Intranets have a habit of getting out of hand, and become corporate dustbins of out-of-date information. Is yours ready for a fresh start?
Many intranets were born as the result of a need for improved communication across a whole organisation. Its growth usually happens in one of two ways:
- A controlled growth with a web team masterminding the web publication centrally. This can result in bottleneck problems as the team struggles to cope with corporate demand.
- Or the site grew organically, with multiple publishers across the organisation probably using a CMS system. The site probably displays an anarchic uncoordinated design and navigational approach with a mishmash of material of variable merit and quality which fails to conform to any corporate standards.
Where an ‘anybody-can-publish-anything’ policy exists, you find that more and more material will be poured into unstructured repositories of knowledge.
... staff are searching in vain for a needle in a haystack
Some organisations can confess that 30% of the web pages resident on the system are unlinked, unloved and unnecessary and should have been deleted years ago.
The upshot is that an intranet becomes a corporate filing cabinet of material that was never intended for screen reading, nor even for ongoing consumption.
If the material has not been tagged to assist the search engine, then staff will often find themselves searching in vain for a needle in a haystack.
When users can't locate information this, in turn, leads to a disenchantment with the intranet itself and a return to traditional filing systems and departmental fiefdoms.
'licensed' content gatekeepers
Most experts would agree that the best intranet growth tactic is to have 'licensed' content gatekeepers who publish on behalf of their departments.
The quality of content can be controlled via the gatekeepers, corporate web guidelines can be monitored and filing administration routines rigorously observed. This should ensure that a burgeoning knowledge warehouse remains both navigable and searchable.
Companies must take structuring and building of knowledge systems seriously, if they don’t - then their competitors will, and business soon lost.