Back to series index: How to build an intranet
You may be in a position where you are building an organisations
first intranet. More likely, you will be updating
or replacing an existing intranet. This comes with its own set of
challenges and benefits:
Benefits
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Challenges
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There may be an existing recognition that an intranet can bring
business benefits.
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You will need to establish whether investment in your existing
intranet was depreciated over a number of financial years. If it was, and
that investment has not yet been fully realised, you will have a tougher job
building a business case for a new one.
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If your existing intranet has a back-end reporting system, you will
have some information about what employees find beneficial. This might be in
the form of most frequently accessed content, visit duration, or user
feedback. If there are clear areas that are working well, you will want to
consider replicating these on the new site.
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People can be resistant to change and you will need to explain to
employees why you want to change a system that they don’t perceive as ‘broken’.
Once the new intranet is in place, there will be some early adopters
and some later followers.
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Regardless of its current effectiveness, you have a starting point
for your intranets taxonomy and information architecture structure. This will
give you clues about the internal language used within the organisation.
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Your current intranet will no doubt contain lots of useful
information – as well as some that is out of date or no longer relevant.
Either way, a decision will need to be taken on each piece of information to
identify an owner and make a decision to transfer, archive, or delete it.
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Action point – Identify what is working well on your
current system, as well as what can be improved.
Action point – Do some research into when your existing
intranet was built. What was the original budget and how was it accounted for
(has the investment been realised)?
Action point – Identify early adopters and encourage them
to be intranet champions – selling the benefits of the new system to their
colleagues.
Action point – map out the existing information on your
intranet and identify an owner for each page. Secure agreement at management
level to invest resource into cleansing the information. Take time to explain
the process to content owners, agreeing realistic review dates. Once it’s
reviewed, make sure it’s kept up-to-date until the new system goes live. Don’t
underestimate the time and effort this part of your intranet development
project will take. It could be a separate project that you need to run in
parallel with the technical development of your new intranet.
Action point – think about your existing information
architecture and layout. Even if they are successful, explore alternative
formats. Use these formats for the basis of user testing. Once the information
architecture framework is in place, it is extremely difficult to change, so use
this precious opportunity to explore different ways of working.