Is Your Intranet Headed for Extinction?

Intranets are complex and expensive investments. Their scope and reach should touch and positively affect all employees in every corner of an organization. The rigor and execution required to build and maintain a successful intranet is massive – from governance to content management, and from technology to business processes. At the heart of a successful intranet is the strength of the plan that underlies it.

Failure to develop an integrated plan that accounts for an organization’s structure, stakeholder, and user requirements will certainly ensure failure and, with it, a loss of significant time, money and jobs.

An intranet manager at a major communications company recently lamented about the phenomenal amounts of wasted time, money and effort exhausted in evolving their enterprise intranet portal that serves tens of thousands of employees. In one year, the intranet was redesigned three times – sucking significant funds and patience from an organization that should be using the intranet to support rather than drain the bottom-line. Of an extended team of more than a dozen people working on the intranet, only one person remains.

A POLITICAL FOOTBALL

The problem here and in many cases was that executive whims shaped the intranet instead of research and requirements. Other threats include management seizing control, especially where managers of various departments vie for profile and editorial power, and intranet design and redesigns based on a myriad of product demos and vendor presentations.

“Too many intranets and portals fail or don’t live up to their potential because they lack direction and often become a political football torn between rival groups and competing priorities within an organization,” says Carmine Porco, Vice-President, Prescient Digital Media, a veteran consultant who has also worked for Cisco and Deloitte Consulting. “Firstly, you have to get your stakeholders to agree, in the form of a strategic plan and vision, on how the intranet should work and evolve. But you also need to understand what employees want and expect; and then marry the two.”

	“Too many intranets and portals fail or don’t live up to their potential because they lack direction and often become a political football…”

 

BUSINESS REQUIREMENTS ASSESSMENT

An intranet’s future performance and success is determined before its birth with the identification and documentation of business requirements and the subsequent, mandatory planning that constructs the blueprint for guiding an intranet’s evolution. In other words, before any technology evaluation, redesign or the scripting of a single line of code, you must undertake a proper business requirements assessment.

An extensive needs or business requirements assessment is necessary to identify, develop, prioritize, and document goals and current practices. The assessment should include stakeholder input, interviews and/or workshops as well as user research that could include surveys, focus groups and usability testing, and a complete technology audit and analysis (conducted subsequently or concurrently with user research).

Armed with this intelligence, a detailed strategic blueprint – including creative, information architecture, technology, and ROI plans – can be crafted to build a leading-edge business system.

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