Good to great intranet

What is the difference between a good intranet and a great intranet? What do you do to get to great?

 

There is no simple answer. In fact, using the Prescient Digital Media intranet methodology of rating and scoring an intranet out of 10, I estimate that to advance a 6 out of 10 intranet to an 8 out of 10 requires twice the effort and much more intelligent thinking.

 

In preparing a magazine article on great intranets I developed a success factor comparison matrix on good and great intranets based on real experience with both good and great intranets with an average of 5,000 employees. The following is a summary of the complete table to be published in a couple of months:

 

Success Factors

Good

Great

 

 

 

Design

Reinforces corporate brand, limited employee presence, simple colors and images

 

Bold, progressive, real employee photos, excellent use of shading

Layout

Two to four columns, large banner, over emphasis on images and design

Three columns, minimal banner, emphasis on information retrieval, text to white space ratio of 70/30

 

Content

Centralized content supported by some standards, sometimes formatted for the web, mostly up to date

Distributed authorship, well defined standards, central content management platform and standardized templates, web trained writers

 

Usability

A working search engine, some meta tagging, working links, global navigation

Taxonomy supported meta tagging, multiple information paths (e.g. dynamic site map, site index, How to

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