“Slow and steady wins the race.” There are dozens of fables about how the underdog or the “little guy” came out ahead in the long run, and these lessons can give you food for thought when approaching your intranet launch and how your organization achieves success afterwards.
It’s not the best idea to break into a sprint as soon as the starting gun goes off. Providing your departments with access to a robust content management system and some web space without first implementing a site governance model can be akin to handing gunpowder to a baby. Unfortunately, this is what many organizations do when releasing an intranet, to “just get it out there”. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and before you know it--boom!--you have unmanageable site sprawl.
And you don’t have to be a company the size of IBM to have intranet sprawl. It’s not uncommon for most medium size companies to have hundreds of intranets (I’ve seen ratios of 1 intranet site per 10 employees). Just imagine the wasted money and resources by not pooling those costs together....
Often the most successful intranets start off in a very humble way (especially in smaller organizations), with not much more content than employee classifieds or the company phone list or even a cafeteria lunch menu.
Some organizations grow their intranets organically, with a department or an employee quietly taking charge, perhaps as a pet project, occasionally enhancing it with features that specific departments ask for. The intranet can sit collecting cobwebs for months before more staff become aware of its presence and usefulness. Managers begin to ask for more and more additions, until suddenly the site captures the interest and imagination of employees, and the intranet becomes well liked and indispensable.
These “organic” sites may not be pretty to look at, but tend to iteratively improve over time. It’s the distribution of easy-wins and low-hanging fruits that allow an intranet to gain “traction” and acceptance and drive more employees to the site. Growth comes slowly over a long period of time, but the site becomes indispensable in the process.
Planning out your site deployment, placing some structure around how it’s managed, launching tools and content that will engage staff and listening to feedback, will make it the “go to” site when they start their work day.
And in the end a little preparation, practice, and thought is going to allow you to gain the traction your site needs to make it to the finish line.