Intranet strategy: Harnessing the elements

The corporate intranet has become an instrumental part of day-to-day business processes within organisations around the world, yet many still have no formal strategy in place to govern their use. Bill Raschen discusses the three key components of an effective intranet strategy, and the importance of getting each one fully under control.

By Bill Raschen

The memo on my desk made for grim reading. Sent by a senior director, it lamented that the organisation’s intranet was drifting into a “meaningless piece of expensive bureaucracy that people pay lip service to.” No individual had taken ownership of the resource, and although staff had ideas of what they wanted the intranet to do, no one had collated these ideas in order to transform them into a working system. In short, the intranet presented a classic case of ‘the tail wagging the dog’, with no clear strategy. And as a result, it was failing.

Thankfully, the memo in question was more than three years old and (more thankfully still) I had not been on the scene when it had been written. A formal intranet strategy is now in place and there is a sense of purpose, which had been decidedly lacking when the director had originally voiced concern. But the issues that he raised are still widespread across many organisations and as recently as this summer, intranet consultant Gerry McGovern said that “most intranets I come across still lack a clear strategy”. The resultant chaos has produced a whole subgenre of worthwhile guides with cheery titles like ‘Why Intranets Fail’, containing tips on how to rescue them. Put simply, if it is operating with no clear purpose, then an intranet will be failing its target audience. It will also reflect badly on you if you are responsible for the resource.

It is worth noting that the concept of an intranet strategy is very much a 21st century phenomenon. There are several rather dusty intranet related textbooks on my shelves dating back to last millennium. Although they expound the virtues of posting the phone list and other corporate information onto a firewalled intranet, there is little, if anything, on how the resource will actually help to support business objectives. Intranets are often seen merely as communications tools, rather than a mechanism for assisting the development of an organisation. Under the circumstances it is perhaps not surprising that so many intranets have languished, unloved and underutilised by their workforce. Similarly, the concept of intranet strategies has grown in importance. According to Martin White, managing director at Intranet Focus, this is partly due to the increasing awareness of information management and an evolving economy. “An intranet will consume resources – staff time and financial investment – and these need to be balanced against objectives,” he says. “In an information-oriented economy, where your success depends on what you know rather than what you make, it seems inconceivable that any organisation would not want to have a strategy for managing information effectively”.

So, how do you define what an intranet strategy should do? The basis of any strategy will be identifying who in an organisation really needs the intranet to become more effective, then checking on their key tasks and putting in place methods of measuring task completion. Of course, strategies will vary from workplace to workplace. For example, Matt Whalley, intranet manager at HSBC Investments points out that their intranet has to satisfy a three-point mission statement:

1. “To provide easy access to information that will help employees to understand the organisation, what it expects from them and what can be expected in return;

2. To provide easy access to data, information and tools that support key business processes around the world;

3. To provide easy access to intelligent analysis of internal and external data and information to support the management decision-making process.”

These three points provide useful yardsticks for intranet management in general.

But beyond a definition, what are the main components of an intranet strategy? A 2003 study1 conducted by Intranet Focus and McQueen Consulting detailed three inter-related core elements that have to be considered: information content, governance and technology. As the building blocks for any subsequent strategy, it is worth considering each of these in turn, together with how they affect (and are affected by) the users and contributors to the resource.

The information content element can broadly be defined as identifying the data that your colleagues need to do their jobs effectively and then putting in to place measures to capture and retrieve that data. This means learning about the day-to-day activities and business processes of your co-workers, whether they be chartered accountants or manufacturers of circuit boards. By doing this, you can start to identify the shortfalls in their information needs and hopefully ways in which the intranet can simplify or speed up their tasks. In practice, you’ll be conducting an information audit: getting the input of your colleagues by methods including face-to-face interviews, workshops and surveys. One bonus is that colleagues may be happy that their opinions are being considered, which should help with the final result.

However, getting a worthwhile response to an information audit is only the first part of managing the information content element of a strategy. It makes no sense placing useful data or business applications – for example, online completion of project records or time sheets – if you are unable to find that data later or can’t retrieve it in a format that’s useful to you or your colleagues. You will need an effective information architecture, defining how topics are grouped and how you can navigate to relevant pages intuitively and quickly. The input of your target audience is again valuable here. Through staff workshops, you can get excellent advice in helping to structure the resource’s navigation system for the long term – along the lines that your colleagues actually want. This element of the strategy should also be concerned with identifying the various groupings within the audience. General ‘usability’ and ‘findability’ issues relating to the intranet will, in no small measure, depend on a good knowledge of the types of people the resource is catering for.

The involvement of staff in advising on the intranet’s information architecture brings us quite neatly to the second core element of the strategy: governance. In practice, this refers to the management of the resource. For Sarah Kittmer, senior analyst at Ovum, it is the key element. “Governance owns the strategy, and owns putting it into practice via operations, technology, standards and information guidelines,” she says. “Without governance, you do not get the intranet you want.”

