Intranet Communications: Improving HR Service and Communications

Effective communications requires two-way, synchronous communications – not just messages pushed on a one-way street from the top floor executive offices. Successful intranets have a well-defined plan that accounts for employee needs and preferences and engages the target audience.

Ward, Toby. Intranet Blog (2006). Articles>Web Design>Intranets>Workplace

Intranet Communication vs. Traditional Communication

A way to measure return on investment (ROI) for your intranet is to answer two basic questions. How does the intranet increase the level and quality of communication? How does it replace traditional forms of communication? To develop such an ROI model, you need to be clear on the current level and type of communication within your organization.

McGovern, Gerry. New Thinking (2002). Articles>Web Design>Intranets>Assessment

Intranet Managers Must Be Managers

While intranets often have someone appointed as the intranet ‘manager’, do they spend their time actually managing the site, or publishing pages? Observing many organisations and intranets, one of the critical success factors is to have an intranet manager who is free to focus solely on the management of the site. The intranet manager should not be writing HTML or publishing pages.

Robertson, James. Step Two (2006). Articles>Management>Intranets>Web Design

Intranet Portals and Scent are Made for Each Other

How does the intranet designer ensure that employees can productively find the important content and functions, with minimum frustration, with a network growing that quickly? Many designers are turning to Portals -- a set of pages that act as a launch point for every dive into the intranet's ocean of content. We've found that some designers confused portals with a site's home page, but they actually function differently. Home pages guide users to content within a specific site, but because the intranet is actually a collection of sites, (such as human resources, sales, or individual project information,) they each have their own home pages.

Spool, Jared M. User Interface Engineering (2005). Articles>Web Design>Intranets

Intranet Portals: The Corporate Information Infrastructure

Over the last half year, it has become popular for large and medium sized companies to build portals to their intranets which have been spinning out of control for years. Still, many companies don't even have a single default starting page for all of their employees: some leave browsers set to boot with the browser vendor's page (an utter waste of bandwidth and time) and others have a smattering of department pages but no company-wide internal home page.

Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (1999). Articles>Web Design>Intranets

Intranet Return on Investment Case Studies

An intranet can deliver return on investment (ROI) by either reducing the cost, or expanding the ability, to communicate. By shifting manual processes to the intranet, the cost of accessing and processing information is reduced. The intranet speedily delivers information to large numbers of people. This gives the organization a greater capacity to change.

McGovern, Gerry. New Thinking (2002). Articles>Web Design>Intranets>Case Studies

Intranet Review Toolkit

The Intranet Review Toolkit provides a comprehensive set of guidelines for assessing the strengths and weaknesses of corporate intranets. It contains a substantial set of heuristics, allowing a detailed intranet review to be conducted that focuses on a wide range of functionality, design and strategy.

Intranet Review Toolkit. Resources>Web Design>Intranets>Assessment

Intranets and Knowledge Sharing

This article challenges the vision of the corporate intranet as a publishing tool, or a static repository for web pages or documents. Instead, it looks at a number of ways in which the intranet can become a dynamic and living environment for knowledge-based activities.

Robertson, James. Step Two (2004). Articles>Web Design>Intranets>Knowledge Management

Intranets as a News Channel

Improving the effectiveness of internal communications is often one of the key goals underpinning corporate intranets. In practice, this is often reflected in ‘latest news’ section on the home page of most intranets. While news on the home page is certainly widespread, the question needs to be asked: how effective is it? This article explores the role of the intranet as a news channel, revisiting some of the assumptions about how best to deliver online news within an organisation.

Robertson, James. Step Two (2006). Articles>Web Design>Intranets

Intranets as the First Source of Information

All too often, intranets become a dumping ground for “second-hand documents”. Information is sent out via email, or other mechanisms, and then stored on the intranet as an afterthought. Where this is the case, intranets deliver few real benefits, while still shouldering the full cost of maintaining an increasingly large collection of pages and documents. This briefing explores the nature of the problem, and proposes what may be considered a radical solution.

Robertson, James. Step Two (2005). Articles>Web Design>Intranets

Intranet Shuffle: Give Your Team Direct Access to Corporate Data

Employee information, HR procedures, collaboration tools, technical manuals, customer relationship management—these are just a few examples of the applications that are commonly deployed on intranets. When you start to add up the list, even a small business' intranet can easily grow to encompass large volumes of information. The issue that inevitably arises is how to allow your users efficient access to that information. As a site grows, traditional navigation schemes can become cumbersome.

Jepson, Brian. New Architect (2001). Articles>Web Design>Intranets

Intranets Look Vainly to Knowledge Management

I have been watching the knowledge management boom for 15 years. I would love to belive that knowledge management was a valuable field. But to the extent that it's about capturing "knowledge" in documents, it goes against everything I know about successful organisations. Like artificial intelligence, it seems based on a mistaken idea about what knowledge is, and about how knowledge-based economies function.

