vsbabu.org

Useit.com on intranets

Alertbox, November 2002: “The average mid-sized company could gain $5 million per year in employee productivity by improving its intranet design to the top quartile level of a cross-company intranet usability study. The return on investment? One thousand percent or more.”

Sweet dreams! I believe there needs to be a culture shift in the organizations before you can even think about such an ROI.

• One central authority to set standards including, but not limited to:
  • User centric navigation, not site owner centric one
  • File types and size limitations. Otherwise, everyone will upload huge PDF/Word that no one wants to read.
  • A maintenance plan focused on tools to make employees' life easier. If you stop at providing an easy content management solution, your intranet will only have static and obsolete content. What would be a tool? Search, Staff finder, Meeting room reservation, Vendor experience posting, Topic maps etc. are things that come to mind.
  Without this single authority, an intranet has as much chance of succeeding as floods in Sahara. It is worse if you have nobody with authority. It is impossible if everyone assumes authority This is a very possible scenario. Everyone wants to have an opinion about anything related to web.
• It is all too common to assume that it is the intranet users that need to change. No. It is the maintainers that need to change. Keep repeating to the maintainers - “remember, a site is not for you to see. It is for you to make FOR OTHERS to use”.
• You want ROI? A much easier solution would be to setup an intranet Jabber instant messaging platform.
  • Hook it up to support popular services like MSN, Yahoo or AOL messengers.
  • Hook up the "presence" monitor to your security swipe in card - many people will thank you if it is possible to lookup whether a person is in the building.
  • Setup subscription channels for information flow and then jabber bots to deliver it.
• Look out for how many people in your company can actually connect to intranet. If a sizable population are mobile, you might want to think about providing intranet to go service. When people have connection, they can synchronise the corporate intranet and their local copy. This ought to be two-way communication.