“There is an enormous thirst for
communications… we really dedicate almost the entire home page of
the intranet to communications,” Cheryl Travis, intranet manager, Iron
Mountain.
Iron Mountain Incorporated (NYSE:IRM)
helps organizations around the world reduce the costs and risks
associated with information protection and storage. The Company
offers comprehensive records management, data protection, and
information destruction solutions along with the expertise and
experience to address complex information challenges such as rising
storage costs, litigation, regulatory compliance and disaster
recovery. Founded in 1951, Iron Mountain has 20,000+ employees and is
a trusted partner to more than 120,000 corporate clients throughout
North America, Europe, Latin America and the Pacific Rim.
The following is a summary of the
“Delivering a high-performing intranet (Case study with Iron
Mountain)” intranet webinar on May 28, 2009, with Cathy Mcknight
and Cheryl Travis.
6 stages of project management (Cathy
Mcknight, Prescient Digital Media):
1- Enthusiasm
2- Depression
3- Panic
4- Search for the guilty
5- Punishment of the innocent
6- Rewards for the non-participants
Planning:
-
“Failing to plan is a plan for
failure.” -
“A good plan today is better
than a perfect plan tomorrow.” -
“Ensuring you have key planning
documents in place (be it the style guide, or content plan)… it's
absolutely critical, and its saved my (intranet) project in many
ways,” Cheryl Travis, Iron Mountain
Planning involves understanding
-
business needs
-
functional needs
-
the right technology needs
-
resources (internal and external)
-
budget
Planning is done – now what?
Governance
-
Governance structure
-
Roles and responsibilities
-
Supporting documentation
Communications
-
Engaging leadership
-
Engaging content owners &
publishers -
Pre-launch employee communications
-
Launch
-
Ongoing communications (keeping
momentum)
“We certainly need to engage
leadership because frankly these are the people that fund the
intranet,” Cheryl Travis, Iron Mountain
Content
-
Content audit
-
Content ownership
-
Approvals and publishing
-
Creating and repurposing
-
Translation
-
Archiving
-
Reviewing and updating
Technology
-
System requirements
-
Resource requirements
-
Ongoing support
(Note: Iron Mountain uses SharePoint
for their intranet, Scout)
Site Build
-
IA
-
Wireframes
-
Design
“For information architecture (IA)
and wireframes you can't rely on your own internal team because they
live the company everyday,” says Cheryl. “You want the IA to live
no matter how your organizations changes. To have a 3rd
party to structure your IA is critical.”
Lessons learned at Iron Mountain
-
Engage content owners at the start
-
Rely on your independent resources
-
Trust your sixth sense
-
Keep communications lines open
“The sooner you communicate with them
(content owners), the better,” Cheryl Travis, Iron Mountain.
The intranet gap
“What the business wants and what IT
delivers can be two different things,” Cathy Mcknight, Prescient
Digital Media. “An intranet is a process, not an event.”
“Its really good to have an outside
expert to apply best practices,” says Cheryl “They have the clout
and experience to do this (Prescient Digital Media).”
Hi – thank you for the information here. It very interesting and useful. But I have a question about the title topic – Delivering a High Performing Intranet… can you provide more information around why Iron Mountains intranet is high performing?
I understand that there were lessons learnt and the information above is helpful, but why is the intranet 'high performing' and how do you know this?
Sorry, I don't mean to be difficult but am interested in this type of information.
It seems like a very interesting case study, but the article here isn't too easy to understand – the bulleted and numbered lists just have too little information to be useful. Is the webinar recorded and available somewhere?
The full webinar name: Delivering a high-performing intranet: The reality in successfully implementing your intranet plan. Case Study with Iron Mountain. So you can see the focus is not on how the intranet is today, but on “implementing an intranet plan.” Performance management and metrics is another, future webinar.
This is a blog post that was up within 60 seconds of the webinar ending. Let me emphasize *blog* — I don't purport to be Time Magazine. As most readers will understand of this free site, some posts are based on live presentations and are kept specifically in a very basic, web log format. Yes, I do full length articles too, however, not everytime and that's why this is called IntranetBlog not Intranet Magazine. The webinar was also free, but not recorded (that can be expensive). There's a lot of free here, without any advertising. Not even a single Google ad. Frankly, for free, you're not going to get as much as if you paid the standard $199 rate.