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Friday, April 4

Fixing a broken intranet

by Toby Ward on Fri 04 Apr 2008 01:00 AM PST

Redesigning an intranet does not mean you are fixing it; a broken intranet requires a lot of work and design is one of the smallest components.

While important, even technology is not the most important ingredient. Far more important to the success of any intranet is people and process.

There’s a process that should be followed for redesigning any intranet – a process that is focused on people, and grounded in the needs of the business. The process or methodology applied to a redesign is best summarized in the following flow-chart from Prescient Digital Media:

Intranet Project Methodology - Prescient Digital Media

I’m not going to drone on about this process and the importance of people and business requirements in a blog article. Sufficed to say however I’ve built a business around this methodology and worked with many dozens of companies that understand the need to align the business with the intranet and to demonstrate measured value. Initiating an intranet redesign begins with the people and documenting their requirements and that of the entire business.

Speaking on a similar topic at KM World & Intranets 2006 this past week in San Jose, my colleague Carm Porco met Nicole Engard, Web Manager for the Jenkins Law Library in Philadelphia. Nicole actually has a pretty good little blog (What I Learned Today) where she’s published a very detailed, lengthy and worthwhile case study documenting the complete redesign of their intranet.

“While the design was important, we saw an opportunity for a complete redevelopment. After researching what other libraries were doing with their intranets, we decided to use read/write Web or Web 2.0 technology,” writes Nicole in her posting Intranet 2.0: Fostering Collaboration with a Homegrown Intranet. “In May 2005 we offered an introduction to the read/write Web for our staff. We defined terms like blog, wiki, and portal, then pointed them to Wikipedia [www.wikipedia.org], encouraging them to edit articles that interested them so that they could get used to wiki technology and syntax.

Once we had a direction, we needed to decide whether to use a prepackaged site or develop something in-house. We wanted more than just a wiki; we wanted blogs (one for news and inter-department communication, and several for ongoing projects), a Web-based helpdesk, and a shared calendar. Most importantly, we wanted to be able to easily link to our homegrown modules. At first we looked at free and low cost portal/content management packages, but nothing lived up to our expectations. In the end we decided to build our own site using PHP and MySQL.”

Jenkins intranet home

The case study focuses a little too much on tools and design and barely touches on the needs of the organization and how performance will be gauged and measured, but it is a pretty good illustration that the efforts involved in a redesign are very significant.

Read more on the process and requisites for building a successful intranet: Intranet Planning: An Intranet Model for Success.

To learn about Prescient's intranet planning services, please see our Intranet Blueprint service.

Toby Ward, a former journalist and prominent writer and speaker on intranets and intranet planning, is the President of Prescient Digital Media. To learn how to undertake effective intranet planning, or to get our free intranet white paper, Finding ROI, please contact us directly.