This element will depend, at least in part, on the creation of an intranet strategy or intranet steering group (the title is less important than what it actually does). Depending on the size of the organisation, there may be additional intranet groupings, but the important point is to ensure that members of senior management are liaising with the intranet team and the IT department on a regular and formal basis. Not only will the involvement of senior management help in advising on what is wanted from the intranet, it will also provide the necessary ‘clout’ in getting staff to use the system effectively. If these senior colleagues are supporting and using the intranet, it is likely that other staff members will follow their example.

Amongst other tasks, the strategy group will monitor the performance of the intranet against objectives. Additionally, the group will be responsible for the intranet resources and budgets, ensuring that objectives remain in line with business requirements. Finally, in providing for the governance of the resource, the strategy group should also enforce agreed standards for the input of information. The need to maintain up-to-date and accurate data will be paramount and the group needs to ensure that there are safeguards to ensure that contributors to the intranet are adhering to the standards that are imposed.

The governance element of the strategy will also need to accommodate measures such as staff training for the intranet – there is little purpose in attempting to get staff to use the resource if they find it difficult to operate. Potentially, you may wish to include intranet usage in performance reviews. Governance will also cover issues such as managing cultural and organisational change brought about by the intranet.

For example, how are you going to get technophobes to buy into the system? And how will you convince staff to use the document and records-management facilities on the intranet when they are used to filing away e-mails elsewhere?

“All too often, organisations spend too much time worrying about the portal technology and fail to realise that employees spend most of their time in Outlook and Lotus Notes clients,” says Kyle McNabb, senior researcher at Forrester Research. “The Intranet strategy needs to incorporate where users currently spend their time, as they are not likely to change their behaviour.”

This brings us to the last core element of the strategy – technology. The main point here is that the strategy will need to make sure that the appropriate IT skills base is available, both in-house and (potentially) out of house, to accommodate any problems or issues that might arise during the development stage. There is little sense in planning the online services you want in three years time, if the expertise to maintain (and perhaps create) those services isn’t available. This element of the strategy will be concerned with the overall hardware for the resource; accommodating matters such as whether your organisation needs a content-management system (assuming it doesn’t already have one), how you cater for documents and records management, and whether you’re aiming for some form of extranet – when collaborating with third parties on projects, for example.

It will also cover measures to assist the retrieval of information beyond the creation of a durable navigation structure for the resource, as described above. This will include the maintenance of robust search software (having made sure that pages are being tagged with the appropriate metadata) and the mechanised creation and maintenance of a taxonomy for the intranet. Again, the human factor will play a part. Even if your colleagues possess considerable technical expertise, it will make good sense to retain good relations with IT colleagues and the vendors who provide you with the appropriate hardware and software: putting it bluntly, your strategy may depend on it.

So, are all the three core elements of an Intranet strategy of equal importance? Definitely, according to Paul Chin, an IT consultant and intranet specialist. “They must all be present to ensure the longevity of an Intranet, but during the planning stage there is an order to those three elements,” he says. “You must first understand the content and how it will be used in an intranet. Second, you need to address ownership and personnel issues. And finally, once content and governance are established, all members of the intranet team need to find the best tool to manage the content and present it to users.”

Martin White agrees that all three are of equal importance, but argues that governance issues are the most difficult to resolve. “If you can’t find someone senior to own the intranet, funding comes out of a department budget and this may constrain the level of investment in content management and search. Therefore, the information content may not be as current and trustworthy as it ought to be,” he says.

If it is agreed that the core elements of information content, governance and technology form the building blocks of an intranet strategy, then what are the inhibitors that a strategy will face? In part, any problems will result from the elements themselves. As White mentioned previously, issues surrounding intranet ownership and governance may well form the main constraint. It is governance issues, he says, that “usually bring an intranet to the point that users do not trust it”.

For Whalley, technology issues could become a major inhibitor, when there is “a tendency to focus on technology rather than human problems”. And it is these, in the guise of people and staff politics, which also have to be watched out for.

The strategy has to be flexible and adaptive enough to accommodate sudden in-house changes, such as large-scale redundancies, relocations or reorganisation. “The biggest constraint to maintaining an intranet strategy is change – in business requirements, in technology and in personnel, which may affect ownership,” says Chin. “While it is important to have an intranet strategy mapped out, intranet owners must be able to adjust it to keep in tune with changes in the organisation and its business requirements.” Bearing in mind this need to accommodate change, there needs to be effort made in making sure that the governance team responsible for the intranet strategy is durable, with a resilient and committed membership.

A well thought-out strategy will not guarantee the success of an intranet, but its existence should make it considerably harder for the resource to fail. All three of its core elements of information content, governance and technology are closely linked and none should be ignored at the expense of others. In creating a long-term strategy, you will have to involve your colleagues throughout, by seeking their opinions, learning about their day-to-day duties and getting them to assist in the governance of the intranet. The result should be that you’ll have created a system that accurately and effectively reflects your organisation’s business objectives. If you manage to achieve this, then you’ll certainly have done your employers – and yourself – a considerable favour. n

References

1 Intranet Strategy Framework – Information, Technology and Governance

Bill Raschen is an intranet consultant with experience in project and intranet management at a number of large organisations. He specialises in usability, web resource accessibility and taxonomy design and can be contacted by e-mail at: bill@raschen.com.