denotes premium content | Feb 7 2012 
Regular
posted 5 Oct 2004 in Volume 1 Issue 4
The key to your intranet’s success
I often get asked what the most important elements to put in place are to ensure you have an intranet that drives real change within an organisation.
The first answer I always give is the importance of the role of strong senior management engagement and sponsorship. Their participation will have the impact of securing the right resources, ensuring you are focused on the right things, and giving sponsorship within their part of the business to ensure the appropriate focus and changes in behaviour occur. In addition, the more employees know that leaders of the organisation see the intranet as important and are using it, the more they tend to start changing their behaviour and attitude towards it. Time and again I see intranet deployments that get off the ground but struggle to really get adopted, and encouragement by management is always the missing element. At Centrica, we have active sponsorship from many of the business managing directors and function heads and very visible engagement and support from the group HR director and CIO, the lead sponsors on the senior executive.
The second answer is strong local ownership. If you try to own everything from content to development to maintenance centrally, the effect will be to remove ownership from your business. Successful intranets support the processes and activities of the organisation, but they can only do that if the people running and engaging in those processes are empowered to do so online as well as offline. Local ownership will also help you create a strong network of champions and super-users who will make change happen on a daily basis at a local level.
The third answer is to ruthlessly measure value being generated and celebrate your successes. This helps significantly in generating the top-down sponsorship of new ways of working, as well as encouraging people to change their ways if encouraged the right way.
The fourth answer is to ensure you are switching off the old ways of doing things, while focusing on making new processes easier for your users than they used to be. That way you get a win-win situation and can be more ruthless about removing old crutches without your organisation reacting adversely.
Of course, there are many more elements to consider. But without being able to fulfil all four of the aforementioned facets or have the ability to work tirelessly to maintain them early on, you run a high risk of achieving nothing more than a communications channel with no heartbeat, rather than a living, breathing business tool.
Hetti Barkworth-Nanton
Programme director for global intranet, Centrica
