We have two major intranet projects underway, both of which are pretty exciting and are natural extensions of work we did on public-facing websites for each organization. I’m struck by a few things with these intranet projects: the emphasis on strong design and strong visuals, the importance of information architecture, the use of the same disciplined process used for external-facing websites, the attention paid to the projects by the organization’s leaders, and the importance of analytics and ROI.

I’m also intrigued by how intranets have matured from a catch-all information resource and employee self-service destination groups to a communication and collaborative tool for moving organizations forward. An intranet guru, Dion Hinchcliffe, has captured the maturation of the intranet in a smart infographic. As you look at it, where would you place your organization?

Behind the Community Curtain

The trends in the evolving intranet are evident in annual research reports from the Nielson Norman Group - trends in content and function, in devices supported, and in different intranet platforms. We have found them helpful in our intranet thinking, and in our advice to clients. One difficulty in benchmarking intranets is actually seeing what companies are doing – this report opens the curtain, and lets you see the designs of successful intranets through screen shots.  It also provides information on the staff required to sustain a robust intranet, and information on the technology platforms that are used, both so useful for benchmarking your own resource and technology needs. If you are undertaking a major overhaul, the latest report, The Intranet Design Annual 2011: Year’s Ten Best Intranets, would be a good investment.

Also, on various platform sites, such as Jive Software’s, there are well-written case studies and studies that will help you build your case in terms of metrics: increased employee connectedness, collaboration productivity, time savings in finding information or experts, increase in ideas, increase in employee satisfaction, reduction in email sent, etc.

New Tools, New Technologies

There is so much activity right now in the “private social” intranet space, mirroring the public social explosion, with new tools, new technologies, new ways to connect and collaborate. Yammer, Basecamp, Sharepoint, Box.net, Google Apps, Jive, Convofy – what’s an organization to do? (And what’s an agency to recommend?)

One conceptual way to think of these tools: how social, and how collaborative? Social in the sense of letting users engage in real-time updates, and collaborative in the sense of letting users work together on actual content. A technical evangelist, formerly with Adobe and now with Convofy, Tad Staley, mapped this out for me. The green “sweet spot” is a tool that offers real-time chat, in-context highlighting and annotations on videos, PDFs, InDesign files and other content types, all integrated within an employee’s activity stream.

Putting It All Together

There is a strong case to be made for improving an organization’s performance by improving its intranet. It’s clearly not a simple process. There are objectives to set, metrics to establish, technologies to choose, and infrastructure and resources to train and maintain. There are also the challenges of either discarding or integrating legacy systems. We are seeing, as we see in the external internet space, a widening gap between the “haves” and the “have nots” in terms of the sophistication, strategy, resources, and scope of Intranet activity.

The impetus for this article: We also see that putting it all together requires just about the same level of commitment and energy applied to externally facing websites. And it requires the same type of discovery process, both in terms of user needs, and technology requirements, as well as information architecture.  We are seeing that strong design is critical to making an intranet successful, whatever the tools or platforms used. Strong design invites collaboration, invites revisits.

Your intranet: Make it work well, make it delightful. Employees are customers too!

Tom Anderson