Great intranets all have one thing in common – greatly skilled and dedicated people. But even with great people, a great intranet requires years of intelligent, and vigorous work.
Step one is to thoroughly understand and document the needs of your organization, and its staff — from senior management to front line employees — by building the business case for investing in a new intranet. Let’s face it, great enterprise intranets are expensive. They don’t have to cost millions, but the great ones are measured in hundreds of thousands of dollars in investment (and possibly more).
Business Case
The need for accountability and for clear measures of success is increasingly demanded for all corporate expenditures, including intranets. If you are responsible for an intranet, you need to know how build a business case and develop a return on investment (ROI) strategy. A successful business case includes:
- Cost benefit analysis
- Expected cots
- Expected return on investment
Note that the business case should not merely discuss dollars and cents, but discuss the problems it will solve, and also the non-monetary benefits it will deliver. This business case should also include a strategic plan with KPIs (key performance indicators) that can be measured and tracked over time
Employee Requirements
Understand and document what employees want, need and expect from the intranet. This is often different from what senior management wants, but a common middle ground can be found. The number one priority for most employees: speed. The ability to find relevant content as fast as possible. This requires strong information architecture, content governance policies, well-trained and eager publishers, and a strong design and search that enable people to find the content.
See the full webinar deck from the Top 10 Master Ingredients for a Great Intranet webinar, found on our Slideshare channel:
Continue reading the full column, The Master Ingredients for a Great Intranet (on www.PrescientDigital.com)
See these master ingredients working on world-leading intranets  from Cisco and IBM, to Pfizer, and more – at this year’s Intranet Global Forum conference in NYC, October 22 & 23. Reserve now and bring a colleague for free.
Very interesting article! You should also check out this article here: http://www.unily.com/insights/the-power-of-purpose/
Thank You!
Great PDF resource about Intranet. Now I can see how Intranet has been useful to a lot of companies specially with the ROI.
Wow, thank you so much for this useful slide, Toby. I’m glad that I’ve finally discovered a useful site about intranets, since I am working for an intranet provider (http://www.myhubintranet.com) and as you know: Learning never stops! 🙂
If companies or developers are involved in the creation of Intranet, then they must go through these informative slides. Obviously, different companies need different features but the main ingredients mentioned in the slides should be there.