs budgeting

The days when intranets could be justified by how much they would save in printing costs are long gone. It did not take organisations long to realise that the intranet would encourage users to print-out their own documents, and the real costs would be hidden in departmental budgets.

Intranets are expensive to maintain and manage. While the infrastructure costs are minimal, the real cost in creating and maintaining intranets is located in the time needed to create good quality content.

There is a danger with intranet management that the real costs of the intranet remain hidden. Because the most common model is decentralised content creation, in which departments and teams take responsibility for creating content, the true costs of content creation and delivery can be difficult to pin down.

To get to grips with your intranet, you have to know how much it is costing the organisation in real terms. When the real costs are calculated, there is a danger that the benefits that accrue from an intranet are not warranted by those costs. However, without knowing the real costs of an intranet, you cannot know the true business benefit.

Tip 7: Small is beautiful

For each additional piece of information added to an intranet, progressively less value is derived. A small part of your intranet will be used a lot, a larger part a little, but most of the content on your intranet will be used hardly at all.

With intranets, however, there is a further factor influencing the law of diminishing returns. Every additional piece of content added to your intranet makes it slightly harder for the user to find the actual information they need at any given time.

The solution is to design small. There are two ways of achieving this. Firstly, you can concentrate on only that content which is used very often. This will usually mean being strict in criteria for content development, and in content retention scheduling. Alternatively, you can hide the content that is used less frequently in an archive, or document bank, so that it does not appear alongside the most frequently used content in the main navigation, but is still there should the user want to go looking for it.

About the author

Luke Tredinnick is a Senior Lecturer in Information Management at London Metropolitan University and Course Director for the MSc on Digital Information Management. He is the author of Why Intranets Fail (and How to Fix Them) published by Chandos in 2004, Digital Information Contexts, and Digital Information Culture, due for publication in 2006 and 2007 respectively.

These top tips were compiled following a UKeiG meeting in March 2006 – Taming your Intranet.

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