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It might seem strange to talk about spring-cleaning when it's -27degrees in the sun where I live in Canada and I need to peel my toque off my frozen noggin after my mid-afternoon jogs. But with the new year one month old and everyone settled back into the work routine, this is as good a time as any to review the state of your intranet and dust off some old promises.

Neglect Through Complacency?

For all the headaches system bugs cause, they do tend to keep developers on their toes -- and they can be a good, albeit frustrating, source for continued improvement. But when an intranet is working smoothly and users aren't making any complaints, new requests, or suggestions, intranet team members can become complacent. They'll bask in their wonderful work and move on to the next project, leaving content owners to manage the system. A system, however, can run status quo for a long time before anyone notices how out of date it is. Just because no one's speaking up doesn't mean the system can't use some improvement.

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Unfortunately, unless developers are officially assigned to work on and manage an intranet full-time, it usually takes a rather dramatic catalyst to get the spotlight pointed back the intranet's way. Why wait for that catalyst? Here are some intranet spring-cleaning tasks you can perform to freshen up your system:

Review the intranet's mission statement
What was expected of an intranet back in 1998 when it was first developed isn't always the same as what's expected of it now in 2007. It's a good idea to review your intranet's mission statement whenever a significant amount of time has passed between updates or when there's a dramatic change in the organization's structure and/or business practices and focus.

Don't be surprised at how quickly an intranet can become defunct when everything is changing around it. Unless the system changes in parallel to adapt to the organization's environment and requirements, it can become an albatross in no time. Reviewing the system's mission statement allows intranet teams to ensure that its core function and purpose are still relevant -- and if not, to make the necessary adjustments to keep the system up-to-date.

Analyze usage trends
You shouldn't take for granted that users will go to your system, or that regular users will always be regular users. An analysis of an intranet's usage and trends (known as Web analytics) and conducting a user survey are effective ways of seeing who's using the system, where they're going, what the most popular sections are, what sections are used least and require some work, and generally gauge users' overall satisfaction with the system. An understanding of these usage trends will help contribute to future system upgrades and prevent developers from spending time on sections that users don't find useful.

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