9 best practices to ensure your intranet is a success...2014/10/09 · 9 best practices to ensure...

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9 Best Practices to Ensure Your Intranet is a Success

All materials within are a copyright of the author and The Rand Group, LLC, 2014


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Disclaimer

The information contained within this whitepaper is the opinion of the author and in no way represents the opinion of The Rand Group, LLC. The information contained within should not be taken as legal or binding, and should be referred to as an opinion piece by a subject-matter expert. All materials within are a copyright of the author and The Rand Group, LLC, 2014 respectively.

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9 Intranet Best Practices

An intranet can be a powerful business tool, or a serious waste of money. You may be in the process of investing in a new intranet, overhauling an existing one, or thinking of scrapping one and starting over. Wherever you are on your intranet journey, the underlying fundamentals of successful intranets remain the same.

The benefits of a well-oiled intranet machine are hard to understate. It is estimated the average mid-sized company can gain $5 million per year in increased employee productivity through better intranet design. By following these 9 Intranet Best Practices your intranet will be well on its way towards capturing similar savings.

The 9 Intranet Best Practices are:

1. Focus on Searchable Content2. Engage Users for Feedback3. Make Use Effortless 4. Commit to Continuous Improvement5. Make Quantitative and Qualitative Measurements6. Promote, Promote, Promote7. Benefits of Being Social8. Personalization Made Possible9. Create a ‘Company Mind’

Now let us work through each of these areas and determine how they are intranet best practices.

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Tip 1 – Focus on Searchable Content

This is easily the most important feature of any successful intranet. The best intranets focus on having the right content, and making sure that content is findable. According to Stephan Schillerwein of Infocentric Research, over one hour of each business day is wasted by workers ineffectively searching information required to perform their jobs.

Such a productivity sink could be costing your organization thousands of dollars a day, and perhaps hundreds of thousands over the course of a year.

Despite advances in technology, many companies continue to treat their intranets as little more than traditional filling cabinets, albeit ones powered by electricity. That is, companies are artificially limiting the usefulness of their new systems by giving them capabilities only marginally better than that of what they replaced.

Leverage technology in your favor instead by focusing on search features like view counts, search-as-you-type (think Google), metadata tags, and wildcard searches that return the most popular results. Don’t think you have to make your intranet a repository of every document ever created by your company either; focus on the most important and pertinent, the rest can be stored on regular file servers.

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Tip 2 – Engage Users for Feedback

You and your fellow employees are those with the most intimate knowledge of your intranet, so tap into it!

Query users on what they want and need on a continual basis. Not only does this have the advantage of providing ideas to improve the intranet, it gives agency to those that may be less inclined to use technology. If those less comfortable feel their needs are being listened to, and acted on, it can be a powerful tool to drive adoption beyond only the tech savvy.

There are many ways to elicit feedback from users. The more common or obvious way would be to include a form that submits to management or the IT department, or a company wide survey. More interesting ideas include allowing threaded comments and simple ‘like’ or rating systems.

Companies like e*trade, Microsoft and Cisco regularly take employee surveys of their intranets, which include measures like overall satisfaction, most frequently used areas, and favorite areas.

Tip 3 – Make Use Effortless

People are predictable. They avoid making unnecessary efforts, and become increasingly frustrated when forced to do so. However, making tasks effortless makes people more likely to enjoy completing them.

Use human nature to your intranet’s advantage. Elements that can slow down and frustrate should be avoided, while elements that speed up tasks should be sought out.

Devote yourself to the KISS principle – ‘Keep It Simple Stupid.’ Design should be clean and elegant, with easy to understand navigation, and search options that are intuitive and not overly complicated. Commonly used elements like Java, multimedia and other memory hogs should be used sparingly or not at all.

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Tip 5 – Make Quantitative and Qualitative Measurements

Every business expense needs a justification. Even more justification is required for expenses that don’t necessarily appear to create immediate returns. Intranets entail significant initial set-up and maintenance costs that don’t appear to add the bottom line.

How can upper management ever be convinced of the great utility of an intranet if all they ever see is money going out? Step in qualitative and quantitative measurements. Qualitative refers to making distinctions on the quality of something, like how closely an intranet follows general best practices. Quantitative refers to making empirical measurements using statistical, mathematical or numerical data, like how long on average it takes users to find a document.

Tip 4 – Commit to Continuous Improvement

It’s incredibly common for companies to invest heavily in the initial creation of an intranet. Also common is for companies to then neglect making an equivalent effort toward maintaining and improving their intranet.

If you’re not improving content it can become stale, and eventually useless. If you’re not improving governance then users may begin to lose access to critical files, or may begin to receive access to highly sensitive documents.

Very quickly that large intranet investment, new and powerful at first, may begin to lose its luster. To avoid issues and to maximize returns on investment, a commitment to continually improving your intranet is key.

Standards should be enacted across the entire organization’s intranet and be similarly applied to all departments. Many individuals may work in two or more intranet areas, and can become quickly confused if each section has a different layout or organization. Enforcing standards means less effort overall is required.

