Corporate Intranets for as long as I can remember have been boring and just a huge file share for documents. Sure enough there was a search to find a needle in a haystack. The expected ROI for the millions of dollars that went into building a custom Intranet solution was that the employees would go to there first, search for the HR or policy information rather than picking up the phone and calling 50 different people. The reality has been that it has been the secondary or even tertiary source of information, let alone collaboration. In my opinion, not finding stuff could be either attributed to an ineffective search system or an ineffective tagging mechanism.
In an ideal world,
- Search would function as a reliable form of navigation.
- Search would be fast;
- it would automatically rank and generate summaries for search results, and
- it would suggest results to visitors when they search for a keyword.
.. just to name a few.
With the advent of Web 2.0, companies are rethinking their Intranet. If you are in this boat, please make it both a communication and collaboration platform. The demographic of the new age worker demands that your Intranet works more like Facebook or Myspace.
Here are the ten things that the guys at Ektron thought about when they were re-launching their Intranet. I am sure a majority of these will be applicable to your situation.
- Management needs to take the lead in using the Intranet
- Maintain a “CEO Blog”
- Stop attaching documents to e-mails. Instead put it on the Intranet and link it back from the email.
- Stop using the email system for announcements. Instead use the forums on the Intranet.
- Use a legitimate avatar for user profiles to make it easy for other employees to know who you are
- Use personal tags to describe your area of expertise and what department you belong to
- Make sure everyone updates their profiles with the correct address information, title, etc. if it is not tied into the HR system
- Use blogs to monitor team and project status
- Use the discussion board and your own taxonomy to allow for structured conversations on business topics
- Make a corporate decision on whether or not to allow social groups and put some policies around them