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Your strategy is the starting point for a successful intranet. Without one, there's little chance your intranet will continue to add value and contribute to the business. In this article, taken from Melcrum's new report Transforming your intranet, Martin White examines how to write a comprehensive strategy that takes five essential elements into account - the user, contributor, information, technology and governance.
A framework to clarify the role and objectives of your intranet
Expectations for intranets are sky-high - from driving up employee engagement to helping employees reach the mythical state of "collaboration." They appear on the desktop of every employee; and they consume considerable amounts of time and money. But too many organizations all over the world (the majority in fact), don't have an intranet strategy at all and, in the companies that do have strategies, they aren't working.
Show me an intranet without a strategy and I'll show you an intranet that isn't trusted and therefore not used, or at least not as widely andfrequently as it should be. This is because:
* Staff are contributing content as a hobby because intranet support isn't in their job description, thus they're unable to take the desired level of time and care.
* There's no senior-level ownership or sponsorship that provides a sense of business direction.
* Content can only be found if the user happens to know the department that owns it.
* Pages are not updated because the content owner has left the company.
In this article, I'll provide a framework for setting an intranet strategy (see Figure One, page 32) that builds (or rebuilds) trust that information on the intranet will be correct, up- to-date, useful and easy to find.
Writing the mission statement
Far too many intranet strategies position the intranet solely as a communication channel, usually because the intranet is owned by the internal communication department. There are two problems with this.
First there are many other communications channels, ranging from meetings to e-rooms, so senior managers will rightly question why the intranet is needed if these other platforms are present. Second, communication implies a "push" model, when most of the information on an intranet should be "pulled" by the user on an as-required basis.
It's extremely difficult...