Top Ten tips for a successful Intranet

So you’re thinking of building an Intranet? Here are top tips for a successful project.

1. Business Need

If you don’t have a list of goals that this project is aiming to achieve, then either go away and rethink them, or just go away. 90% of Intranet projects that fail do so because they are not designed to meet specific business needs that actually give a return on investment.

For instance, if an area of your intranet hosts files that are commonly used throughout the organisation you may think this is an advantage. However, what if those files are also available much more easily through a shared network drive without having to login to a website? A limited number of staff will use that particular area of the Intranet and you haven’t actually solved any business goal. If your goal was to create faster access to commonly used business forms, you have failed.

So in this example, why would we bother building an Intranet if all you want to do is share files? The answer is that Intranets should be used to educate on a higher level than just act as a file server. Yes, we can simply list commonly used files, but what if we listed them with some more information? What that file is used for, who should use it and what to do with it once it has been filled in? That may actually provide added value.

2. Killer Applications

Largely agreed to be the most important aspect of content on an Intranet, the fabled “Killer App” must be recognized in order to repeatedly pull staff members back to the site. The killer application is something that you simply can’t live without in your day to day job. Executing this application through a good user interface and pleasant look and feel will go a long way to securing your audience.

Examples of killer applications in some of the Intranets we have created are:

- Phone Directory
- Timesheet/Expenses
- Meeting Room/Resource Booking
- Shared Calendars/Contacts
- Document Repository/Searching
- Instant Messenger/Forum/Surveys
- Canteen Menus
- Vacancies/Training
- Integration with Legacy Systems
- IT Support/Trouble Tickets
- Lead Management/Business Development

3. Single point of responsibility

Once you have your Intranet up and running, you’re going to need to keep it up to date. If you are running a content management system to help with this area, that’s half the battle won, but you’ll need to assign ultimate responsibility for the Intranet to a single person. You may be setting up a steering group for this purpose, but make sure it has a clearly defined chair to be responsible for its decisions.

This person should have decent librarian skills for organizing the content in a logical and navigable fashion and have the capacity to make sure the Intranet is updated on a periodic basis; daily if possible.

4. Single Sign on

If you are going to make information available to people through a website, you will need to make it as easy as possible for them to get to that information. Building an Intranet that asks for a password each time a users logs on is going to be a barrier to that information, so make sure the authentication is tied in with whatever your network uses (Active Directory, LDAP, Athens etc.).

You may also want to consider setting the home page for the browser to be the Intranet homepage so users don’t need to type in a URL.

5. User Interface

The design of the Intranet itself is one of the most important factors. The page should be clean and clear from excessive graphics, it should have navigation that is easily identifiable and easy to use. The pages must load quickly and with relevant content, and the design must not restrict users from the way they are used to using the web (avoid pop-ups and frames).

The homepage should advertise elements of the most important content such as top 5 downloads, forms, links, vacancies etc. then clearly link to the rest of any similar content.

For more information, read some of the papers from Webcredible on usability.

6. Search

To make all the information available to users as fast as possible, integrate a good search engine that not only indexes web pages, but also reads the content of documents such as PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, RDF and other popular files.

A good choice for an open source search engine is Lucene. Alternatively you can run a Google appliance to search an Intranet.

7. Promotion & Freshness (email marketing)

Once the Intranet is up and running you will, like any other website, need to promote it in order to attract visitors. So print flyers, have a launch party, put the photos from the party on the Intranet, have training sessions, and do whatever it takes to raise awareness that this system is now available to make life easier.

Send regular HTML newsletters to all your users alerting them to the latest information on the Intranet and put in direct links to that content.

8. Training

Training is essential for the proper use of an Intranet. Your users will be of varying skill levels so training will help a large percentage of them understand the layout of the site and how to use the various features.
From experience the main areas that benefit from training are search techniques, any custom applications such as timesheets or expenses, and the community tools like forums or instant messenger applications.

9. Personal

Relevant content is what this is about. You know quite a lot about your users this time because they are part of your company, so use that information to tailor the content to that particular person. If they are in the marketing department, show the top 5 marketing forms. Show photos from the marketing department, show their group calendar.

Make use of any other information you can such as their line manager, phone numbers, address information , the last login times, the areas of the site they visit most regularly, the current projects to which they are assigned, their previous search history etc.

10. Community

The Intranet can be used as the community hub of the company. Install forums to discuss and vote on various company issues. Instant messenger applications can be very effective methods of communication. Photos of various social events are always welcomed, and can be linked with discussion threads to really bring people back to the site. You may even get some viral marketing going on internally!
Update the site with personal information periodically, and make reference to this in the newsletters. The Intranet is after all, the source of all information about your friends within the company.

These tips were written by http://www.solidstategroup.com