How to build an intranet

Redeveloping a corporate intranet can seem like a daunting task – securing buy-in from senior management; capturing technical requirements from across the business; ensuring compatibility with the existing technical infrastructure and software solutions; fostering employee adoption and so on. This series of articles looks at how to get started:

1. Aligning your intranet strategy with your business objectives

2. Identify your starting point

3. Intranet vendor selection and management

4. Hosting and infrastructure of your intranet

5. Intranet accessibility

6. Sustaining your investment

7. The impact of an intranet on cultural change

8. Content credibility

9. Removing old ways of working

Building an intranet - identify your starting point

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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	Challenges
There may be an existing recognition that an intranet can bring business benefits.	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.
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.	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.
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.	Your current intranet will no doubt contain lots of useful information – as well as some that is out of date or no longer relevant.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.

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.

Intranet credibility

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The inability to locate information, or uncertainty about its reliability, poses a serious risk to the credibility of an intranet as the central, trusted source of business information. This has the potential to affect user adoption rates.

A powerful and reliable search function is key to credibility and I would argue as important as a well designed information architecture. A good search will scan both webpage and document content and allow users to filter the results by file type. Searches by keywords, phrases, Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT), and wildcards(*, and ?) should all be possible.

Of course, you can have the best search facility available, but if your content isn’t written in a way that is optimised for the web (SEO), users will express dissatisfaction with it, because it won’t always return the results they expect to see.

Action point – Find out whether the reporting system of your current intranet (or server log files) tell you about the search terms employees have entered in the past? Analysing the search terms entered will provide you with an important steer on the taxonomy of your new site.

Action point – Create a plan for the ongoing maintenance of intranet content. Secure buy-in at management level to dedicate resource to this task.

Action point – Identify whether users will want the option of searching specific areas of intranet in isolation, as well as the site as a whole.

Action point – Educate employees about the value of adding meta-data to their documents and content pages. The best search on the market won’t operate fully without this – it’s a case of rubbish-in, rubbish-out. Plan in resource to educate content authors in the basics of writing for the web (SEO).

Remove old ways of working

Old habits die hard, so wherever possible, remove the old ways of working. If employees are used to storing documents on a shared drive instead of uploading them to a document management system on your intranet, that is what they will continue to do as long as they are technically able to do so.
Examples of tasks that an intranet may 'replace':

• Room bookings

• Claiming expenses

• Completing 'return to work' information

• Completing a time sheet

• Storing documents to a shared drive

• Storing and looking up contact details (this could be internal or external contacts)

• Newsletters

• Completion of internal training modules

• Logging IT helpdesk requests

• Completing a purchase order

• Book annual leave

Action point – Identify what employees can do offline, as well as via the intranet. Think about what would happen if the off-line option was removed. Talk to your senior management team about removing these old ways of working and make sure it is factored in to your project plan.

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Intranet vendor selection and management

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For the purposes of this article, I have assumed that you will be procuring services from a third party supplier, rather than using an in-house team of developers.
Take your time when selecting a vendor as once contracts are signed, they will be with you for the medium to long term.

Before sending invitations to tender, invite a number of suppliers for informal discussions to learn about the products and services they have to offer. This is an important step in the relationship building process. It will also generate some useful discussion and provide you with ideas you may not have thought of.

When considering suppliers, there are a number of important factors to consider such as:

·         their ability to meet your technical requirements

·         value for money

·         experience of working with organisations in your sector

·         geographical location

·         after sales service model – direct access to development team or account manager

·         ability to meet procurement framework standards (such as ISO accreditation for information security)

·         client references (from existing clients of your choosing)

·        age of company and their financial stability (run a check via Companies House if they are UK based)

·         the size and expertise of their development team

·         whether they own the software solution or are a reseller of the product

·         their roadmap for product development

·         their ability to provide training

·         cultural fit with your own organisation (visiting their offices can help you to get a feel for how well you will work together).

Action point – Decide on your criteria for selection and weight each element in terms of its importance / impact.

Action point – ensure any contracts/service level agreements between your organisation and the supplier include financial penalties for late delivery or failure to deliver. Of course, in relationship management, the use of carrots rather than sticks should be the preferred modus operandi – but you may want to keep a stick handy.

Discussion point - What do you consider to be the critical factors for consideration when selecting a third party supplier? 

Next article in this series - Intranet hosting and infrastructure

The impact of an intranet on cultural change

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Developing an intranet is not just about implementing a software solution - it is also probably going to involve asking people to work differently. You might for example, be asking them to complete tasks via an intranet that they have previously done off-line, or that they have not previously done at all.

User adoption of your new intranet will depend on buy-in and belief that the system helps employees to do their job more efficiently and effectively than the old ways of working.

Action point – Involve your HR and Communications teams – ideally from the start of the project. They should be taking a lead in helping employees make the cultural shifts that the new intranet will bring – be it through effective internal communications, or the provision of training.

Action point – If training is required, make sure there is time and finance allocated for this when considering resource implications.

Next article in series - Content credibility

Intranet accessibility

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Discussion point -  How can you future proof your intranet as much as possible, for example, by ensuring it continues to be supported on ext generation devices and platforms?


The end user adoption rate of a new intranet will be linked, in part, to it's ease of use. Make sure employees will be able to access their new intranet regardless of:  physical ability;  geographical location; operating system / device (laptop, smart-phone, tablet) used.

Action point – At the start of your project, agree the accessibility standards that your intranet will have to meet, for example, conformance with www.w3.org standards.

Action point – Think about how employees will need to access the intranet. Will they need access via VPN or a smart phone? Linked to this, what range of operating systems will the new intranet need to be compatible with?

Next article in the series - Sustaining your investment in an intranet