Best Practices For Successful Intranets

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Most corporate intranets are born around a conference room table, with a bevy of expectations heaped upon them from the moment of conception. The human resource department wants employee self-service and document distribution; sales and marketing requires a portal environment for accessing customer information, sales presentations, and up-to-date product information; upper-level management envisions a communications and data conduit linking global operations and partners - while the members of the IT department find themselves cracking open another package of Tums as hundreds, or even thousands, of Web pages flash before their eyes.

Thinking big in the first phase of intranet planning is the nature of e-business, but then it's time to start asking the tough questions. One needs to figure out where the business goals and the user goals need to meet in order to create an intranet that offers the most value.

Why Do We Need An Intranet?
Asking why will lead you to understand what the organization needs, what the user needs, and help prioritize them. Most organizations with mobile workforces, geographically dispersed business units, extensive partner networks, or large employee bases benefit greatly from using Web-based communications, making the decision to create a corporate intranet, or even multiple intranets, the most logical choice. Often, however, the more extensive the needs, the more complex the intranet can become. Figuring out how to get the "quick hits" in terms of usability and ROI is a matter of looking from the outside-in to determine what content and functionality will benefit users most, how this information will further help the organization's operational efficiency, and ultimately, the bottom line.

When creating a large corporate intranet for Stevedoring Services of America (SSA), a leading marine terminal operator with operations spread across the globe, Tideworks Technology (SSA's information services division) helped the company take the same approach to understanding the special requirements of its employees as it had to meeting the needs of its shipping customers. With more than 150 business units and 1,200 employees around the world, SSA managers were constantly challenged by the time and effort it took to keep the business communications and operational functions consistent and timely. A corporate initiative to expand SSA's global presence with new regional offices and international operations throughout Africa, Asia, and Latin America further compounded the heavy administrative burden.

After realizing that human resources functions were the dominant time-sink, Tideworks launched phase one of the SSA intranet as a support system for every business unit. This provided a wide spectrum of intranet-ready human resources functions such as benefits management, payroll, business templates, and an electronic version of the company's 300-page employee handbook.

"The complexity of managing operations that are segmented so widely is tremendous," according to Michelle Boone, marketing manager of Tideworks. "Different locations have different health care providers; all forms and procedural manuals have to be updated and mailed out each time a change is necessitated; starter kits for offices are customized - it's endless. The intranet makes it possible for more than 100 business managers to contribute and control content in a dynamic environment and keep their own administrative operations running smoothly as a result of more timely communications."

Who Is The Audience?
SSA's target users were internal, as is the case with most corporate intranets, but that hardly makes intranet planning and implementation easier. Intranet audiences must be segmented and targeted the same way a marketing department looks at its customer bases. You have to get inside their heads and understand what they want to accomplish on a daily basis in order to make the intranet useful. If users don't find value in a site the first time they visit, it will be tough to convince them to use it on a regular basis.

Usability is a major concern. Addressing intranet usability requires an in-depth understanding of how target users function in their job responsibilities, and their level of technical acuity. For example, customer service representatives (CSRs) need to access specific customer or product information quickly, but turnover in this job area can be high, and often result in the time-consuming task of training new hires. Usability and ROI are so tightly linked that any intranet functionality designed for CSRs must be extremely intuitive.

Where To Start
Involving target users early in the planning process is essential to ensuring usefulness and usability. Their perspectives on what they'd like accomplish on the intranet, and how they would go about achieving their goals, will eliminate hours of guesswork for those outlining the basic site structure, functionality, and content.

It's important to never lose sight of the fact that the exchange of information is the primary goal, and that the quality of the content will drive the site's success. Content management is, without a doubt, one of the biggest challenges in any Web environment. The sheer volume of information, and the effort it takes to keep intranet information fresh and dynamic, requires the distribution of content contribution responsibilities across an organization. This will keep the content management system itself user-friendly, without needing to involve the IT staff at every turn.

By setting realistic metrics at the outset, one can measure how well the intranet is meeting both business and user needs. Simple, quantifiable goals might be to reduce printing costs and shorten response times between business units. Without metrics and a time-frame to measure against, there is neither a basis upon which you can claim your intranet is succeeding, nor is there a basis upon which to implement necessary changes that all tie into your original business goals and initiatives. This makes it easy for organizations to lose sight of why their intranet was created in the first place, not to mention causing a tidal wave of IT workers rushing to get more Tums.

In part two of this "best-practices" series, Barnes will discuss how to apply Strategic Content Management, a comprehensive approach combining technology and methodology, to help businesses efficiently plan, implement, measure, and enhance corporate Web sites that deliver significant value to the site audiences and the business.

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