(Chicago, IL – Conference Board, Improving Employee Benefits conference) Despite the power and value of the intranet, the ultimate communications tool remains face-to-face communications. Employees want and demand face-to-face time. The intranet however is a powerful runner-up.

At the heart of your intranet is the employee – your target audience and most important stakeholder. Organizations that have effective employee communications reap the rewards with better…

·         morale

·         collaboration

·         organization loyalty

·         faith in management

·         productivity

Effective communications requires two-way, synchronous communications – not just messages pushed on a one-way street from the top floor executive offices.

Atomic Energy of Canada engages employees on their intranet home page by using a daily (or weekly) quick poll and via an interactive question box to company executives. Executive Online allows any employee to submit a question or comment to any senior executive via a home page input box with a drop down list of all the company’s executives.

Why are so many companies in a position to redesign their intranet? Well, it’s time. The corporate intranet, in most organizations, has changed very little in the past five or six years. Meanwhile, the available technology and platforms – such as content management systems and portals and self-service applications – have evolved considerably. In addition, the intranet, like the business it represents, is in constant flux and evolution. A redesign forces the necessary change and process revisions to keep pace with the business and the market.

A redesign should be driven by business needs and a business case that details the needs, requirements and value of a redesign.  

Part of the process, prior to any designing or redesigning the look-and-feel, is addressing the little monster known as content. The monster requires feeding and likely has been well fed. As such, a number of key questions must be answered:

• What content from the old site needs to be migrated as is?
• What content has to be edited and updated?
• What content has to be forgotten and deleted? 

One client undertook an intranet content audit and was able to rid themselves of 70% of their content. Yes, 70%. Run that through the ROI calculator for your redesign business case!

In Rolling content inventory Louis Rosenfeld espouses the need to not look at site content just simply once, as a simple snap shot in time, but to continually examine content as the intranet rapidly expands and evolves. 

“When you've got hundreds or thousands of distributed subsites and other pockets of content, you simply won't not know what's out there. If you send a spider on a content reconnaissance mission, you'll still likely be overwhelmed by the volume of content that turns up. And even if you can send, as one past client put it, an "army of monkeys" to swarm over and survey your content, well, that's not good either. No measure of simians can deal with the jungle truth that your content is a moving target. Any snapshot you take of it will be instantly out of date. And in your efforts to grab a comprehensive view of your content environment, you will surely go insane. 

That's why I'm increasingly recommending pursuing a rolling content inventory. Instead of a snapshot, as all those silly IA books suggest, inventory your content on an ongoing basis. Put another way, a content inventory is an process, not a deliverable. Put yet another way, content inventory shouldn't be something that you allocate the first two weeks of your redesign to; allocate 10% or 15% of your job to it instead.”

Never build or redesign an intranet without understanding best practices. Understanding what your competition does is even better. If you're building a case for a redesign, then your senior management will demand to know why (see Leading an intranet redesign).

A good source of case studies and best practices is the Web itself from sites like this. Conferences can also be good; so too are intranet consultants (but they’re a little more expensive). An even better place for leading and in-depth case studies is the Intranet Insider’s World Tour webinar series.

Previous webinars on the Insider’s look at leading intranets include IBM, Sodexho and most recently General Motors. Next webinar is HP.

HP’s intranet portal, hpNOW, was launched in 1997, serving primarily as an archive for Employee Communication's electronic newsletter and for selected articles from the company's print publication. Over time, online communications became more and more critical to communications at HP, eventually reducing the electronic newsletter to a push reminder to visit the site and serving as the replacement of the worldwide employee print publication, when it was discontinued in 2001.

Read more about the Communitelligence.com Intranet Insider’s World Tour featuring HP.

An intranet redesign is like a political campaign – you might win, you might lose. And like a political campaign, an intranet redesign requires the support and vote of those that count – particularly senior management.

It is possible to do a redesign without the support of senior management and eek out a minority victory, but your power and potential success will be severely limited without the support of those key taxpayers – the people that pony up the cash.

If your intranet isn’t owned by a senior executive then you need a champion. However, unlike a political campaign working for a democratic purpose, a corporation is not a democracy. Senior executives are all powerful. They have the political clout and they control the purse strings.

Enlisting an executive champion

In organizations with successful intranets, the intranet champion is a c-level executive. In other words, a senior executive that reports directly to the CEO. This could be the CIO, the CFO, the COO or perhaps the SVP for communications or human resources.

Determining which executive makes the best champion in your organization depends on the executive and their power and influence within the ranks. Firstly, your executive champion should understand the value of the intranet and the potential it can deliver. Secondly, your executive champion needs to be involved. Not on a day-to-day basis, but when a decision needs to be made or funding is required. As far as a time commitment, your champion need only attend an occasional meeting (perhaps twice per year).

