Make your intranet useful, then usable

In the latest issue of KM Review, Aidan Cook says that “most organizations have intranets that might best be described as failures.”

Cook says this is because, too often, those organizations set a series of lofty goals for their intranets that sound great at the time, but which haven’t really been thought through, and are certainly never delivered by the project teams.

If you’re looking to overhaul your intranet, you need to find out what will be useful to the people that you want to use it and then you have to make it usable.

Here are five tips from Cook on how to improve your intranet.

1. Ask “What will people use our intranet for?” This is a time to be careful. If you ask users what they want, they will tell you. Users will be creative and imaginative about all the things they might personally want from an intranet; departments will also list things that are essential for inclusion, so that they can look as important or conscientious as other departments.
Most of their answers will be wrong. Within a month or so of launch, departments will no longer maintain their “essential” information and users will no longer look at the intranet at all. Nobody will use it for anything. The only valid answer to this first question should be: “To make their lives easier.”

2. Ask “Why do we want them to use the intranet?” You’re not just building a resource for the individual user’s benefit – it has to be useful for the organization too.
But what counts as useful? If usage alone is to be the measure of success, then you may as well just set up a Group for your company on Facebook and let them spend their days on there. You also don’t want them to use the intranet for its own sake. If you discover people are spending hours on the intranet each day, has that saved your company time, money and resources, or have you just introduced a new inefficiency to your staff? The answer to this question should be: “To make our company more efficient.”

3. Add useful features – things you love to hate Think about simple, regular tasks that your users need to get right. These are the things that will generate the most e-mails and phone calls in the organization if they’re done incorrectly or neglected entirely.
Some examples of features your intranet users might find useful include ways to find internal phone numbers, book and manage holidays, expenses claim management, help on preparing for appraisals, car parking/car pooling/anything to do with commuting, today’s lunch specials in the canteen.

4. Make it usable “Usability” is an ugly word and an imprecise science. Here’s an analogy: as a reference book, a dictionary is eminently usable. But even then, there is no such thing as a “one size fits all” dictionary. Different editions are produced for different uses and users: pocket-sized, quick reference, student, medical, legal and so on. The user has a number of options and can choose the solution that best fits their need for a usable word reference tool.

Most organizations’ intranets resemble a dictionary only in that they contain a vast amount of words. Beyond that, there is little similarity. There is, for example, far less logic to the way information is placed on an intranet, compared to the strict alphabetical order of a dictionary. Information is often organized by department, or by terms with which the user may not be familiar.
Here’s a simple scenario: a new starter at your organization needs to book a day off for a hospital appointment. Do they search for “Leave”, “Holiday”, “Absence”, “Sickness”, “Policies”, or for something else entirely?

5. Take a tip from the web Look at Google or Facebook. A simple framework for information, submitted and controlled by the user, and the ability to add applications that are useful and relevant. People like this – it’s popular.

Websites are increasingly becoming online applications, delivering real services. However, most intranets remain information-dumping grounds, of little real use to the user. If this disparity between the public web and corporate intranet continues, then user-frustration with the shortcomings of the latter can only increase. Give users a degree of freedom in what they do and don’t want to see. Let them “drag and drop” different features and functions to different areas of their page to give them a sense of ownership over the applications.

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