What is the difference between a good intranet and a great intranet? What do you do to get to great?
There is no simple answer. In fact, using the Prescient Digital Media intranet methodology of rating and scoring an intranet out of 10, I estimate that to advance a 6 out of 10 intranet to an 8 out of 10 requires twice the effort and much more intelligent thinking.
In preparing a magazine article on great intranets I developed a success factor comparison matrix on good and great intranets based on real experience with both good and great intranets with an average of 5,000 employees. The following is a summary of the complete table to be published in a couple of months:
|
Success Factors |
Good |
Great |
|
|
|
|
|
Design |
Reinforces corporate brand, limited employee presence, simple colors and images |
Bold, progressive, real employee photos, excellent use of shading |
|
Layout |
Two to four columns, large banner, over emphasis on images and design |
Three columns, minimal banner, emphasis on information retrieval, text to white space ratio of 70/30 |
|
Content |
Centralized content supported by some standards, sometimes formatted for the web, mostly up to date |
Distributed authorship, well defined standards, central content management platform and standardized templates, web trained writers |
|
Usability |
A working search engine, some meta tagging, working links, global navigation |
Taxonomy supported meta tagging, multiple information paths (e.g. dynamic site map, site index, How to…), standard footers & headers |
|
Information Architecture |
Organizational structure with some catch-all sections for forms, policies, etc. |
Business intuitive architecture with 6-8 parent categories, many redundant links |
|
Plan |
Defined goals, log analysis, user research |
Critical success factor tracking and measures including ROI, formal, detailed directives that align with enterprise |
|
Governance |
Shared ownership between communications & IT, some standards (largely ambiguous) |
Formally defined committee structure driven by one or two executive champions, well defined and enforced standards |
For the complete table or more information on evolving your intranet from good to great then please contact me directly: toby{at}prescientdigital{dot com}.
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© 2006 Toby Ward - Prescient Digital Media