Shorewalker (2004). Articles>Web Design>Intranets>Knowledge Management

Intranets: Losing the Language of Enforcement

All too often, centralised intranet teams find themselves battling with decentralised authors to enforce consistency and quality standards. Not only is this fighting ultimately fruitless, it can be very damaging for the morale of all participants, and potentially crippling for the future of the intranet itself. In these situations, intranet teams need to find a new approach, and new ways of working with their decentralised authors. The first step is to lose the language of enforcement.

Robertson, James. Step Two (2005). Articles>Web Design>Intranets

Intranets: Strategy First, Usability Second

More and more intranet teams are buying into the need for usability. However, usability is not a strategy, and without a clear strategy, usability can become a pointless, wasteful and counter-productive exercise.

McGovern, Gerry. New Thinking (2005). Articles>Web Design>Intranets>Usability

Is Communications Up to Job of Running Intranet?

The natural home of the intranet is in communications. However, intranet management requires particular skills that many traditional communications departments don’t have.

McGovern, Gerry. New Thinking (2005). Articles>Web Design>TC>Intranets

Is Your Intranet Trusted by Staff?

It is widely recognised that an intranet must be trusted, if it is to be regularly used by staff across an organisation. While it is easy to make this statement, it is harder to qualify what is meant by trust, how users assess it, and how we can build (or rebuild) trust in the intranet. This briefing looks at the issue of trust, and presents some simple steps that can be taken to further build staff trust in the intranet.

Robertson, James. Step Two (2005). Articles>Web Design>Intranets>Workplace

Is Your Intranet “Under Construction”?

Many intranets contain a large number of sections ‘under construction’. In general, this happens when a new section of the intranet is being created. The template or section for the site is set up (often by another, more techical team) a list of ideas for content is written and some initial content may be loaded. The section is unfinished but the creators are excited and want to release it, so it is marked as ‘coming soon’ or ‘under construction’.

Spencer, Donna. Step Two (2004). Articles>Web Design>Intranets

Keeping Your Intranet Healthy and Effective

An intranet must constantly grow and evolve to match the changing needs of the business, while ensuring a high level of usability and efficiency. This is no easy task, and it will require the constant enthusiasm and efforts of the intranet team.

Robertson, James. Step Two (2002). Articles>Web Design>Intranets

Key Benefits of a Single Intranet or Public Website

A single website is more connected and credible. It is more consistent and cost effective. It is easier to manage and measure. Multiple websites weaken the potential power of the overall organization on the Web.

McGovern, Gerry. Step Two (2005). Articles>Web Design>Intranets

Leadership Tips for Intranet Teams

Intranets require strong leaders if they are to be more than just publishing platforms for occasionally-used information. The intranet team must take on this leadership role, and drive the evolution and enhancement of the site. This is not an easy role for some intranet teams to play, but ultimately it is one that is satisfying for the team, and greatly beneficial for the site itself. This article outlines a range of practical tips that can be applied to help intranet teams operate more effectively in this leadership role. These are all small (but important) steps that can be taken immediately by any intranet team.

Robertson, James. Step Two (2006). Articles>Web Design>Management>Intranets

Make Sure Your Intranet is Well-Perceived by Staff

Many intranets are only now beginning to show their true potential. However, many staff, having had unsatisfactory previous experiences of the intranet, may need quite some convincing that the intranet is now genuinely useful.

McGovern, Gerry. New Thinking (2005). Articles>Web Design>Intranets>Workplace

Meeting Your Intranet Users

You can’t usefully deliver information to users that you haven’t personally met. This article discusses the challenges in delivering information to all staff within an organisation, and outlining practical approaches that ensure efforts spent publishing intranet content are not wasted.

Robertson, James. Step Two (2005). Articles>Web Design>Intranets>User Centered Design

Nine Ways to Fix Intranet Search

Search is often the greatest source of frustration on intranets. Irrelevant results, hard to read results pages and ‘untitled document’ entries plague many intranet searches. With the size and scope of most intranets, search is a key tool used by staff to find information. While the expectation is that it should be quick and easy to find information on the intranet, this is often not the case. Beyond generating staff frustration, these problems can reduce trust and confidence in the search tool.

Robertson, James. Step Two (2006). Articles>Web Design>Intranets>Search

Not All Content Needs to Be of Equal Quality

One of the greatest challenges confronting intranets is ensuring that content is up-to-date, accurate and useful. In many organisations, much thought and effort is put into maintaining (and enhancing) the quality of published content. What must be realised, however, is that not all content on an intranet needs to be of equal quality. Only once this is recognised can successful strategies be put in place to support content authoring and publishing.

Robertson, James. Step Two (2005). Articles>Content Management>Web Design>Intranets

Paradox of Delivering to Isolated Staff

Staff in geographically isolated locations are most reliant on information sources such as intranets. In practical terms, however, these staff are the hardest to reach.This is a central paradox for intranets, and while there are no easy answers, there are some practical steps that can be taken to better meet the needs of these isolated staff.

Robertson, James. Step Two (2005). Articles>Web Design>Intranets>Teleconferencing