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Organizations set strategies for almost every area of their business - recruitment, finance, communications, IT, pensions, security, intellectual property... the list goes on. You might think the same would be true for intranets. Here, Martin White sets out "everything you need to know about strategy" - including determining user and contributor requirements to understanding organizational needs in three areas - information, technology and governance.
Understanding the organizations expectations, requirements and needs
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 and frequently 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 1, opposite) that builds (or rebuilds) trust that information on the intranet will be correct, up-to-date, useful and easy to find.
Expectations and realities
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. Here are two cases in point:
1. In the UK, at a meeting of the Intranet Benchmarking Forum, comprised of more than 20 of the UK's largest companies, those present were asked to describe their intranets. The majority of adjectives were along the lines of "ugly, chaotic, inflexible, and disorganized." Later in the meeting I asked how many of the organizations present had a written intranet strategy approved by the Board of Directors or at no more than one level below the board. Only three hands went up.
2....