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Creating pre-defined measurements of ‘critical success indicators’ and how your intranet stacks up against them can provide hard evidence to justify an intranet’s expense. Common measurements include analysis of metrics or data logs, online and offline surveys, number of help desk inquiries, and estimates of return on investment (ROI).

A simple example would be if it can be shown that investing in an improved search option will save 5 seconds per query, cost $5,000, but save $10,000 in wasted time, it should be easier to convince decision makers to make the investment.

Tip 6 – Promote, Promote, Promote

An undertaking as important as your company’s intranet needs promotion, and many different kinds to ensure its success. The most obvious is making employees aware of an intranet’s existence and usefulness. If people are unaware of its existence, how can they possibly use it? Even more troubling would be if an intranet is perceived to be useless, employees will instead create their own ad-hoc methods of distributing information, often leading to non-standardized, unapproved, and ultimately chaotic processes.

Instead companies should be taking proactive steps to demonstrate to new and current employees that the intranet is ultimately there to save them time and frustration.

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Tip 7 – Benefits of Being Social

One of the newest developments in intranets in the addition of a social focus. For example Microsoft has recently added Yammer, a social network component, to its SharePoint intranet offering. A McKinsey research study reported that collaborative technologies in the workplace resulted in significant organizational impacts including increased information sharing, less hierarchical information movement, and collaboration across information silos.

A Salesforce.com survey in November 2010 found that companies using Chatter, an instant messenger application, had 27% fewer meetings, 30% email reduction, 39% increase in collaboration, and found information 52% faster.

Integrating these elements into your intranet can have similar effects. Message boards that contain commonly answered questions can save an employee having to walk down the hall to ask a question. Being able to add a comment to a document can save sending an email to its author. Small increases in efficiency by being social can add up to big savings.

This can be accomplished using traditional marketing efforts like emails, newsletters, internal conferences, and hosted chats.

The other type of promotion that should be sought is via your executives. Almost all successful business projects are predicated on the involvement of an executive sponsor. It could be the CEO, CIO, CTO or other similar position within the organization. If people are aware that the intranet is a priority to the executive team, it will naturally become a priority for the entire organization. Having an individual promoter also negates diffusion of responsibility and creates a figure to direct comments and concerns towards.

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Tip 8 - Personalization Made Possible

Good intranets do their best to organize a wide variety of content in clear ways, using techniques like user-tested structure, intuitive titles, and tagged metadata. This would be considered a ‘push’ focus - that is administrators are pushing information to users in a specific way.

Great intranets recognize that different types of users have different needs and interests. Those in the accounting department may access information very differently than those in the IT department. Allowing a degree of customization allows users to access content that interests them most, in the quickest manner possible. This is considered a ‘pull’ focus.

An Intranet Design Annual Report from Nielsen Norman Group gives insight into some best practices relating to personalization of intranets. They include having a customizable homepage, personalized ‘quick links’, options to include specific content based on job role, division or location, and automated links that displays most accessed content and pages.

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Tip 9 - Create a ‘Company Mind’

This is the end game, or should be a major goal, for any company’s intranet. What does it mean to create a ‘company mind?’ It essentially means all the organization’s valuable information stored in every employee’s head should be captured as much as possible on the intranet.

It is the mindset that to have top organizational performance the collective wisdom of all employees must be tapped into. Imagine a situation where all on-boarding materials are on the intranet, organized, and ready for new hires to devour. All of a sudden instead of HR spending hours preparing and collating hundreds of pages of information for new hires, it’s at everyone’s fingertips.

What about when important individuals leave the company, as is happening much more frequently with the retirement of the baby boomers? Huge issues may arise when C or management level individuals leave an organization without passing on their knowledge in some way. By having as much of an individual’s expertise and knowledge available on an intranet issues caused by such occurrences can be alleviated as much as possible.

Sharing of ideas for improvement can sometimes be hard for some. What if your intranet was a catalyst for the disbursement of ideas? PriceWaterhouseCoopers’ has an idea management site called ‘iPlace’ where as of October 2011 about 60% of their employees have submitted, commented or voted on ideas. From this, 140 of the 3,300 ideas proposed have been implemented, with the company reporting that it has saved them ‘hundreds of thousands’ of dollars.

Remember, a group of minds is always much more powerful than one!

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Conclusion

The effort required to create and maintain a company intranet is a significant undertaking, but one that can yield great benefits for most organizations. Don’t let other’s past failures dissuade you from creating, improving, or remaking your own.

By following these 9 Intranet Best Practices you’ll be insulating yourself from common mistakes and setting up your intranet for success. With it being estimated the average mid-sized company can gain $5 million per year in increased employee productivity through better intranet design, it could end up costing you more not to.

Speak to an expert today

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About Rand Group

Rand Group is a professional services firm that serves the oil and gas, manufacturing, distribution, and construction segments within the state of Texas. Rand Group combines the business acumen of CPAs and industry specialists with the technology expertise of software developers and process improvement specialists to drive real business results utilizing technology. Consistently the fastest growing application partner in the US domestic market, Rand Group has built a reputation of making systems work for business.

Rand Group. Software Delivered as Promised. No Surprises.

For more information please visit www.randgroup.com.

9 best practices to ensure your intranet is a success...2014/10/09 · 9 best practices to ensure...

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