Usually, in most cases, executives don’t know much about intranets. In fact, most think of the intranet as a cost center. You need to educate them.

Education comes in the form of:

• Best practices and case studies (see Know the leaders and the competition)
• Employee research
• Business case with ROI

Developing a complete business case with all of the above will convince just about any executive of the need for a high value intranet.

Continued with Intranet redesign: rolling content inventory and Intranet redesign: building a business case.

For more intranet news visit www.IntranetReport.com

Intranet Blueprint © 2008

The Intranet Portal Blueprint © 2008

Intranet Evaluation

Value and Return on Investment

CMS Blueprint © 2008

© 2006-2009 Toby Ward - Prescient Digital Media

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Great intranets are rarely done solely in-house. There’s too much at stake and the intranet is far too political to not take advantage of a non-partisan intranet consultant with relevant expertise.

There are advantages to doing it yourself:

• Costs less cash out of pocket
• Internal stakeholders are forced to learn the ropes
• Internal jobs are reinforced

The disadvantages of doing it yourself are obvious:

• Lack of skill and experience
• Lack of people to execute
• Internal politics on what and how to do it
• Time away from day-to-day work

To hire an intranet consultant, visit Prescient Digital Media to see their intranet consulting services.

Politics

The greatest barrier to an intranet’s potential is politics. Technology and budget are secondary barriers. The intranet is a political football.

Why? Most intranets don’t grab the attention of executives. The intranet is left to middle managers in communications and IT with limited budget and power. Conflict ensues and the intranet stalls – often for years.

Resolving conflict and breaking the subsequent limbo requires senior management support and participation. Where politics runs thick, a collaborative governance model is strongly urged.

Tearing down the political barrier often requires a third-party consultant with lots of expertise and no political axe to grind, but an arsenal full of best practices. If communications tries to lead the process, the other stakeholders will be suspicious. Ditto for IT and HR. If budget allows, everyone respects an experienced and capable mediator.

People

Building or redesigning an intranet requires a lot of work. It can take months or years. If you decide to build or rebuild the intranet, who will be minding the store?

An intranet requires:

• Employee input (research)
• Best practices intelligence (benchmarking)
• Business requirements analysis and documentation
• Strategic planning (mission, objective, goals, CSIs)
• Functional planning (structure, content, etc.)
• Governance model
• Policies and guidelines
• Business case and ROI
• Content management & migration
• Information architecture
• Layout
• Design
• Tools
• Staffing
• Technology implementation
• Network and database administration
• Integration
• Writing
• Etc.

Hiring an intranet consultant will free-up the necessary time to stay on top of the day-to-day job you were hired for – the daily news, benefits enrollment, new application rollouts, etc.

Finally, does your team have the skills? Have they ever developed a governance model, an editorial policy. or an LDAP integration plan?

How to hire an intranet consultant

If you have a budget and a work culture that recognizes the value of an outside intranet expert then proceed with caution.

Caution: an Internet consultant is not an intranet consultant. A web design firm has deep creative skills, but rarely has any business acumen and intranet expertise. A big-five consulting firm has very smart people but is very expensive.

Identifying the right intranet consultant

Prepare a thorough and detailed RFP (request for proposal). Invite companies that have proven experience and case studies. If you don’t know one (though you should know several if you read this news blog) then look for a recommendation:

• Ask a leading company or partner
• Sniff around your local trade associations like IABC or PRS
• Phone your IT analyst at Garner or Forrester
• Google the phrase “intranet consultant” or “intranet consulting” with or without geographic locations (if that’s important to you)
• Post a comment here and I or another reader will help steer you

The RFP responses from any intranet consulting firm should contain the following:

• Line by line details of every process and deliverable
• Intranet consulting history and overview
• Detailed client case studies
• Solution functional specifications
• Consulting, licensing (if applicable) AND implementation costs
• Project team resumes, skills overview & experience
• Client references and contact information
• Detailed timeline and schedules
• Ongoing service & support commitment
• Solution technical specifications (if applicable)
• Product demonstration (if applicable)

A final word: Google before you hire a particular intranet consultant or intranet consulting firm. I’m a little bias because I write a lot, have the top blog dedicated to intranets and speak at a lot of conferences, but I like to see for myself the ‘thought leadership’ credentials of the consultant. A great intranet consultant is not only experienced, but a leader with published credentials to support it.

Top intranet consulting firms:

• Prescient Digital Media (North America & Europe)
• Step Two (Australia & South Asia)
• Intranet Focus (United Kingdom)

Note: obviously there are far more consultants than this… but actually surprisingly few that focus namely on just intranets. So yes I’ve left a few out, but this is not intended to be a consultant directory but an article (also note that the author hasn’t used his own name).

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© 2006 Toby Ward - Prescient Digital Media