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Over the last ten years I have seen many intranets develop from simple document lists to powerful portals that act as the central hub of a business. During this time I have attained an excellent understanding of the factors which influence intranets, which has allowed us to create a model for success. This has traditionally been based on the three pillars of Communications, Business Processes and Knowledge Management.

There has been a lot of buzz recently about using the intranet as a collaborative tool to facilitate knowledge sharing amongst users, raising the questions as to whether collaboration is a key success factor. I think that there is definitely a good reason to add collaboration to our list, as it promotes mass participation and improves best practice.

This makes our four key success factors:

Communications -- e.g. News and events

Business Processes -- e.g. Absence Booking workflow

Knowledge Management -- e.g. Best Practice documentation

Collaboration -- e.g. Cross-department working group discussion board

For an intranet to be truly successful it must provide a balance of all of these elements. Some elements may form a greater percentage of the whole depending on an organization's particular needs. Also, the proportional split of these elements may well alter over time to meet changing business and employee requirements.

The ratio of these components will depend to some extent on the type of organization e.g. in a professional services organization the 'knowledge management' constituent is likely to form the largest element as these organizations usually have masses of documentation, research and policies that staff need access to, whereas in a more project based organization 'collaboration' may form the largest proportion with people working together in collaborative workspaces on the intranet.

However, none of these elements should exist in isolation but have a connection with the other elements; there is a relationship between them in many instances. For example, a document about swine flu is published on the intranet and pushed out to staff via a 'communication' but it then forms part of the 'knowledge' of the organization. A collaborative intranet will enable people to comment on the document or ask questions about its content.

A successful intranet will retain all this information and link it to other relevant information e.g. sickness policy, recent discussions on the subject, latest posts, HR presentation on swine flu and other users' comments on swine flu. This additional information may be spread out across the intranet in an unconnected way, but intelligent intranets should bring this information together and connect users to content in meaningful and contextual ways.

This works rather like leading websites such as Amazon which use anonymous data collection technology to look at what users are browsing and buying; their purchase decisions, product searches and movement around the website adds to the site's store of anonymously gathered intelligence. This in turn develops insight into a user's preferences. It outputs this intelligence in peer-rated product suggestions. It is this same technology, applied to an internal audience, which will enable modern intranets to effectively 'push' the most current, useful and important content.

In order to understand what each of these elements constitutes we need to look at what they should consist of in a successful intranet.

Communications

Tends to be information classified as time sensitive i.e. information with limited 'shelf life' e.g. corporate news announcements, internal job vacancies, corporate events, latest KPIs. This type of information is pushed to employees on a regular basis. Traditionally this element has formed the greatest part of most intranets. It is important that a good mechanism exists for making sure the right people see the right communications and it shouldn't get lost in an intranet 'black hole'.

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